Amy Nicholson

Jaume Collet-Serra's Run All Night, a shoot-'em-up about an out-to-pasture hit man desperate to keep his boss and best friend from whacking his son, is humid with testosterone. It's the sort of film where a woman accidentally caught by the camera practically apologizes and scurries away from the lens. When......

Start at the feet and pan up Adam Sandler: the sneakers, the pants that never quite fit, the sloped shoulders, the furrowed brow and world-weary sulk. He's a cartoon man drawn the same in every movie, whether he's in a lonely walk-up or a McMansion crammed with kids. Sandler plays......

"Mark Twain said boxing is the only sport where a slave, if he's successful, can rub shoulders with royalty," says former heavyweight Mike Tyson, who once knocked out 19 opponents in a row. "Can you imagine that? Just by fighting another human being, he can meet a king, a prince,......

It's an ironic truth that directors fascinated by robots tend to make inhuman movies. From Ridley Scott's Blade Runner to last year's Transcendence, these stories that ponder the gap between man and machine often reveal filmmakers unsure of where they fit in — they get so involved in the question......

If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus' Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel's upcoming Sundance hit Z for Zachariah, she......

The 1977 Burt Lancaster version of The Island of Dr. Moreau was the first movie South African director Richard Stanley ever saw, and the furious boy wanted his money back. He loved the H.G. Wells novel about a mad scientist surgically blurring the line between human and beast, and years......

Five years ago, four losers passed out in a Jacuzzi, boiled back to 1986, healed their past wounds, rocked out to Poison and returned to their timeline as gods. Thusly, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink was hailed as a minor deity: He'd taken a dumber-than-huffing-hairspray premise and made......

Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club's social categories are, like, way passé. As Bianca (Mae Whitman) explains, "Jocks play video games, princesses are on antidepressants and geeks rule the world." Today, be ye goth kid, science......

When E.L. James wrote 50 Shades of Grey in 2011, she had an excuse for explaining her whips-and-chains sex god Christian Grey as mentally ill. According to the American Psychiatric Association, he was. The APA's heaving Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classified BDSM as a psychological disorder. Outed......

Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. "We were constantly abused," Clement says. Over the next decade,......