Amy Nicholson

Kong: Skull Island is an offering to the hungry mouths at the multiplex who want to cheer a movie that doesn't insult, or tax, their intelligence.

The film doesn't trust Deutch to complete the full redemption arc from sinner to saint, which is, you know, the point of the script. She's a marshmallow from minute one, and that's a shame because Deutch is capable of being a real pistol.

Logan is the rare action flick in which the quiet moments are as compelling as any of the fights.

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.

The Great Wall doesn't have the lunacy that made last year's Gods of Egypt a hoot. Zhang can't kick his craving for respectability, even if he's making a movie that flips the middle finger at historicity.

What lingers is Kedi’s awareness that the city is alive.

In the first film, his rhythmic overkills felt brutal. Here, they're more like a dance, and the best bits of the movie have a lightness that made me giggle with delight.

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.

With The LEGO Batman Movie, a shiny, irresistible delight, blockbuster flicks have perfected their ideal form.

The Space Between Us has admirable ambition, even though none of it works. Sure, the romance is a bust and the script is a howl. Yet every so often, Butterfield becomes infatuated with a new earth treasure...and for a moment, the film reminds us that there are things on this planet worth risking your life for.

It’s hard to spend time with Jackie, and Hackford doesn’t make a convincing case as to why we should. Instead, the script attempts to justify his bitterness by lowering the rest of the world to his level.

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.

Split has to satisfy both audiences that believe in trigger warnings and the camp crowd that just wants to see McAvoy pull the trigger. And so, Shyamalan trickily asks us to redefine victimhood.

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.

[Davis's] insistence on shaking hands and showing respect — the opposite of the behavior you see on Twitter — patiently chips away at their preconceptions about race. It's like he's trying to carve the Lincoln Memorial with a scalpel.

Live by Night loses energy whenever Sienna Miller’s not around. She makes this world with its showdowns about machismo and machine guns seem fresh, instead of the same old antler clashes.

It’s candied history. The timeline is all wrong, the soundtrack is too cheery, the movie is too eager to please. Yet at the end, I found myself tearing up anyway.

Barry's questions are powerful whether asked by a future president or a future janitor. The script is great no matter who it's about — it's just that fewer curiosity-seekers would give it a watch were it about someone else.

Edwards and the screenwriters have designed Rogue One around applause breaks for cameos and callbacks. We’ve all lost the point of the franchise. Audiences once packed theaters to gawk at the future; now, it’s to soak in the past.

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

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.

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

It's thrillingly, fiercely female. It takes the same neighborhood-boy-turns-hoodlum story we've seen for a century and simply flips the script.

No Iraq movie has better captured our country’s nationalistic nonsense, and the inner chaos of the men and women returning home to this noise.

Bad Santa 2 doesn't hate Christmas. It just hates women.

At a time when judgment and self-righteousness outrank forgiveness and empathy, Nadine is the heroine we need.

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

Newt lacks soul. So, too, does his movie.