Joe Neumaier

If you don’t love monkeys already — and really, we all should — then Monkey Kingdom will swing you in the right direction.

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.

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

The result is a stunningly nervy sequel that vaporizes any worries that Abrams’ terrific 2009 reboot was a fluke.

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

Most impressive of all, The Avengers makes superhero movies new again - a colossal task indeed.

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.

The battle it documents is both a cornerstone of the past and a reflection of ongoing struggles. DuVernay infuses Selma with that dichotomy, never forgetting how Selma, the place, was a pledge to march ahead.

Chandor (“All is Lost”) has made a movie that quietly but ferociously immerses us in a time and place, with atmosphere done in minimal yet evocative strokes.

A thrill ride with a brain.

The fear, desperation and hope of Time Out of Mind is painfully, hauntingly human.

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.

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.

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.

Zipper captures the erasing of one of New York’s most unique stamps by cartoon businesspeople with dollar signs for eyeballs.

When you get through it, though, you can’t help but feel uplifted by this tough-skinned movie that can stand with the best muscular wartime dramas in the American movie canon.

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 summer's best popcorn flick.

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.

This bold movie may sound like a stunt, but it’s so much more than that. Linklater is an effortless, genial auteur, and his passions are woven through “Dazed and Confused,” “School of Rock” and the “Before Sunrise” trilogy. Here, his mellow groove becomes an everyday rhythm.

As important and eye-opening a documentary as you’ll see this year, A Place at the Table makes it impossible to think of hunger as merely another symptom of a shredded social safety net.

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 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.

Chimpanzee lets everyone feel like a mini-Jane Goodall.

This amazingly beautiful, and amazingly frightening, documentary captures the immediacy of what climate change is doing to the Arctic landscape.

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.

If a documentary can be both alarming and oddly reassuring, it's the gripping splash of cold cinematic water Racing Extinction.

The story Stiller tells manages to float in a most peculiar, satisfying way.