Amy Nicholson

In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is "Think smart." It's a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies such as Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the......

Two and a half years ago, Judd Apatow released This Is 40, the most personal film of his career. He was anxious. He usually is. His default setting is inward panic. "I don't know if people can understand the pressure to be funny," Apatow says today, "just knowing how badly......

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People Issue 2015. Check out our entire People Issue online. "I would never wear shoes like this in Victorville," admits 23-year-old actor Keith Stanfield, gazing down at the tasseled caramel wingtips he's paired with blue-striped socks, a green leopard-print button-down and......

One of the 54 fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People Issue 2015. In March, actor Michelle Rodriguez moved to Venice with her cats Hemingway and Coco, and then sped off to promote Furious 7 in Beijing. "I don't even have couches," she sighs, though she does have a bed......

Diane Keaton thinks her new film is delightfully ironic. Richard Loncraine's 5 Flights Up is the latest in that burgeoning genre, Retiree Real Estate Romantic Comedy, where cool, gray-haired New Yorkers realize they can barely afford to live in the city where they fell in love. Keaton plays a teacher......

Avengers: Age of Ultron is a complicated, ticking machine — a cuckoo clock under attack. Returning helmer Joss Whedon is earnestly trying to make a movie out of a bag of bolts: six stars, nine cameos and three enemies, plus at least 10 films to go before the climactic Avengers:......

Holden Caulfield, the original hipster, was a jerk at the movies. He hated them. He thought actors were phonies, screenwriters were prostitutes, and audiences who sniffled during weepies were “mean bastards at heart.” Holden wasn't a sucker. He was something worse: a laugher—the kind of disengaged cretin who'd snicker through......

I dread explaining man-child dramedies to the ghosts of the dead. "You see, Grandpa, after your time, a generation paralyzed by the economy and indecision stopped growing up — and started churning out indie movies justifying it." In the 1940s, men fought wars at 18. In 1967, Benjamin Braddock faced......

A normal movie ends with the American Humane Association's assurance that "No animals were harmed." But Tippi Hedren's doomed 1981 obsession Roar isn't normal. The AHA's seal is the first thing on screen — yet, if the authorities had a safety code for humans, Roar would fail. This odd, slight......