Amy Nicholson

You can say this for the Disney teen machine: They sure know how to pick 'em. Vanessa Hudgens was 17 when High School Musical made her famous, the tail end of a generation of Mouseketeers that included her contemporaries Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez as well as her......

Meryl Streep just scored her 18th Oscar nomination with August: Osage County, a benchmark she'd probably acknowledge with a self-deprecating eye roll. She's not one to applaud her own achievements. In fact, she has spent her 37-year career doing the opposite, writing off her hits as just good roles that......

Bereft that Tom Hiddleston's Loki won't be in next summer's The Avengers: Age of Ultron? Never fear. The charismatic villain who survived three Marvel flicks has taken off the cape and horned helmet and jetted back to London to star in Shakespeare's Coriolanius, the tragedy of a egomaniacal general–turned–senatorial candidate......

Let's start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight......

Every Sundance there's a crowd-pleaser, and most years it's got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film by Argentinean......

Sixty years ago, Fred Flintstone hawked Winston cigarettes. Today, he pitches cereal. And both can kill. Stephanie Soechtig's rabble-rousing documentary Fed Up argues that it's time to attack Big Sugar just like we successfully demonized Big Tobacco. Narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up is the first doc of Sundance to......

Kristen Stewart spent five Twilight films getting rescued by werewolves and vampires. Consider Camp X-Ray, her rebuttal to a half-decade of playing damsels in distress. As Guantanamo guard Private Cole, Stewart is punched, bloodied, and spat on - and that's just the first 10 minutes. When her commanding officer jokes,......

Pamela Smart, the sexpot schoolteacher who seduced three teenage boys to shoot her husband, has been imprisoned without parole since 1991. Her official release year is sometime in 9999, assuming that human civilization is still alive. Yet the captive in Jeremiah Zagar's Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart isn't her...

Sure, he's played the Super Bowl and the World Cup, and sold out Staples Center three nights in a row. But the Black Eyed Peas' Jaime "Taboo" Gomez still has a sense of humility. "When you saw the Peas, you knew, 'That's Fergie, that's will.i.am — I may not know......

"You are the man?" a crook asks Ice Cube as the cop comedy Ride Along opens. "I am the man!" Cube insists. You can't blame him for being defensive. Now a 44-year-old father of five, Cube is three decades away from the furious teenager who co-founded N.W.A in his senior......