Jack Mathews

Passes like an evening spent with friends.

School of Rock may be to Black what "The Nutty Professor" was to Jerry Lewis, or "Groundhog Day" was to Bill Murray - that rare, perfectly tailored opportunity to play against one's broadest impulses. Not to neutralize them, necessarily, but to tame them and turn them into something very human and charming.

Tony Gilroy, co-author of the superb Jason Bourne film trilogy, makes a stunning directorial debut with Michael Clayton, an out-of-courtroom drama that helps solidify George Clooney's acting bona fides.

Kempner demonstrates how the star's success and dignified bearing inspired a generation of Jews to fight through the ethnic barriers in all fields.

Though made 31 years after D-Day, the dramatic scenes have the period look of a '40s movie, which links them perfectly with the stunning archival footage.

There is a little of all of us in their awkwardness, fears and neuroses, and we root for their success in the mundane as if they were ascending Everest. Elling is still in the running for 2002's most uplifting movie.

A love story told from the point of impact, at the heart, and no conventional resolution could be more profound.

The stories are eye-opening and heartwarming at the same time, but you'll be moved less by empathy for the characters than by the summoning of your own emotional memories. This movie is personal.

A movie-movie about the movies.

Parents, who are more apt to be bored by the simple story line, are going to be amazed nevertheless by the smooth, convincing animation that lends Stuart his lifelike physicality and expressive facial gestures.

What we need to remember, what Black Hawk Down reminds us, is that there are no safe missions when you're chasing bad guys. Especially when you have to chase them down a hole.

Amy Berg's riveting documentary, tracks O'Grady's predatory trail from San Andreas, Calif., to Ireland, where he is now living on a church pension that was apparently meant to buy his silence.

Moore's most assured, least antagonistic and potentially most important film.

A smartly written, confidently directed film that delivers big laughs while developing two of the year's most earnest characters and some of its most rewarding sentiments.

The black-and-white animation won't dazzle your eyes, but everything else about Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's adaptation of Satrapi's graphic comic book series Persepolis will hold you in its thrall.

Hilariously inventive Hollywood satire.

A brilliantly spare and poignant tragicomedy that projects such savage self-criticism of China's "economic miracle" that the film has been banned at home.

A hive of broad, brilliant performances.

As the relationship between the two British schoolteachers begins (quietly), builds (deceptively) and dissolves (spectacularly), Dench and Blanchett give a master class in acting. Pick your own sports metaphor, but watching them go at each other is the match of the year.

It's more fun than a turkey shoot. It's also one of the most entertaining riffs on American culture in years.

A sweetly hilarious romantic comedy about a soccer fan whose favorite pro team's unexpected success threatens to push him over the edge.

Peter O'Toole, looking frail beyond his 74 years, gives what may be his farewell performance as a leading movie actor in Roger Michell's Venus. It's one for the books - and maybe the Oscars, too.

It is a devastating indictment of the ruling class of Money, Miss.

The actors are solid at every position, but Broderick, who seems to get better with each performance, is especially good at playing the impulsively self-destructive yet sympathetic loser.

The face-to-face interviews laced throughout the movie are fascinating and often laugh-out-loud funny. Ask people to talk dirty and you don't know what they'll say.

In some ways, The Queen is a comedy of manners - bad, good and archaic. The formal bowing and scraping surrounding Her Majesty is as hilarious as it is (apparently) accurate.

The Manhattan movie of the year, Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend, offers a stunning glimpse into how the city - as we know it today - might look in 2012 if it were abandoned in 2009.

Strong stuff, compelling drama.