Betsy Sharkey

Mostly, the movie swings wildly between mania when Hart is on-screen and relative serenity when he's not. It gives the film a multiple-personality feel that does not work in its favor.

In blurring the lines between truth and fiction as well as right and wrong, Third Person maddens far more than it intrigues. Indeed, more curious than anything about the movie itself is how such an artistic stumble happened.

The Moment is a psychological thriller more muddled than the mind and the maze it is caught up in.

What DeBlois has deepened in No. 2, is the film's emotional core. Though there are moments when the tension goes slack, the cast steps up to keep things afloat.

Everything unfolds at a glacial place, with so many emotional beats overplayed that the experience is more wearing than moving.

A great deal of insanity ensues, none of which would work if Tatum and Hill weren't so disarming in their roles. Their level of comfort with the characters and each other helps 22 click.

As Obvious Child stumbles its way to the final punch line, it echoes Donna's onstage musings — funny but rough around the edges. A work in progress that somehow hooks you anyway.

What sustains the film through the rockier times are its challenging themes, offering real issues for the young protagonists to wrestle with, rather than whether anyone will be carded trying to buy beer.

What happens when a seemingly righteous operation goes wrong and anxiety threatens to overtake ideals? It is the question Night Moves asks and answers in chilling ways.

Though it never plays like a polemic, the film has so much it wants to say the emotional power that might have made it a classic is undercut.

MacFarlane is a very funny dude, and there are times A Million Ways to Die is indeed funny. But too often the movie feels half-baked.

For the most part, the florid flourishes are so lightly played by Owen and Binoche, screenwriter Gerald Di Pego's melodrama can almost be forgiven.

Tense and violent, it grabs you from the first moments and rarely loosens its hold until the last body drops.

There is action galore, but Future Past is a deeper, richer, more thoughtful film, more existential in its contemplations than earlier Xs, all rather nicely embedded in the mayhem churned up by the mutants' altered states.

The Retrieval comes at you like a haunting slip of a memory, one that writer-director Chris Eska retrieves from a mostly forgotten era in unforgettable ways.

Though the film is sometimes as fraught as the immigrant experience, in the end the ideas are so rich, the look so lovely, Ewa's journey so heartbreakingly real, even the flaws seem to suit it.

Ironically this big, lumbering movie could have used more, not less. More Godzilla without question, and more emotional content for its very good cast too.

This raunchy unrooting of a settled suburban idyll exposes the considerable angst of emerging adulthood with a kind of scatological fervor designed to elicit oodles of inappropriate laughs. It succeeds.

The script, written by director John Slattery and Alex Metcalf, drifts too quickly into blue-collar cliches, leaving its interesting collection of characters only half-drawn at best.

It is the interplay between Wasikowska and Eisenberg that gives "The Double" both its tension and its charm... Their struggle captivates, the resolution shocks, and you can't help but wonder what windmills Ayoade will tilt next.

Belle is greatly buoyed by Mbatha-Raw's performance. She infuses Dido with a confident and intelligent grace that keeps you engaged long after the tangled story has let both the actress and audience down.

The division between the personal and scientific stories is not a clean one. It gives the film an uneven rhythm as it at times lurches between the two women's very separate lives.

The Occasionally Amazing Spider-Man 2 might be a better way to think of the not-always-spectacular but sometimes satisfying Spider-Man sequel.

Blue Ruin is an uneven film, and there are slip-ups along the way, but the tension that settles in slowly like a low-grade fever keeps you with it.

Slyness, slapstick and sex can often be mixed to amusing effect whatever the specifics — the original "Hangover," for example, did a credible job of it — but The Other Woman is ultimately undone by its indecision.

While Fading Gigolo periodically threatens to come apart at the seams, it is Turturro's most disciplined and delightful work yet.

Don't let the title of this indie gem fool you, Small Time has humor and heart big time.

Unlike the teeming world living between the lines in Munro's story, there is not nearly enough in Hateship Loveship to keep you invested.

What the movie could use is a little more faith — in the power of its message and the art of filmmaking. Instead, Heaven is sincere to a fault, and the closer it gets to heaven, the more it wavers.

Though Joe occasionally slips and falters, the filmmakers and actors get all the hard-luck details right.

Wonderfully animated and well-voiced, Rio 2 is nevertheless too much. Too much plot, too many issues, too many characters. But not too much music.

In taking Partridge to the movies, the writers go broader and deeper than they typically do with the story.

Watching this film feels like a genesis moment — of sci-fi fable, of filmmaking, of performance — with all the ambiguity and excitement that implies.

