Amy Nicholson

The cast does its best with the material, especially supporting player Perry Mattfeld, who makes a meal out of her small role as the mistress who broke up Solène and David’s marriage.

Its refractory tone, both deadpan and swoony, announces that the first-time feature directors have a phenomenal eye for character (which is something those who’ve been watching Marks’ work as an actress may already have realized).

A wickedly funny cannibal romance and dazzling feature debut from the director Mimi Cave.

This is a terrifically nasty thriller about seizing control, over others and over oneself. Wigon proves to have a great grasp on it, as well; his assuredness is half of the film’s success.

Almereyda lays tracks to take Tesla in a dozen wild directions. . . . Yet, having ordered the audience onboard, Almereyda doesn’t go anywhere with the gambit.

At times, Wonder Woman feels like watching Splash with a shield — another babelicious naïf breaking all the rules. Yet the joke isn't on her. It's on all the men mistaking unsophistication for weakness. To be uncultured is to be mentally free; no one's put on a yoke. That's what makes Wonder Woman a knockout.

Loose-kneed, sloppy, and powered by charisma, this hangout flick doesn’t just embrace gross-out girl comedy cliches, it sticks Jacobs in the air roof of a limousine screaming, “Whooo! I am a total cliché right now and I don’t f–king care!”

Esparza's cast of unknowns is so fresh and raw that the drama could be mistaken for a documentary if the camera work weren't so controlled.

The grief in this film is relatable to anyone who’s realized how hard it is to go home again, whether that means a newly gentrified neighborhood or simply the security of what a middle-class wage used to afford.

Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans.

If you started the movie at the end, you wouldn’t be champing to find out what happens next. But the apocalyptic opening act is pretty great.

Cruise is reason audiences will, and should, see Final Reckoning on a large and loud screen.

Like Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There"-which never once came out and said the name "Bob Dylan"-Nowhere Boy bites its tongue and refuses to say "The Beatles."

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

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.

At times, the doc feels like science-fiction without the fiction. Swap whales for aliens and these two doctors aglow with the thrill of discovery could double for Jodie Foster in “Contact” or Amy Adams in “Arrival.”

Though Feinberg is a singular figure in modern American history (few else could, or would, do his job), Worth hammers his story into a standard biopic template — Grinch Finds Heart — as though one man discovering empathy is truly priceless.

The film feels a lot like the Serge Gainsbourg number that Stephanie dances to in the kitchen: jazzy, a little sleazy, and worth a cult following.

The film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds.

Speak No Evil is the rowdiest horror flick in ages, a hilarious and venomous little nasty that cattle-prods the audience to scream everything its lead characters choke down.

It's dumb and consistently funny.

[Whedon] wants to give us everything, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat. Age of Ultron is a middling film, yet it's so heavy with his sweat that it never feels like a lazy cash-in — which for a preordained summer megahit is an accomplishment.

Too soon, however, this intriguing psychological study turns into a programmatic geeks-vs-bullies story that relies on pushing the easiest emotional buttons.

Missing captures the constant distractions of the modern age. Pop-up windows continually tug at June’s attention. However, the film’s more engaging moments tap into the older cyber nostalgia of text-based adventure games from the 1970s, where problems are solved by typing the right command.

Sausage Party is ballsy and dumb and brilliant all in one bite.

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.

We’re stuck with Hancock’s vanilla saga about a soulless businessman who failed until he won big, a story that might have worked in the cynical ’90s but today has a moral obligation to say something with its two-hour running time.

Only Anderson’s part with all its hazy contradictions — neither comic nor tragic, neither pathetic nor heroic, neither subtle nor showy — seems, to transcend. More than the film around her, Anderson earns our respect.