Betsy Sharkey

As intriguing as Prince Avalanche can be in its contemplations, and as glad as I am to see Green cozying up to his more elemental and esoteric side, the film ultimately plays like an unfinished thought. It's a good thought, mind you, but like the road, it seems to go nowhere.

In a World… stands as a very entertaining first crack at what one can only hope will be a long career behind the camera. That is where it seems the actress can truly make her mark.

For a movie about planes, a lot happens on the ground — those refueling stops can take forever. But the animators take advantage of the power of flight, packing the action sequences with daredevil runs. But it's a race, and a kind of sameness occasionally sets in.

We're the Millers is full of moments that feel as forced as the marriage of convenience — and contrivance — in the movie.

Director Andrew Bujalski makes a serious play for his own place in the pantheon of hysterically pretentious pretend.

To has a great mastery of timing; he knows just how long to let a look linger before cutting away, how little he can reveal without losing us. The director keeps you guessing until the very end whether Choi or Zhang, or someone else entirely, will be the last man standing.

Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, as high school seniors Sutter and Aimee, bring such an authentic face of confidence and questioning, indifference and need, pain and denial, friendship and first love, that it will take you back to that time if you're no longer there, and light a path if you are.

The To Do List is neither supergood nor superbad, but passable doesn't exactly raise the bar.

The movie is among the filmmaker's most emotionally affecting.

Red 2 is much more of a mixed bag than it should have been.

The Danish filmmaker's latest theater of the macabre is brutal, bloody, saturated with revenge, sex and death, yet stunningly devoid of meaning, purpose, emotion or decent lighting. Seriously. Artful shadows can certainly set a mood; too many and it merely looks like someone is trying too hard.

A series of strong emotional crosscurrents tied to the notion of winning and losing are in the hands of a very eclectic and capable cast.

It is a devastating film to watch.

Whether the San Pedro does its magic is of course the big question. Regardless, Silva works his, delivering not exactly the Holy Grail of road movies, but a very mellow summer high.

Intimate in the telling, sweeping in the implications, Loznitsa has created an unusually incisive film.

Authenticity gives the movie its witty, heartwarming, hopeful, sentimental, searing and relatable edge. It is merciless in probing the tender spots of times like these, and tough-guy sweet in patching up the wounds.

Even with slightly heavier issues, like its predecessor, Despicable Me 2 is light on its feet, visually inventive and very fast with the repartee. It requires actors who can pull off the many peppery lines at warp speed and in that the film is lucky with its voice cast.

Byzantium's appeal is not so much its bite, which could use some refining, but the emotional journey its undead take. In Jordan's hands, the vampires are so very human.

I'm So Excited! will not stand as one of Almodóvar's defining works. But for some completely frivolous, naughty nonsense, it may be just the ticket.

At times The Heat gets messy, and the comedy is not always pitch perfect. But they're cops. They're enemies. They're friends. They're opposites. It's funny.

The civil rights arguments and the activism are handled in remarkably objective fashion, though it is no mystery where the directors' sentiments lie.

The animation is snappy in the way it handles an extremely eclectic-looking bunch of monsters. The 3-D effects are nifty but, as with so much about "MU," not necessary.

As intriguing as the facts are, much of the documentary's charm is the way in which it embeds the work.

Make no mistake, it is lovely to look at this celebrity bedazzled bit of L.A. crime history for a while. But the movie ultimately leaves you feeling as empty as the lives it means to portray.

From the clockwork comic timing to the movie's salty mix of the ridiculous and the reflective, This Is the End is stupidly hysterical and smartly heretical. Cross my heart and hope to die, it's funny as hell.

It's a great trick the filmmakers have pulled off to make us feel as if we're there sorting through the memories with him. The movie's editing is especially artful with Maya Hawke and Casey Brooks doing the nipping and tucking.

Pensively shot, painfully and poetically told.

Violet & Daisy comes out of the gate guns blazing. Too bad it ends as a misfire.

The movie is not exactly a laugh riot. But its comedy is amiable enough — and surprisingly clean.

The filmmakers are a bit like their boys of summer, plowing into new terrain in promising ways but rough around the edges.

The script has no nuance, none. And when Shyamalan moves into the director's chair, the script problems are magnified. Everything is spelled out, underlined in red.

For the most part, The East is a dizzying cat and mouse game with all sorts of moral implications.

When the movie should touch the heart, it just misses. When moments should produce gales of laughter, it struggles for a smile. When panic and fear should set the heart racing, it doesn't.

The films have only gotten better by letting the relationship marinate. "Midnight's" more disgruntled edge reflects what creeps up on couples as years pass, regrets stack up, kids factor in, real life intervenes.

