Amy Nicholson

At Lonergan's best, he turns the sounds of Patrick's home into its own claustrophobic, percussive sympathy.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s fun and fizzy adaptation views its Molotov cocktail as half-full. Yes, it says, the struggle for liberation continues: ideologues versus toadies, radicals versus conservatives, loyalists versus rats. But isn’t it inspiring that there are still people willing to fight?

This cut sutures the two halves together while sustaining its unusual momentum. It’s a film so flush with ambition that it rarely crescendos; it can afford to chop sequences, songs, even genres, down to a string of snippets. The exhausting, invigorating totality of the thing sets its own tone.

The film wants to prove that hope isn’t fools gold. And when it does, Rocks glows.

For all the distractions and gags, Inside Out argues a more complex idea: that sometimes, Sadness deserves to steer, and that as we age, our happy memories deepen when tinted a wistful blue.

If only the script measured up to the craft. La La Land gives us no reason to root for Mia and Seb’s romance, except for its blithe assurance that you will because you loved Stone and Gosling together in Crazy, Stupid, Love.

As good as the movie is with its visuals, it’s just as skillful with sound.

The Brutalist argues, and proves by its very existence, that the maddening thing about major works of art is that they demand invention and resources and cooperation.

Jesse Moss's documentary The Overnighters is a heart-wrencher about the clash between economics and ethics. Its story sounds like the sort of dry news blurb you'd skim over in the Sunday paper but unfolds into an epic tragedy.

The movie’s moxie makes it impossible not to get caught up in Marty’s crusade. We’re giddy even when he’s miserable.

Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths invites you to spend an hour and a half with the most insufferable woman in the world. (If you personally know a worse one, my condolences.) That the unpleasantness turns out to be time well spent is a credit to Leigh’s curiosity about miserable jerks and the joy-sucking traps they set for themselves and others.

Grand Budapest is Anderson's most mature film, and his most visually witty, too. It's playful without being self-congratulatory, and somehow lush without being cloying.

This solid genre pic salutes its touchstones.

Back to the Future just might be Hollywood’s richest, cleverest blockbuster — and its attention to detail deserves to be re-celebrated.

Return to Seoul is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house.

To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.

Morgen’s structural inspiration is to organize Jane not around the facts Goodall found about chimps, but the emotions the chimps help this strong, independent woman find in herself.

[Wiig's] great, but the film's in the pocket of Powley's rib-high corduroys from the second she struts onscreen — and long after she takes them off.

Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism.

In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration.

Nebraska is the antidote to other family charmers about goofballs in matching sweaters.

The first hour of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert convinces you that the King is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. By the end of it, he’s a god.

The film invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence. Schoenbrun’s argument might be that this is exactly the response they’re after. They’ve accomplished it, but at the expense of engagement, resulting in a collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin.

There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.

Peele is so attuned to the tiny ways race sneaks into conversations that we hear it in every line. Our suspicions are so heightened, we start to second-guess our own senses.

Hall’s performance — tender, tough, empathetic, controlled — crumples from tears to laughter in a blink. It’s phenomenal.

Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.

It’s a pleasure to enjoy something that’s both straight-faced and freewheeling, like a jazz pedagogue who also knows how to get a crowd dancing.

Neville’s fantastic archival footage reveals the man through his work — or at least, it reveals his philosophies, if not the childhood memories that gave Rogers the ability to understand a four-year-old’s brain, almost as if he still carried his in his cardigan pocket.

Filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s snaky, surprising fable starts with a sneeze and explodes into a saga about bureaucracy, modernization and moral corruption. It’s electrifying.

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a jaw-dropping, pulse-quickening mash-up.

This adaptation, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (“The Edge of Seventeen”), seems uneasy putting funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is.

Sinners works more like a pop song than a grand statement, the kind of deceptively simple high-level craft that few people can pull off.

Satter, a veteran theater director, makes a smooth transition into her feature film debut, written with James Paul Dallas. She’s skilled at evoking tension from a minimal set.

