Betsy Sharkey

The Purge: Anarchy is a good deal bloodier, but also — gulp — a good deal better than its predecessor. Make no mistake, a good "Purge" does not equal a good movie, but the post-apocalyptic thriller is slightly more interesting because it takes itself, and its menace, more seriously.

Since it's a comedy, much could be forgiven if the film was consistent in generating laughs, but the comedy is as erratic as the couple's sex life.

Joe Berlinger's densely detailed new documentary about the legendary Boston mobster is disturbing on so many levels it's hard not to wonder why Bulger was the only one on trial.

Land Ho! is full of surprises, rich in the way it noses around the rocky terrain of aging in an indifferent world through the engaging performances of its two stars.

An extraordinarily intimate portrait of a life unfolding and an exceptional, unconventional film.

It is a caustic, comic, cerebral romp for a long time before it hits you with its best shot — some Polanski-worthy darkness.

Though the movie wears its agenda on its sleeve, the music and the cast, many of them members of the real Les Muses, as Marion-Rivard was for a time, are simply so charming that it makes Gabrielle hard to resist.

There are some laughs and, at least on screen, more than a few tears. But it doesn't come together with the kind of satisfying punch a comedy should deliver.

[Bong Joon-ho] combines a great cast, a gripping idea and a gorgeously grimy retro aesthetic to keep this eerie examination of the train wreck of humanity racing along.

Let's say "Bayed," as in "being Bayed," is the core principle at work in the films. In general, being Bayed means being beaten, blasted, bashed, crushed, melted, morphed, reconstituted and remade over and over and over again.

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.