Amy Nicholson

Like life itself, the film is unemotional and cruel. It hides its own nihilism behind grotesqueries that force the audience's stomachs to clench. We can't help feeling things. After all, we, too, are just collections of cells, and Espinosa plays our nervous system like a flamenco guitar in concert with head-pounding drums and nauseous trombones.

Though Roberts is miscast as a wallflower — seriously, the film expects us to believe a jock in her class would dismiss the mannequin-perfect beauty as “not my type” — Nerve taps into the rush of realizing strangers think you’re cool.

Lee is credited as a director for filming a live performance of Rodney King on an outdoor stage in New York. But Lee mostly seems to have loaned Smith his brand name to get the monologue attention. He doesn't leave a fingerprint on the play, and didn't care about where to put the cameras. The angles make no sense; the edits are clumsy.

The dialogue is dense and quick and brainy.

As much as I enjoyed this bizarre, ambitious adventure and its careful popcorn kitsch, Tarzan’s story will always leave our ears ringing with something we hate, whether you choose Burroughs’s white-savior syndrome or Christoph Waltz’s shivery final speech: “The future belongs to me.”

DeMonaco makes small choices I admire. For once, no woman gets threatened with rape. Instead, ladies seem to be the aggressors, and as we cruise the streets of D.C. we see wives stabbing and incinerating husbands, or dancing around a tree strung with male corpses.

Café Society is a light-fingered, backstabbing trifle. Despite the occasional sour zinger, the film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve.

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.

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

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.

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

Give Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle credit for not wholly insulting the audience’s intelligence. The entire script is centered on these cliches embracing their cliché new bodies, cocooning stereotypes inside stereotypes like nesting dolls.

The story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has one core problem to fix, but the film is really about the meandering path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with a lot of awkwardly erotic squelching.

The film struggles to find an appropriate ending for a woman who’s itching to get back to work.

It’s a film prone to tonal whiplash. Yet the script has made some sharp trims, scrapping a subplot about Ellen DeGeneres and eliminating some of Ryle’s most outlandish behavior.

Design-wise, the “Inside Out” characters are Pixar’s crudest work, with the blocky colors and stiff hair of a creature in a TV commercial for insecticide. Blown up to the big screen, they just look worse. Narratively, however, the film’s portrait of Joy is beautifully complex.

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.

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.

It’s a simple, gentle tale that’s told beautifully but feels hollow — like a eulogy for an acquaintance.

[Tim Federle's] leads deliver hearty performances that elevate the movie, particularly once we’ve had time to adjust to the gusto of Wood, whose wired performance has the flavor of Hugh Jackman’s exuberance squeezed into an espresso cup.

“Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense.

Tokyo Tribe is Sono cackling hysterically while smashing a keytar. Sure, there are a few sour notes, but he's made a great blast of noise.

The actors are in full command of our empathy, especially Brennan’s gray-haired caretaker who, when she cracks open her heart, seems to glow from within.

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.

It is a pity that Richard Bean and Clive Coleman’s script mires Bunton in a soggy family drama about an unresolved death; an elder son (Jack Bandeira) who flirts with crime; and a wife, Dorothy (Helen Mirren, so sheepish as to be near invisible), who is humiliated that her husband prefers prison to a stable home.

The final product feels like if the greatest musician in the world tried to write a classic in 15 minutes. Yet, “How to a Build a Girl” dares to argue that reinventing yourself doesn’t make you a poseur ... It’s a young person’s jam that will hit the right teen like a thunderbolt.

The documentary’s biggest challenge is shaping Coward’s biography into a satisfying roller coaster of highs and lows.

[A] cheery, lightweight documentary.