Amy Nicholson

It's clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we'd never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense that they were......

Comedian Gregg Turkington sits at an airport bar in Van Nuys, orders a spiced whiskey sour — the joint's too-sweet specialty cocktail — and stares out the window at the tiny commuter jets he hates. “I'm terrified of flying, like seriously freaked out,” he says. “But I fly more than......

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. But then Collette, playing a vain patient bereft at losing her hair and her ability to wear 7-inch......

David Gordon Green's Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in a fast-talking political comedy. Watching Sandra Bullock, as ruthless campaign manager Jane, flog her uncharismatic candidate for Bolivia's president, I snickered at her knowing quips. Asked by an offscreen TV interviewer (the film's awkward framing device) to......

Thirty-six-year-old Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva, the writer-director and star of the comedy Nasty Baby, is himself an enfant terrible. In eight years he's made six eclectic films, his own wicked twists disguised in what looked like the usual arthouse tropes. The Maid, his American breakthrough, looked like a benign Latin......

If you want to meet the smartest man in Hollywood, head east from Grauman's Chinese Theatre until the Walk of Fame fades into a barren stretch of dental clinics and Filipino restaurants and enter a tasteful, almost camouflaged midcentury office that, until recently, was the headquarters of Cat Fancy magazine......

Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age at which Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton's garish Alice in Wonderland. In......

Steven Spielberg's true-story Cold War procedural, Bridge of Spies, has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his......

Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism. Seven years ago, a man (Sean Bridgers) snatched 17-year-old Joy (Brie Larson) and stashed her in his backyard shed. Two years later, she bore their son. The door stayed locked. Now 5, Jack......

Here's the best way to go to the New Beverly now that Quentin Tarantino has taken over: Just show up. Every night of the week you're guaranteed to see something great — and, more importantly, something that probably wouldn't have crossed your mind to see but boy, are you glad......