What really sets "F&F6" apart is the blinding speed with which it shifts between over-the-top action, that speedometer inching toward 800 mph at times, and soap opera emotions that bring everything to a screeching halt. It's enough to give you whiplash … in a good way.

Chow is actually an apt metaphor for the movie - indescribably irritating and only in it for the money.

The English Teacher is a tragedy masquerading as a comedy and doing a disservice to both.

This is a beautifully rendered film.

So many things are done right that even with the bombast, "Into Darkness" is the best of this summer's biggies thus far. It's a great deal of brash fun.

It is the almost accidental way Tina and Chris go about going bad that provides Sightseers with its twisted humor and its unexpected charm.

The great failing of The Iceman is not in giving us a monster, but in not making us care.

Assayas has such a steady hand as a director, he knows precisely how to let all of Gilles' inner angst play out. His nostalgia for those past days can be felt in the affection and forgiving way the indiscretions of youth are portrayed.

Though Bier isn't as comfortable with the lighter side of life, the film is a lovely little lark with a good head on its shoulders.

That sense of extreme, excess, over-the-top everything is there from start to finish. And isn't that what Bay fans count on even at cut-rate prices?

To be fair, there are moments that earn their laughs and nostalgic memories for the marriage that was and the relationship that is that are sweet. But like many big weddings — a lot of things go wrong and not much goes right.

One of the most creatively rich and emotionally rewarding movies to come along this year.

The promise it begins with doesn't pay off. And while Arthur Newman is not a complete disaster, it does leave you wishing the romance and the ride had been a whole lot smoother.

Beyond the timelessness of the story itself, the film is beautifully shot and though early in Godard’s career already showcased his ability to capture emotional intensity in the very way he frames the shots.

Almost from the beginning the message overwhelms the medium.

Pawn's cops and robbers game could have been far better played.

François Ozon can usually be counted on for dark irony of the juiciest sort...But the filmmaker has an especially deft touch when a dash of comedy is mixed in. He uses this to delicious effect in his latest, In the House.

I found it to be some kind of wonderful, flaws and all. This is one to be taken in like meditation. Clear the mind and let what is in front of you wash over you. Save the contemplation for later.

The Angels' Share leaves a warm glow.

Simon Killer...is Campos' bleakest project, which honestly makes me fearful for the future. Still, he is a provocative one to watch — willing to push the aesthetic boundaries as well as the story to extremes even when the risks don't always pay off.

The Company You Keep is a shrewder, more satisfying piece of filmmaking than we've seen from Redford in a while, though not quite in the league with his best behind-the-camera work.

Music in Babe's and Ricky's is righteous and raucous and easy to come by, but the story of Mama Laura is more elusive. And that is the frustration.

The movie is intimate in its telling, sweeping in its issues and stumbles only occasionally.

The story goes slack onscreen, so much so that the movie's two-plus hours will seem an eternity.

It's massive, all the retaliation and the world saving stuff. And it's convoluted. Frankly no one should have to think that hard to keep up with the Joes.

Good stuff comes when bad stuff happens; that's when some of the movie animation prowess kicks into high gear. But too many of the "solutions" the guys concoct are so impossibly complex or just downright ridiculous — puppetry comes to mind — that like the continents, it's a little too easy to drift away.

With so many twists, the movie feels like it's trying too hard. Some moments are cleverly constructed; and others seem as if the filmmakers have left themselves no plausible escape.

The war crimes and romance stories theoretically run on parallel tracks, but the overall pacing is ragged and the dialogue frequently out of step with the characters we've met.

It is a rare thing to witness the creative process. But in the excellent new documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, filmmaker Ben Shapiro gives us fly-on-the-wall access over a 10-year period to an acclaimed artist as he envisions, designs and executes his surreal commentary on small-town American life in the form of an epic photo installation, "Beneath the Roses."

Barsky does a good job of taking all the complexity of such a major personality and the times in which he flourished and boiling it down to the essentials.

The new thriller from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a bizarrely perverse, beautifully rendered mystery that you may or may not care to solve.

Beautifully envisioned, badly constructed, the only truly terrifying things in the new horror movie Mama are the fake tattoos, short black hair and black T-shirts meant to turn "Zero Dark Thirty" star Jessica Chastain into a guitar-shredding, punk rocker chick.

The film, which came out in 1970 after a censorship battle with the Franco regime, catches — and releases — all the tension of shifting sexual mores. You can almost sense the director's pleasure in taking apart the duplicities of a patriarchal Spanish society. [21 Feb. 2013]