Sirāt is taut and riveting and nearly all mood. You feel the exhilaration of veering off the path, the self-exile of speeding toward nowhere, the dread that this caravan has veered too far for its own safety.

Instead of exploring her actions, and the people they affect, Nancy‘s restraint keeps the film closed-off and grim, as muddy gray as the life she’s aching to ditch.

Hamnet’s sweetest note is 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe playing the actual Hamnet. The script hangs on our immediate devotion to the boy and he stands up to the challenge.

Director Rian Johnson's resulting film, a cornfield neo-noir, is the coolest, most-confident sci-fi flick since 2006's "Children of Men."

Patterson trusts that chemistry will compensate for a gentle thriller that chooses to impress with ingenuity and charm instead of special effects.

The tone is dry and spartan — and funny, too, if you don’t mind snorting at someone whose sons died in a marshmallow-eating competition, or giggling over the sobs of a worker weeping in a cubicle for reasons that go unexplained.

It’s “The Bachelorette” wed to “The Iceman Cometh”: the setup is staged, but the tears are real.

As much as the script quotes Shakespeare, it’s a lot closer to “The Shawshank Redemption,” a well-meaning reminder that the incarcerated are human beings, too.

[An] excellent, tensely controlled thriller.

He left behind enough tape from both ends of the microphone that Belkin is able to create his entire documentary with old footage, juiced by retro imagery of broadcast air waves and vintage dials and knobs.

Lord and Miller do great work within constraints, taking pre-made pieces and fashioning them into feats worthy of applause. It's no wonder they made a Lego movie — and it's no wonder it's so good.

In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.

Baker’s delicate spellbinders more often leave their themes unspoken. Her characters grapple with longings and a need to prove their worth, but they rarely share their struggles out loud.

Red Army is a riveting look behind the Iron Curtain.

The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog.

The film could do with fewer panty shots of the listless sisters flopped across each other like kittens. Yet it manages to capture the lethargy of watching your life goals winnow into wifely servitude.

Creed wants all of the Rocky drama but invests in none of the smarts.

The Love Witch, by writer/director Anna Biller, is a feminist film about a character who thinks feminism is bad news. It's delightful.

As we switch sympathies from scene to scene, Muylaert forces us to think big about the clash between idealism and acceptance, a philosophical war that spills beyond the walls of this small story into every corner of our own lives.

Dreams are incubators for dissatisfaction, Martins seems to sigh.

The film’s most disorienting and wondrous realization, however, is that Shakespearean acting can exist even within “Grand Theft Auto’s” limits.

Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint.

Clemons has been a luminous presence who could bloom into a great grown-up actress. Hearts Beat Loud proves she’s the real deal. As for the film around her, Haley’s 21-drum solo salute to the passage of time is, like Frank, merely fine. But he admirably keeps his characters’ victories small and their losses familiar, making his movie a ballad everyone can hum to.

It lacks the control of Guadagnino’s earlier work — or rather, I should say, it takes subtlety and restraint and thwacks them over the fence and into the bushes.

The movie is constrained by its own conscience.

Villeneuve's proven he's got a strong punch. The trouble is, he barely aims.

Adams’s clear-eyed, open-minded doctor forces us to ask how much we’re willing to communicate.

A former sketch comic, Cregger knows how to work a crowd. The combination of his assurance and his characters’ confusion is wonderful in the moment, as though you’re listening to a spiel from someone who sounds crazy but might be making all the sense in the world.

Despite their wundercabinet of delights, the filmmakers most want to celebrate human beings in all their contradictions. Each of us, the movie says, is capable of everything.

Most of all, Coco hums with the idea that we’re kept alive by the stories people tell about us when we’re gone. Whether Coco itself will be an eternal story is iffy. But I’m glad it’s with us today.

What Spielberg seems to want most from this respectable lark is for audiences to notice the parallels between the 1950s and today.

Foxcatcher is merely a very, very good character study with acting so fine that it's frustrating it's not in the service of a real, emotional wallop.

