Joe Neumaier

McQueen has made a film comparable to “Schindler’s List” — art that may be hard to watch, but which is an essential look at man’s inhumanity to man. It is wrenching, but 12 Years a Slave earns its tears in a way few films ever do.

Occasionally stumbles into charm but more often is just wayward and hazy. It makes you hungry for a real movie from writer-director Jonathan Levine.

A thrill ride with a brain.

A work deeper than its nickname, "The Facebook Movie," hints at - coils around your brain. Weeks after seeing it, moments from it will haunt you.

Small victories that turn into defeats, long walks to gain little ground, little wounds that get deeper every day - growing old is a war, and movies rarely go there. Michael Haneke's amazing, dignified Amour is the exception.

What finally sticks in the mind about "ZDT" is its precision. What the film says about getting information from terrorism suspects in an era of high-tech surveillance depends on your point of view. What is unquestionable is how powerful its full scope is.

Together and apart, Hatami and Maadi are magnetic. Hatami, a star in Iranian cinema, lets us see Simin's intelligence and defiant sense of self-worth often with nothing more than a gesture.

Rotates around a rusty little robotic hero who's built, as the movie is, with such emotion, brains and humor that whole universes exist in his whirring tones and binocular eyes.

Delpy and Hawke, who’ve invested this trilogy with the fine shadings of life lived, do extraordinary things with small moments.

Inside Out is the year’s best film so far. After you see it, you’ll say that’s a no-brainer.

Can’t-look-away stuff, though it’s tough to believe your eyes and ears.

While the vocal performances of Hanks, Allen and company make up a perfect ensemble, and its visual leaps astound, TS3's real power sneaks up on you.

The film is a mystery uncovered like a detective story, wrapped in a love letter.

Ida is photographed in gorgeous black-and-white cinematography. A deep focus allows every corner of the simple, serene compositions to be seen clearly. The economy of story and dialogue extends to the running time — at barely 90 minutes, the movie feels full, yet free of excess.

A fascinating and informative, if sometimes stodgy, documentary about the most secret wing of Israel's anti-espionage unit.

Ball knows one trick, and it's sure over.

Strap in, load up and hang on because Mad Max: Fury Road is a freaky, ballsy, phenomenal ride.

Amid all the hokey hill stuff, Lawrence's hard eyes and manner draw us in.

There’s a great fever-dream quality to David O. Russell’s American Hustle that instantly reels you in.

History has made his midair stroll meaningful, but the film shows how even then, everyone - from Petit to his accomplices to the cops who were waiting for him atop the North Tower - recognized the stunt's crazy poetry.

Intimate and intellectual, the film — with a title taken from J.D. Salinger — focuses on the type of person you pass on the street, see in a coffee shop or sit next to on the subway who makes you wonder what life he’s led. One full of melody and muse, it turns out.

One of the best movies of the year.

Falls short of being revelatory, yet has a mysterious, sturdy power that grows on you.

A kind of historical detective story made up of haunting montages, including a theater performance featuring a heartbroken musician that's absolutely chilling.

The result is a film almost too reliant on its players to push it through.

Ferguson doesn't aim to entertain; he wants answers, and talks to many of the enabling weasels.

Despite being about a royal family at a critical moment in history, The King's Speech doesn't shout about its many strengths. Rather, it urges you to lean in close, where its intelligence and heart come through loud and clear.

Like the last gift buried under singing Billy Bass fish, dancing Coke cans, joke books and mounds of wrapping paper, there's a glimmer of fun in Four Christmases that almost gets vacuumed up with the tinsel.

The history lesson in Steven Spielberg's austere, engrossing Lincoln is less about the revered President himself but his method for justice.

The irony is that Ebert famously lost his actual voice. Yet as the extraordinary documentary Life Itself shows, that couldn’t quiet one of America’s most beloved critics and cultural commentators.

This extraordinary hybrid of a movie lives and breathes the game, yet its achievement is bigger than that. There's a touch of old-fashioned romanticism here, but more crucially there's strategy going on inside Bennett Miller's movie that turns it into something cool and special.

