Amy Nicholson

Summer officially starts to end with the dawn of film festival season, when we critics pack our suitcases and trek to the Toronto International Film Festival to see what great, smart, small movies are going to make a run at the art house, or even the Oscars. The 10 best......

Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema's best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are—hurtful, hopeful, lovely, lonely and......

Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can't blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz's new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn't helping. The quiet creepshow follows 11-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn't......

Director Alex Gibney's choice to follow this spring's Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible......

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 that people may not notice. Like Mike Nichols, Joseph......

Nima Nourizadeh's American Ultra is a bloody Valentine attached to a bomb. It's violent, brash, inventive, and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe, two West Virginia stoners blissed out on weed and each other. “We're the......

It's a perfect summer afternoon in Los Angeles, and Lily Tomlin wants to do everything: Drive to Neptune's Net in Malibu, explore the L.A. River, tour Koreatown, grab cocktails in West Hollywood. She jumps in her 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer — her other car, a Prius, balances out its ecological......

"You could make five different N.W.A movies. We made the one we wanted to make." That's director F. Gary Gray during an audience Q&A after a recent screening of Straight Outta Compton, the long-awaited N.W.A movie. In our review, Amy Nicholson writes that there's much more to the group's story:......

In the holy trinity of N.W.A, each icon had a power: Dr. Dre produced, Ice Cube wrote the words and Eazy-E was the comic relief. N.W.A's biopic, Straight Outta Compton, blurs those roles. Both Dre and Cube produced the film, and they seem to have edited the script with a......