Amy Nicholson

Anesthesia doesn't cast judgment. Instead, Nelson slowly reveals awful things about his characters after we've decided to like them. I admire the film's vigor, even if at times it feels like a cruel, clumsy trick.

Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens steers the franchise back to its popcorn origins. It's not a Bible; it's a bantamweight blast. And that's just as it should be: a good movie, nothing more.

Once the bash really gets going, I was swept up in the chaos and happily clicked off my brain. Screenwriter Paula Pell classes up the dumb stuff with a touch of depth.

Howard is great at capturing the timbre of the ship, the creaks and snaps and the whir of the hemp lines, and the sonar clicks of the whales strategizing below. All his sound and fury has a befuddling purpose. His emotional climax is about, well, disaster insurance.

The film could do with fewer panty shots of the listless sisters flopped across each other like kittens. Yet it manages to capture the lethargy of watching your life goals winnow into wifely servitude.

Chi-Raq is a marvel. It's Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned, and funny as hell — right when we need to hear it.

If The Danish Girl dared to critique its main characters, it'd be brave. If it had celebrated a modern marriage that worked for 26 years — much longer and stranger than the film lets on — it'd be truly pioneering. Real life is full of kinks, mistakes, and selfish behavior. Biopics, however, are made of formulaic virtue.

Creed wants all of the Rocky drama but invests in none of the smarts.

Most astonishingly, with the franchise's powerful climax, Lawrence has managed to align her parallel Hollywood lives and reinvent the prestigious popcorn flick, a crowd-pleaser with intelligent class.

Entertainment is a painful, poetic watch.

The film doesn't demonstrate belief in much of anything except that audiences must be so desperate for a peek into these stars' private lives that we'll invest energy in their mopey fictional counterparts, who can't even invest in themselves.

Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke's cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate.

David Gordon Green's Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy.

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.

Nasty Baby isn't satisfying. But on Silva's terms, it makes sense.

Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism.

What Spielberg seems to want most from this respectable lark is for audiences to notice the parallels between the 1950s and today.

Though this movie waltzes to its own strange rhythm, del Toro hits every note.

This sparse marvel leaves the audience rattled by how small decisions lead to big consequences. Still, you're most likely to leave the theater gushing about the cast's bravura unbroken performances.

Villeneuve's proven he's got a strong punch. The trouble is, he barely aims.

Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.

Most docs are lucky to have one wild character. The phenomenal Finders Keepers has two.

Headland's film might have been more engaging if it were about its supporting characters.

Karas showcases the actors' surprisingly good tennis skills, like the continuous volley they do while reciting the lyrics to "Bust a Move" and the deft way Sisto spins his racquet. But rather than develop these two as characters, Break Point tries to score too many points.

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

Remake The Graduate today, and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, "Startups." Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly people may not notice.

As we switch sympathies from scene to scene, Muylaert forces us to think big about the clash between idealism and acceptance, a philosophical war that spills beyond the walls of this small story into every corner of our own lives.