Warfare is strictly the facts, and those alone are terrible, brave, intense, random, tedious and captivating.

Pablo Larraín's Jackie is an elegy to two slandered traits: self-consciousness and superficiality.

Ducournau has made a beautiful film about terrible horrors.

Corny, yes. But charming, too.

To make good on his movie’s message, Jefferson is determined to give space to the moments of Monk’s life that don’t hinge on race at all.

Memoir of a Snail, by the Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot, is a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid.

As an intellectual dismantling of white savior narratives, Devotion is smartly done; as an enjoyable heartwarmer to watch with your uncle, it’s stiff when it should soar.

Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.

If we lived in a rational world, Fiennes’ bravura comic-manic performance would earn him an Oscar nomination.

Rian Johnson’s darkest, funniest and best installment yet in his three-film detective series.

Knock Down the House has a clear political agenda. It wants to promote the hard work, courage and progressive policies of these women, who have all experienced financial hardship. Still, the film lets its subjects do the talking instead of cluttering things with statistics.

The misery unfurls in a straight timeline of dramatic scenes that leap over the lived-in moments that make up a relationship.

It’s hard to fault Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners” for being chaotic and miserable. That’s the mood he’s after — and he captures it with such assurance that the film is a tough watch.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens steers the franchise back to its popcorn origins. It's not a Bible; it's a bantamweight blast. And that's just as it should be: a good movie, nothing more.

When the violence gets unbearable, take comfort in the troop of trainers on the sidelines who prove that, for now, man and beast still make a good team.

Most docs are lucky to have one wild character. The phenomenal Finders Keepers has two.

Out of magnanimity, I’ll liken this trifle to a Rothko. The more I think about The Christophers, the more I imagine it has interesting layers. But I won’t fault anyone who just sees a simple square.

It’s human and messy — and it’s divine.

Song Sung Blue couldn’t be less cool. But the Sardinas were completely sincere and Jackman and Hudson honor their innocence by playing them straight.

Babygirl’s erotic scenes are hot. But really, Reijn is doing her damnedest to get a moral rise out of us. Romy and Samuel have safe words, yet our own national conversation about sexual ethics gets tongue-tied whenever it tries to define right and wrong. Instead, we have Reijn asking uncomfortable questions.

For the small but enthusiastic documentary crowd and the comic's diehard fans, it's a must-see.

Negga, an Ethiopian-born, Irish-raised Hollywood newcomer, gives an Oscar-worthy performance. She's so still and powerful, she gives the film a depth the script doesn't earn. I can't think of the film without thinking of her gaze, and I can't think of that gaze without admiring the film more than it deserves.

It's possible to watch Silence and see a story about saints martyred by an oppressive government. It's also possible to see a told-you-so parable about imperialists who should have stayed home. I suspect Scorsese would be a little disappointed by either conclusion. But he stays quiet because he wants to challenge the audience to go deeper inside themselves, to separate our own religion (or lack of one) from the faith that guided us to it.

In its small moments, say when Walhberg sighs that his robe misspells "Micky," The Fighter feels clued-in to the very small, very tough world of a man trying to make his way out of his block-and after getting to know his family, you want to help him pack his bags.

The film stirs the soul less by the magic of ghosts than by the power of human connection.

[Schaffer's] Naked Gun doesn’t want to regress; it wants to surprise and surpass while never punching down. The film is so committed to its PG-13 rating that it manages to pull off some truly filthy, bawdy slapstick without exposing a frame of skin.

Lurker is a teeth-grittingly great dramedy that insists there’s more tension in the entourage of a mellow hipster than a king.

Headland's film might have been more engaging if it were about its supporting characters.

The movies aren't so bad they're good. They're so brilliantly bad they're genius, with Foley dutifully presenting every inane plot point while gifting us excuses to laugh.

McCormack is fantastic in a role so subtle it could appear flatlined and phony if people aren’t playing attention.

Instead of a thrilling climax, he chooses to let the story evaporate into the Amazon fog. Yet this odd film left a chill in my bones that I'll be thinking about all summer.