Between Law's performance and Shepard's script, which brims with explicit and expressive dialogue, the movie is remarkable for its ability to exhaust, irritate and also entertain.

As inventive as the action sequences are, there are too many of them and they tend to go on far too long — the movie is just shy of two-and-a-half hours. Still, Evans' filmmaking has undergone some impressive fine-tuning for The Raid 2. It is something to see — if you have the stomach for it.

The man was not, by most accounts, pedestrian. In trying to follow so closely in his footsteps, the film, however, is.

Though there are many delicious little moments tucked inside, the action heads in so many directions it can be dizzying to keep up.

It is clear in every frame that the filmmakers and actors really appreciate that loyalty. It doesn't make for a particularly ambitious film, but it is a satisfying one as it moves easy, breezy over familiar terrain.

Waugh has a good feel for the cars and action extremes, while director of photography Shane Hurlbut acquits himself nicely. But the screenplay written by George Gatins is full of potholes.

Sarcastic, sanctimonious, salacious, sly, slight and surprisingly sweet, the black comedy of Bad Words, starring and directed by Jason Bateman, is high-minded, foul-mouthed good nonsense.

The animation style mirrors the original, which is simple in an appealing way. It is particularly effective in the action sequences, which make the most of animation's ability to create a playful reality. But the multi-layered historical references designed to be adroitly wry are a trickier gambit.

The spectacularly brutal fighting is the film's main calling card, and in that "Rise of an Empire" doesn't disappoint. Still, in the battle for best guilty pleasure, I'd give it to the Spartans of "300," by a head.

A magically understated mash-up, Ernest & Celestine has a comforting storybook effect and proves a refreshing departure in an age of high-tech, hyperkinetic animation set to soaring pop ballads, as entertaining as they can be.

It is the most nonsensical crime caper to make it on screen in a while.

What happens when Omar is outside the prison walls, and how his world and his relationships are reshaped by the realities of broken trust and betrayal, make for gripping and heartbreaking watching.

The film is helped by Costner's self-deprecating, aw-shucks charm. The actor is game whether he's being asked to fight off truculent teens or treacherous terrorists.

For all of the substantive issues underpinning the documentary, it still feels a slight film for Berlinger, and very unlike the documentary veteran's best work, found in his dogged following of the West Memphis Three case.

Every time things between blue-collar David (Pettyfer) and pretty, privileged Jade (Wilde) get sticky — either kissy/gooey or teary/hurt-y — and the film could go deep, "Endless" morphs into music video territory.

Although the movie isn't a complete disaster, it's not your father's RoboCop either.

You can feel how personal a film In Bloom is and how promising a first feature this is for one of the country's new wave artists.

It is difficult to tell whether the filmmakers intended Welcome to the Jungle as a satire or a farce. It is neither funny enough, nor clever enough, to measure up in either case.

The Lego Movie is strikingly, exhilaratingly, exhaustingly fresh.

The filmmaker constructs a growing sense of dread with the calculated precision of a classic horror movie.

Garcia and Farmiga have such an easy, natural chemistry that their on-screen sparkle helps mitigate the film's weaknesses. At others times, it serves to underscore what might have been. It's a feckless conundrum.

What makes this film particularly bedeviling is that you get the sense there is a nice guy behind this mess, one not so callous about matters of the heart. If anything, the raunch seems forced. The closer the film gets to real emotions, the more authentic it feels.

Between Lelio's ingenuity in staging the film, an extremely clever script co-written with his frequent collaborator, Gonzalo Maza, and the pumping disco that interjects its opinions and assessments of each situation, Gloria is one of the most enjoyable movies to come along in a while.

Gimme Shelter, a ripped-from-real-life story of a pregnant teen's journey toward hope, is filled with very good intentions, very bad dialogue and a surprisingly affecting turn by its star Vanessa Hudgens.

The laughs here are lazy, and any sense of logic is definitely on the lam.

The film finds its footing as the weekend progresses and the temperature and tension — outside and in — rise.

Berg, who wrote and directed, is more interested in how men deal with battle than the ideals or the politics that put them there. What the movie achieves, with a gruesome energy and a remarkable reality, is a firefight.

A very fast three hours, Wolf is a fascinating, revolting, outlandish, uproarious, exhilarating and exhausting master work on immorality.

A hyper-realistic-looking, character-driven story of survival with talking dinosaurs that can't decide whether to inform or entertain. The film and its featured creatures do a little of both but modestly.

With so many sight gags and nearly every living comic in the world making an appearance at some point, the entire operation, like Ron's ego, feels a bit bloated.

