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Amy Nicholson

Amy Nicholson

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Amy Nicholson is the film critic of the Los Angeles Times and the host of the podcast "Unspooled." She is a current on-air voice at LAist and KCRW, and a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics. Formerly, she was the chief film critic for MTV News and LA Weekly. Her other credits include the New York Times, the Washington Post, Variety, Rolling Stone and the Guardian, plus the podcast miniseries "Zoom," "The Canon," "Quentin Tarantino Presents," "Halloween Unmasked," and "Skillset." She has served on the juries for Sundance and SXSW, as well as the FIPRESCI juries for the Moscow International Film Festival, Cairo International Film Festival and Eurasia International Film Festival, among others. Amy holds a double B.A. in Film Studies and Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma as well as a Masters in Professional Writing from USC.

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Magazine Dreams (2023) 80% “Jonathan Majors plays a volatile bodybuilder named Killian Maddox, presumably because the writer and director Elijah Bynum thought calling the character Murderguy Sulkface was too on the nose. ” – Los Angeles Times Mar 21, 2025 Full Review Disney's Snow White (2025) 43% “A fascinating case study in today’s impossible contradictions — a magic mirror reflecting the tensions of the current times.” – Los Angeles Times Mar 19, 2025 Full Review Black Bag (2025) 97% “Spy games are merely a bit of lingerie tarting up a story about trust. Call it “sex, lies & videotape & guns” — and a sign that Soderbergh doesn’t have faith in today’s audiences to be interested in that kind of thing unless someone might get shot” – Los Angeles Times Mar 14, 2025 Full Review Novocaine (2025) 82% ““Novocaine” makes a convincing argument that its lead, Jack Quaid, can do it all: woo the girl, shoot the goon and tickle the audience. The movie itself has a harder time, screwing its three genres together so awkwardly that it tends to limp. ” – Los Angeles Times Mar 14, 2025 Full Review The Actor (2025) 74% “Johnson has bent the novel inside out and turned it into, of all things, a romance.” – Los Angeles Times Mar 12, 2025 Full Review Mickey 17 (2025) 77% “Of course, Bong Joon Ho is an environmentalist. He recycles his own ideas.” – Los Angeles Times Mar 7, 2025 Full Review The Accidental Getaway Driver (2023) 85% “Lee’s too subtle to say it out loud, but there’s a hushed irony in that Long attempted to rebuild a life halfway around the world only to wind up in the same place: captive at gunpoint.” – Los Angeles Times Mar 2, 2025 Full Review Riff Raff (2024) 59% “Like a pool shark, Montiel reveals his intentions only toward the end. The gamble doesn’t pay off as well as it could, but at least “Riff Raff” gets smarter as it goes on.” – Los Angeles Times Mar 1, 2025 Full Review Universal Language (2024) 96% “The film anticipates a question that it doesn’t outright ask or answer: Does it matter what Canadians speak if they’re willing to communicate?” – Los Angeles Times Feb 14, 2025 Full Review DIG! XX (2024) 100% “It's about what it is to try and make art in a corporate world, and you start empathizing with the stubbornness it takes to keep going.” – FilmWeek (KPCC - NPR Los Angeles) Feb 11, 2025 Full Review I'm Still Here (2024) 97% “To tell this story through a woman who has been kind of raised by her husband to stay a little ignorant and watch her be forced to become a strong figure fighting against the regime... Fantastic performance. ” – FilmWeek (KPCC - NPR Los Angeles) Feb 11, 2025 Full Review Love Hurts (2025) 19% ““Love Hurts” is an action-romance that fizzles like a science-class volcano made of baking soda and cheese. ” – Los Angeles Times Feb 8, 2025 Full Review Heart Eyes (2025) 81% “It’s got decent gags, middling scares and a rationale sloppier than two dogs sharing a strand of spaghetti. As date night fare, it’ll do.” – Los Angeles Times Feb 5, 2025 Full Review Opus (2025) 41% “It has good style and a handful of fun ideas, but it’s ultimately as superficial as the puff pieces it’s attacking.” – Los Angeles Times Jan 28, 2025 Full Review Presence (2024) 88% “A family drama disguised under a sheet. The eye holes are the only thing separating it from a thousand other ordinary little films about the injuries people do to those they love. Otherwise, the story doesn’t have enough flesh on its bones.” – Los Angeles Times Jan 24, 2025 Full Review Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) 93% “To be an artist, or not to be? That is the question of “Grand Theft Hamlet"” – Los Angeles Times Jan 18, 2025 Full Review One of Them Days (2025) 94% “This shaggy, silly movie works because you want to be there wherever the leads fall splat on their faces: a blood bank, a brawl, an ambulance. SZA and Palmer make a fun pair. They’re not quite an odd couple — more like adjacent screwballs. ” – Los Angeles Times Jan 16, 2025 Full Review Wolf Man (2025) 50% “There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style. ” – Los Angeles Times Jan 16, 2025 Full Review The Last Showgirl (2024) 83% “This is not a blood-and-guts show business exposé — it’s a diaphanous portrait of a woman who, like Anderson herself, wafts through life like a marabou feather. It’s less a story than a vibe.” – Los Angeles Times Jan 9, 2025 Full Review Hard Truths (2024) 95% “He’s constructed this movie like a quilt. Every scene is a comment on the art of complaining. This is, believe it or not, a pro-complaining film.” – Los Angeles Times Jan 9, 2025 Full Review Better Man (2024) 88% “If you could tear your eyes away from the screen enough to check a stopwatch, not one minute goes by without a flourish that’s either funny, ridiculous, stunning or emotional. ” – Los Angeles Times Dec 24, 2024 Full Review Babygirl (2024) 76% “Romy and Samuel have safe words, yet our own national conversation about sexual ethics gets tongue-tied whenever it tries to define right and wrong. Instead, we have Reijn asking uncomfortable questions.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 24, 2024 Full Review Nickel Boys (2024) 91% “The director not only turns anonymous bones into people, he turns his people into the camera: The audience sees the world literally through the eyes of Elwood and Turner. We couldn’t be hugged any tighter to their point of view.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 20, 2024 Full Review Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) 56% “The company’s zeal for prequels has resulted in a movie about two kittens who we’ve all seen meet a grisly death. To my morbid delight, “Mufasa” starts off by killing one of them again.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 19, 2024 Full Review The Brutalist (2024) 93% “The movie announces itself as a modern epic and goes on to earn that gilded frame. You’re dead certain that at some point, someone must have come up with the elevator pitch that this is “Citizen Kane” from the perspective of Xanadu’s interior designer.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 18, 2024 Full Review
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