From Manohla Dargis’s N.Y. Times review: “Amy Schumer is my kind of superhero — she stops haters dead. As fans of her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, know, there’s almost nothing that anyone can say about women, her included, that she hasn’t already said herself. Her powers of deflection are the perfect approach in a neofeminist moment in which women are calling out sexists, sometimes against vicious pushback. Think that she’s not thin enough or pretty enough? She intercepts hateful slurs like those and turns them into ferocious comedy gold that exposes chauvinism as the absurdity it is. She can’t be stereotyped away as a sourpuss who just needs to chill out, lie back and smile. She’s already smiling, and she’s killing it, joke after joke.

“In Trainwreck, Ms. Schumer plays, well, Amy, a more vanilla version of one of her comically flawed women, who aren’t as remotely together as they think or may appear to be. The movie, which was directed by Judd Apatow from her script, is often extremely funny, even if it never approaches the radicalness of her greatest, most dangerous work. Mr. Apatow’s talent as a movie director is opening up a space on screen in which comic performers (and some total stiffs) can be effortlessly funny together. In Trainwreck, he creates a roomy, comfortable vehicle stuffed with second bananas (both professional zanies and guest-starring squares), who support Ms. Schumer as she tosses out jokes, pops her eyes, deploys her deadpan and shows off her gift for old-school physical high jinks, often in heels and minis.

“Ms. Schumer drew on her own life for the story, which she turned into something of a sexual bildungsroman cum romantic comedy jumping with pop-cultural references and edged with razored social cultural critique. Her on-screen doppelgänger works as a writer for a men’s magazine, S’Nuff, a blistering, jokey title that sums up the idiocy of lad mags and their annihilating views on women. That the editor running it is a woman, Dianna (a peerless Tilda Swinton, in a swingy shag and gloomy spray tan), isn’t surprising. Ms. Schumer can be a merciless equal-opportunity takedown artist. If she doesn’t let women off the hook, it’s because she knows that sexism isn’t exclusively a guy thing; like stupidity, it is a people thing.”