This drama, about an ordinary guy trying to keep his infant daughter alive in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, is sincere but struggles as much as its hero.

Like art itself, words can't fully capture what it is like to see the Vermeer emerge under Jenison's brush. Or to see Jenison's obsession with the idea run its course.

Jackson's latest go at Tolkien's treasured "Hobbit" story gets closer to that rich alchemy of fantasy, adventure, imagination and emotion that made his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy such a triumph.

The most hopeful — and the best — of this solid and unsettling series.

Bale, Affleck and Harrelson are in their element as men battered by life, delivering exceptional performances that hold nothing back. Bale and Affleck are as nuanced as Harrelson is unhinged. It is among the finest work done by all three.

Deeply moving and devoid of melodrama, These Birds Walk is as pragmatic as its subjects.

Many of the transitions between narrative and music are rough. The temptations of the street, all too real in the real world, feel forced. Confrontations become clichés. The substance of human motivation is missing. And thus the heart never beats as it should.

Oldboy suggests a filmmaker doing almost as much soul-searching as the main character. There is a brashness in the risks taken, the very imperfections revealing an artist finding new inspiration. For Lee, this weird, brutal film seems to have freed him.

Delivery Man, a heart-tugging new comedy about fatherhood and family, is warm as well as wry.

Frozen is fabulous.

I don't know whether the tall man is happy, but I do know that Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? is intellectually and visually groundbreaking, and most certainly a film.

A joyous, raucous, righteous film but also a frustrating and disappointing one.

The Ghosts in Our Machine, a heartfelt meditation on animal rights, comes at you as a whisper. It depends on the persuasive powers of creatures great and small — in their natural habitat or in cages — to argue that we stop using them for food, clothing, research and entertainment.

Though this is an emotionally driven movie, it never drifts into melodrama. Collyer is as pragmatic in her approach as her characters. But it is Dillon and Watts' nuanced portrayals that make "Sunlight's" darkness so appealing.

Even with some flaws and flailing, Dallas Buyers Club is a rough, raw, ragged and exhilarating ride.

In Enzo Avitabile Music Life, Demme has not given us an expansive film, and there are spots you wish he'd dug deeper. But there is such a well of emotion that the music alone is almost enough.

It's amazing what a little story and a little substance add to a movie. It might not be a giant leap for mankind, but it is a small step for one old man.

The telling is beautiful and explicit. The truth of its emotionally raw, romantic drama is eternal and universal.

All Is Lost, which is only Chandor's second film, reveals itself as remarkably skillful, surprisingly insightful and deeply moving. It's a confident work by an artist who knows himself and trusts his audience.

Peirce has done a remaking rather than a reimagining.

Far too conventional underneath all the trappings, you wish it would howl.

It is an imperfect film about this imperfect world. But if "Mister & Pete" doesn't make you rethink the social safety net that fails these kids, and so many others like them, book some time with a cardiologist.

This is Shakespeare lite, which ultimately makes for Shakespeare slightly trite.

In its own strange way, All Is Bright pulls you in even as it frustrates. This is far from a picture-perfect Christmas story, mind you, but there is a spirit in its celebration of disappointment that is quite special.

The struggles in the movie are with the moments when life and liberty are on the line. The ones that should put you on the edge of your seat are more likely to have you glancing at your watch.

For cheap thrills, Nothing Left to Fear is true to its title. Director Anthony Leonardi III and writer Jonathan Mills have let not one scary moment on screen.

The writer-director digs deeply and with a marked sensitivity, capturing the desperate, heartbroken humanity of the time and the place. But it is also a movie of frustrating stumbles — blunders that diminish what might have been a brilliant film.

Who would have thought one of the most amusing and oddly insightful romantic comedies would be built around the power and the potent pull of porn?

Like the family, the film occasionally comes apart at the seams. But Childers and Garner are absolutely mesmerizing as Iris and Rose.

It is the inventive design of the many creatures that feels so fresh. The detail is so rich, and so dense, that you wish some of the frames would freeze so you had more time for savoring.

It is the kind of distinctive, culture-driven drama from emerging filmmakers that I wish we saw more of.

Thanks for Sharing is a bit like the recovery scene it digs into — filled with intoxicating highs and dispiriting lows.

Exciting, terrifying, worrisome stuff saturates every second of Prisoners, holding you captive, keeping you guessing until the bitter end.

It's a challenging film, but maybe not as challenging as it should be.

I'm not going to get into the acting, because there's not much of it, frankly. No one is embarrassingly bad; no one is exceptionally good.