Amy Nicholson

It's dumb and consistently funny.

To When You’re Finished Saving the World, being good is exhausting and miserable, and aspiring to be good is even worse. Joy exists only to be taken away.

What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.

Beast Beast’s plot twist is a swing at gravitas that disrupts the balance of Madden’s naturalistic character study. This is the way teen life is, Madden says, until suddenly the film accelerates from reality to sensationalism, and trades humanity for pulp.

In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.

It’s disappointing, yet inevitable that the creation story of Lee gives way to the characters he helped create.

It doesn't entirely engage, in part because it's so determined to correct the story that it can't let us explore it ourselves.

Batkid Begins wants audiences to celebrate the everyday heroes who donated their time and energy to Miles's dream. Absolutely, we should. Still, take a minute to ask what the disproportionate investment and interest in Batkid's adventure says about our own maturity — and how the internet allows us to feel like champions for rallying for one afternoon, while overlooking the years of unglamorous doctor appointments before it.

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.

The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.

A Valentine’s Day massacre in which PDA leads to public executions, it’s got decent gags, middling scares and a rationale sloppier than two dogs sharing a strand of spaghetti. As date night fare, it’ll do.

It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity.

The caffeinated cuts and pacing never allow the audience to find its footing in the film’s large, expensive set pieces, which prevents the action from becoming truly thrilling.

The crux of Gun’s struggle is that she risked everything to tell the truth, and the war happened anyway. Ultimately, her personal story was neither uplifting, nor tragic, which means the film surrounding her doesn’t hurtle toward a satisfying arc.

It’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence.

Riff Raff is a solid crime comedy with unusual wiring.

It’s mostly Pugh’s tale, a smart move as she delivers one of the better performances I’ve seen in a super suit.

It's a staggering film, but not a brilliant one — a superior version would have played more with the gulf between our senses and theirs.

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.

Our world so hauntingly echoes Collins’s fictions that the film, shot last summer, moves us to spend its gargantuan running time reflecting on contemporary headlines, mourning the generational tragedy of anger and fear begetting anger and fear.

Director Douglas McGrath's empathy rescues it from the brink of disaster porn - it's so good-hearted and optimistic that a swath of stressed out moms will feel the flick speaks directly to them, which it does.

If you’ve seen even one based-on-a-true-story British misfit hobbyists movie, you already know the tune.

It’s rousing stuff and a bit glib.

Payne's book is more epic and shameless than Gustin Nash's tidy adaptation.

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!”

Won't Back Down makes grand drama of bureaucracy, positioning Gyllenhaal as the knight slaying 400 pages of government paperwork in order to wrest control of her daughter's elementary school. It's rousing - if not thrilling - stuff.

As sloppy as it is, there’s no denying that Honey Don’t! works as a noir with a pleasant, peppery flavor. Yet, there’s a snap missing in its rhythm, a sense that it doesn’t know when and how its gags should hit.

Land Ho! feints toward pathos and perversity, only to decide that it's better off giving us abridged, postcard emotions.