Mary's search drives The Tillman Story, and throughout this taut, true epic, we see a smart, sometimes angry, always loving family find their destiny: to speak truth to power, to call wartime myths what they are and to show how the American character is not about blind obedience.

Capturing family on film — the real rhythms of family, with all the annoyances, awkwardness and affection — is tough. Tougher still is wrestling a story around the murky emotional waters of Midwestern relatives. Yet one needn’t be cut from that cloth to see the hilarious beauty, and the beautiful honesty, in Nebraska.

Sadly, the film gets mired in traditionalism, something the man himself always railed against. But worth a look for seeing intellectual bravery (still) at work.

Director Werner Herzog's latest cinematic mind trip blows you away with its beauty.

Quiet, soulful and wrenching.

Director John Scheinfeld's film, utilizing interviews with friends and collaborators, hits a high note on Nilsson's friendship with Ringo Starr and his fear of stage performance.

Argo is movie magic. Ben Affleck's third directorial outing, is an entertaining, real-life, race-the-clock thriller that nabs you at the start and never makes a wrong move.

This superb, cerebral film about unchecked belief is a fictionalized and cutting drama hinging on the origins of Scientology. Scratch around a bit, though, and its wider indictments become clear.

Trippy in the right way, and wholly enchanting.

This is crucial work, evidenced by a line on a wall of R.I.P. graffiti that reads simply, "I am next." This film of common folks fighting the seemingly inevitable is just as moving.

Winds up feeling like a form of emotional tourism. The images recall Terrence Malick, but the film fills "atmosphere" into dry narrative holes where a story should reside.

Like a more personal, less pretentious version of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel," this spiraling dissection of circumstance, choice and fate is more about thoroughness of vision than tricky storytelling.

Watch Mulligan's face as she goes from weary to awakened, and see it all come together.

Director Samuel Maoz's gripping you-are-there feel does for tanks what "Das Boot" did for submarines, and that chokehold only gets tighter as this taut drama about the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war goes on.

There’s visual poetry here and haunted performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi -- who plays two roles, and is especially gripping as Dalser’s grown son.

Twisted, tortured, terrifying - and terrific.

A quiet, oddly serene movie with a curious soul.

The always beguiling Radha Mitchell can’t save this stunted procedural-horror combo.

Like so much in this astounding, consistently beautiful and challenging movie, the answer depends on what you bring to it. Think of it as the Ultimate Anti-Summer-Blockbuster.

Even after experiencing the film, what they've gone through - and how they deal with it - deliberately remains a mystery.

High art swings sort of low in this watchable but thematically repetitive drama.

One of the most extraordinary films you’ll see this year.

Director Lee Chang-dong's soulful, affecting film is as quiet as a tomb and has a disturbing, critical underside that's hard to shake off.

Haneke's superb cast provide beautifully measured hints at the disconnect between the ribbon's symbolism and the entire town's unspoken atrocities.

Gordon-Levitt is flinty, and Willis, on his A-game, is fiery. Together, they take us on a helluva trip.

Payne's observational humor and attention to detail yield something emotionally epic. Everything from beachfront jogs to hospital confessions reveals layers of humanity and absurdity.

The film features plenty of elements that seem familiar from previous cinematic dystopian visions — class warfare, decrepit living, a feeling of terminal velocity — yet you can’t help but admire director Bong Joon-ho’s high-wire act.

This Arthur is missing a soul.

Wiseman films it all without comment, letting the rhythm of the place tell the story.

Gyllenhaal is charming and makes unexpected choices in her performance, but this is Bridges' show, and he's as Best Actor-worthy as he's ever been.

Talk about style over substance: The sheer volume of musical, comic-strip and video-game influences, riffs and licks in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" can get exhausting, but they also are what lift this romantic coming-of-age tale from this world to someplace totally ... else.

The poetry in The Place Beyond the Pines can be elusive, but also easy to get lost in.

