Amy Nicholson

Green is a storyteller with such control that we don’t leave the theater feeling patronized or hectored. She’s thought everything out, and planned it so that every scene in The Royal Hotel is as gripping as it is pointed.

Gibney dissects Jobs's image with the calm curiosity of a coroner.

[An] excellent, tensely controlled thriller.

They Came Together is one joke repeated until you're broken down by the giggles. It shouldn't work as well as it does, and wouldn't if it weren't perfectly cast with America's Comedy Sweethearts.

Rebel Wilson is the peroxided Aussi who stole scenes as Kristen Wiig's roommate in "Bridesmaids," and this is the role that will turn her into a star.

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.

This cheerful small town portrait makes for an idealistic crowd-pleaser (after all, Eureka Springs is the rumored home of healing waters), but this beautiful, and beautifully shot, documentary is a cure for the angry headline blues.

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.

Even as the movie captures Williams’ recklessness, it’s also a convincing sketch of his artistic growth and commitment.

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.

It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.

Nothing about Together screams comedy, yet that’s precisely how it’s put together. Awkward humor is the skeleton under its prestige nightmare surface, even as it’s wonderfully, heartbreakingly tragic to watch our leads roil to melt together like mozzarella.

Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous, and crams the corners of her movie with images of other female characters discreetly seizing their own moments of satisfaction — glimpses of joys which realize that it’s in the margins of a medieval tale where the best stuff happens.

Música, Mancuso’s phenomenal feature debut, is a comic trip inside a mind that’s forever feverishly creating — even against his will.

Rudd and Robinson’s scenes together are great.

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

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

The Rover might not be about anything at all, but the dust it stirs up sticks to you after you leave the theater.

Hokum is a fabulous horror film for all tastes.

[Anderson's] managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty.

Obvious Child is perfect for those who want more honesty in fiction.

[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.

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

The film punctures that airless sense of fate which can suffocate period pieces and restores this moment of upheaval to immediacy.

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.

Now that Linklater has ascended to the establishment, he’s encouraging cinema’s future by turning to its inspirational past with Nouvelle Vague, the lively story of how Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) directed Breathless with a tiny bit of cash and a ton of ego. It’s the origin story of Godard, and, in a way, of himself. Even more importantly, it’s a manual for what Linklater hopes will be a fresh wave of talent storming the shore any minute. (I’m counting on it.)

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

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.