Betsy Sharkey

Polite society is so often impolite it's a wonder it still retains rights to the description. Vacation retreats are not so much for relaxing as for allowing wealthy clans to...

"Venus in Fur," a whip-smart dissection of gender politics via some teasing S&M, is arch. So arch in fact that it is surprising it's a Roman Polanski film. The director...

In Mike Cahill movies, bad things happen to good people, and other good people are guilt-ridden as a result. But the human connections and the spare sci-fi logic that characterized...

"The Immigrant," starring Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner, is one of those prickly period pieces about hard times that gets under your skin and leaves you unsettled long...

If, like me, you were hoping that "God's Pocket," starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final films, would feature yet another of the actor's distinctive turns,...

Perhaps at some point it will again be possible to write the name Woody Allen and go from there. But after a year marked by artistic highs and controversial lows...

"Blue Ruin" is a moody, stripped-down action thriller with the most unlikely vigilante one could imagine. Dwight (Macon Blair) is no buffed-up hero, but a soft and skittish loner who...

"Ernest & Celestine," the charming French-Belgium, Oscar-nominated animated film, is about a bear and a mouse whose artistic tendencies are forever getting them into trouble. Marked as outsiders by their...