The movie’s spell is solid, even if it doesn’t soar to the heights it could.

An extraordinary, must-see examination of what humans do to killer whales so that these amazing creatures can become one more entertainment.

If only this were a media-fueled tall tale and not one poor creature's lifelong nightmare.

Avatar clears the hurdle in terms of being optical candy. Its story, though, is pure cheese.

Drag Me to Hell is an eyeball-gouging lesson in how to make a genre flick and live to tell about it.

It shows that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. And how, in case we forget, every age can predict the next.

The final result somehow undersells a man whose life and death were watershed moments in the gay rights movement.

Watching Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko make their art, we’re reminded of how much life is inside even the most abstract of pieces.

There’s atmosphere here, but nothing else.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilize the footage Kim and Scott Roberts had taken throughout the disaster, showing how residents suffered, survived and came together to help when official assistance let them down.

Falarde, in adapting a play, has a sweet, humanistic approach reminiscent of Bill Forsyth's '80s dramedies that lets "Lazhar's" protagonist and his class shine.

Once Franco's on his own, everything is played across this terrific actor's deceptively goofy face.

Short Term 12 wraps up with one of the most touchingly memorable last moments of any film this year. Despite a title that’s hard to recall, this brief but resonant movie sticks with you.

A thoughtful drama about guys who have a moment in the big time before returning home to an odd reflected glory.

The new Star Trek is more than a coat of paint on a space-age wagon train. It's an exciting, stellar-yet-earthy blast that successfully blends the hip and the classic.

Aiming for lightness but landing with a thud, Frances Ha is a well-meaning blunder. Director Noah Baumbach’s ode to Brooklyn twentysomething life is a flibbertigibbet fable that, like a self-absorbed flirt you meet at a party, grates on the nerves despite being easy on the eyes.

An emotionally devastating drama that isn't for the squeamish.

The focus in James Ponsoldt’s affecting, intelligent drama is a pair of teenagers, and in them is so much complexity and heart that this casually paced gem feels rich in scope. They’re two of the most carefully created figures on screen this year, and yet their normalness takes us by surprise.

This brisk but full documentary about students at a Bronx high school taking a class that promotes literacy and poetry slams is, like its subjects, multifaceted, sometimes sad but ultimately inspiring.

Director Joe Berlinger mixes archival footage, concert scenes, interviews and present-day reunions to meld a harmonious, fair-minded, energetic and enlightening portrait of one masterpiece's moment in time.

Film enthusiasts especially will appreciate this wonky but fascinating documentary about the process of making movies.

The result is a dull, high-minded soap opera.

Michael Starrbury’s astute script draws us in slowly, depicting the realities of Mister and Pete’s lives in progressive reveals.

Has moments of honesty, but more often the barren landscape - both outside and inside - drains the emotions out of the film.

After a summer of robots, mutants and explosions, the beautifully honest, grownup Love is Strange is a treat.

The most gripping based-on-fact film so far this year.

Snitch is like watching an elephant on ice: inelegant, but you admire the effort.

Upstream Color is weird, but it’s worth the time.

Acclaimed director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's meditative, at times maddening expression of human mystery and barren landscapes is gorgeous to look at, intriguing to think about and, at times, hard to sit through.

This dramatic thriller finds a spot somewhere between your brain and your stomach, and drills in.

Halfway into Blue Valentine, a work so beautifully acted and emotionally honest it is my choice for best movie of the year, there's an amazing flashback scene you hope never ends.

It’s one of the most vibrant, sly romantic comedies this year.

A pensive and searching drama that explores how deep into the national psyche these murders in the Katyn forest went.

The bad news about Admission is that this thin envelope of a comedy checks all the boxes for being a phoned-in, phony, padded rom-com.

Rare is the drama that plumbs the quirky, unsettling depths of human nature like Foxcatcher. Simultaneously understated and grippingly edgy, this is an arresting examination of naivete, mismatched worlds and old-fashioned American oddness.