Amy Nicholson

Brooke, Greta Gerwig's latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She's a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke's sister-to-be following their parents' Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea,......

It was easy to find the premiere of Gusmano Cesaretti's motorcycle club documentary Take None Give None, even if it was an hour east of Los Angeles. Four dozen bikers snaked behind the Mission Tiki Drive-in in Montclair, one blocking traffic while his buddies gunned up the service road entrance,......

Jonathan Demme's rock & roll dramedy Ricki and the Flash exists in a wormhole where the last five decades of pop culture are a blur. There's 66-year-old Meryl Streep, playing a broke singer who ditched her family to dominate the stage with the whiskey growl of Janis Joplin, the jangly......

Jason Segel didn't tell his book club he'd been cast as novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt's biopic The End of the Tour. "I didn't want to sound like Fancy-Pants McGee," Segel admits over lunch in Los Angeles. (Especially since the 6-foot-4 comedy actor is famous for dropping his......

At 53, Tom Cruise is past the retirement age of every James Bond except Roger Moore. Yet his 19-year-old Mission: Impossible series ticks on, counting down the seconds till its next explosion — and Cruise's Ethan Hunt is determined to unman his cross-Atlantic competition. Forget high-tech gadgets. The older Cruise......

Here's a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That's his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he'll transform from......

The history of Boyle Heights is an example of the promise — and peril — of American progress. In her great new documentary East L.A. Interchange, premiering Saturday at the Downtown Film Festival, filmmaker Betsy Kalin whisks us through this fascinating past. In the 1920s and '30s, much of Los......

At the start of Woody Allen's campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that has already steeled itself for his arrival. "Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me," Abe admits. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director,......

Imagine Donald Trump wanted to reboot his disastrous presidential campaign announcement month to start over as a younger man with real hair. In Tarsem Singh's Self/less, Trump could hire the medical geniuses of Phoenix Biogenic to transfer his aging brain into a strapping hot bod for $250 million — the......

The pizza joint Shakey's in Hollywood is packed when transgender actresses Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez slide into a booth with their director, Sean Baker, whose shot-on-location-and-on-iPhone comedy Tangerine was the most talked-about surprise of this year's Sundance Film Festival. Taylor, the quieter and more glamorously aloof of the......