Betsy Sharkey

Echoes of the hilarious ineptitude of Woody Allen's "Take the Money and Run" and the historic kookiness of "Forrest Gump" turn up throughout "The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the...

"Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter" is a moody comic allegory about desperation, disconnection and dreams that uses "Fargo," the Coen brothers classic, as a touchstone to examine modern life. The film...

The simplicity of an old-school Western with one good loner facing down a relentless outlaw can fool you into thinking these films are easy to make. From classics such as...

The intriguingly unorthodox "Timbuktu," one of five films vying for a foreign-language Oscar, is a provocative, sometimes satiric drama about the sort of Islamic extremists who make life, especially in...

A vampire is such a handy creature for filmmakers in search of a metaphor or two. Mortality is usually the first bite, and Ana Lily Amirpour's stunning first feature, "A...

Whatever you think you know about pelicans, "Pelican Dreams" will surprise you. I like that filmmaker Judy Irving names one of the stars Gigi, short for Golden Gate Bridge, which...

The excellent new drama "In Bloom," Georgia's 2013 Oscar entry in the foreign language category, has the heartbreak and hope of a country slipped inside a coming-of age-story of two...

Ambiguity is the intrigue in "The Two Faces of January," the new thriller starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac. Acclaimed writer Hossein Amini, making his feature directing debut,...

Sometimes the freshest face on the big screen is 80 and counting. Certainly that's true of "Elsa & Fred's" brightest star, Shirley MacLaine. One of the grandes dames of cinema,...

One thing director Peter Sattler gets right in the new film "Camp X-Ray" is the way life can entrap even without prison walls. Pvt. Cole, a young soldier played by...