Lisa Schwarzbaum

One of the great virtues of Disney's most elegant animated ''classic'' in years is how blessedly sermon-free this zippy, dignified retelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs' ripping 1914 yarn is.

Surges with an energy and visual verve that improve the play and enhance the themes of dramatist Peter Morgan's script.

The personalities in this well-drawn family combine to produce subtle new flavors — and in the end, no one is spiced as you’d imagined they’d be.

With exemplary use of archival footage, director Asif Kapadia expertly contrasts episodes of adrenaline-rush speed with moments of reflective slow motion to capture the addictive thrill and danger of the sport, as well as the personal values of the humble, spiritual sportsman.

The audience for this grimly disquieting film is, or ought to be, self-selecting.

Monsters, Inc. has got that swing, that zippity, multilevel awareness of kids'-eye sensibilities and adult-pitched humor.

The Sessions is first and foremost about Hawkes' virtuoso performance, one of those "My Left Foot"-y transformations that make audiences verklemmt and generate awards talk.

Luc Jacquet's exquisitely shot eye-of-God study of a year in the lives of these distinctive birds is a nature film built with a feel for the epic and a love of operatic narrative.

For kids, blessedly unironic by nature until wised up by nurture, the movie is just shiny, funny, and filled with songs.

Great, restrained performances of Beatty and Schreiber, delicately framed by the filmmaker's taste for visual compositions.

The charm and art of De Felitta's gentle domestic sketch expand far beyond biographical borders.

Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long.

Rees presents this vivid, hidden culture with raw honesty.

A strange history lesson that leaves us more overlectured than properly overwhelmed.

Slow -- sometimes maddeningly, soporifically so.

There are moments in Baran as wholesomely heart-tugging as any involving Charlie Chaplin and a blind girl, but the film is saved from aren't-kids-cute sentimentality by a warmth that isn't faked and a stately sense of composition.

It's a good bet the average American moviegoer, however familiar with the rhythms of cinematic global culture, has never experienced such a handsomely self contained world.

With its warring factions, citizen uprisings, guerrilla insurgencies, political intrigue, bloody warfare, family tensions, and homoerotic subtext, Coriolanus is one of the year's best political thrillers.

Doug Pray's cool documentary about 85-year-old Dr. Dorian Paskowitz, his wife, and their eight sons and one daughter is about surfing insofar as surfing is the family's shared passion.

The film is almost deliriously stylish, which helps mask the silliness. But the bellowing music, by John Adams, is infuriatingly intrusive -- which undoes the visual good.

This patient, righteous documentary by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns recounts the story of justice undone (a serial rapist confessed) with extensive interviews, a thorough use of archival footage, and a less-than felicitous use of ominous-rumble music that unnecessarily insists, Isn't this an outrage?

The result is an engrossing chronicle of creative people under pressure, a movie about the madness of opera for which no knowledge of opera is required for full enjoyment.

Kinsey is patient and educational and never (darn it) rude or shocking.

Greggory anchors Gabrielle in manly bewilderment and rage, while Huppert claws the title character's way to self-awareness.

There's a bravura recklessness to Beautiful People that perfectly fits its subject.

A movie of uncommon sweetness and delight.

This is a movie about actors acting; who cares why Juliette was in the pen?

In the heaving cross-century swirl of the climax, ''Weight'' makes its point: Jealousy is timeless; Hurley is not.

Reprise is kissed with the breath of French New Wave sensibility, sweet with verve and a love of forward movement. The mood of joy in the midst of youthful pain is enhanced by the freshness of the first-time lead actors.

Tsai builds this shimmering story with deft, deadpan wit and a warm, understated love of the absurd, both in life and afterlife.

The wry filmmaker has created an urbane society of family and friends as ridiculously pretentious and hypocritical as they are cultured, accomplished, and posh.

The movie is a morals-free procession of bang bang bang! and blood blood blood!, and men slamming each other with blunt objects and slicing each other with blades.

Among Gosling's many star-making qualities is his nuanced mastery, since "The Believer," of a facial expression of infinitely adaptable, imperturbable, sustained calm that can read as chilling or ardent, hard or soft, as the role demands.

Gravity-defying kung fu choreography.

The simplicity and poignancy of the choices — riding a bus, swinging on a swing — and the great variety of interviewees result in a film of nonsticky freshness, as well as unforced profundity.

This audaciously issues-loaded indie drama works, improbably and entirely, on account of the marvelous, often familiar-looking, rarely starring character actor Richard Jenkins and his perfect performance as a stodgy, widowed economics professor.

So much goes down on Nick and Norah's one enchanted evening that the best advice is to enjoy the ride -- the actual ride -- around this vibrant new New York.

Anxiety-provoking documentary.

Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie from the filmmaker (''Harvard '66'') who, in his body of work, indulges his fantasies as fetishistically as other men finger their cigars.

A Lebanese variation on sweetly soapy dramas about Women Who Bond With Wet Hair.

The dramatic power, though, comes entirely from the eloquence of old people, shot in medium close-up, barely moving as they remember things.

Affliction -- a beautiful bummer, a magnificent feel-bad movie -- is American filmmaking of a most rewarding order.

Lee's bigger theme isn't God or survival, but the awesome adventure of making the imaginary visible, the adventure of making movies.

Loosely based on real events, this harrowing, superbly made drama by fast-rising filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo (I'm Gonna Explode) is Mexico's 2012 submission for Best Foreign Language Film - rightfully so.

Another must-see marvel of horror, comedy, and impeccable filmmaking by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho.

The yarn is too irresistible: We're fed plenty of sugar in this authorized fairy tale, but are left hungry for beef.

Unbearable were Witherspoon not such a genuinely attractive performer.

It's all very French, very intricate, and -- this is Rivette's magic -- seemingly as light as air.

Jennifer Baichwal's gorgeous documentary Manufactured Landscapes amplifies the powerful work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of terrain transformed by civilization into rivers and tides of industrial ugliness.

Smith profiles five extraordinary American homes, and because the owners seem fully aware of the uses and abuses of fame, it's a pleasure to enjoy their eccentricities.

Del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers.

Excels at creating a keen, creepy sense of a civilization stopped dead in its tracks -- vaporized, almost, except for those disemboweled bodies left still undisposed.

Superb psychological thriller.

This stunning movie -- one of the very best of the year -- makes a much read American classic feel new and freshly devastating.

A visual and aural overload that ultimately tires rather than conveys a feeling of f—-d up-ness.

Propelled by ferocious sex, nasty violence, and coy interludes of traditional Turkish love songs.

British filmmaker Andrew Haigh's background in editing (from Gladiator to Mister Lonely) is evident in the casual beauty of moments that only appear "found," giving Weekend an engrossing documentary feel.

Jaoui handles her crowd of vivid characters so naturally, and shoots her scenes so unobtrusively, that the diagrammatic cleverness of the plot never overwhelms the intelligence of the observations.

Kicky, elaborately constructed fantasy.

In Please Give, the sharp-eyed filmmaker sends her vibrant representative out into the world to explore what it means for a woman to be lucky and still feel itchy. The report has the resonant ring of truth.

Art history majors may write in with corrections. Meanwhile, I'm declaring that the masterly, big-canvas biographical drama Chi-hwa-seon: Painted Fire is about the Jackson Pollock of 19th-century Korea.

What matters now, what Lumumba conveys, is the urgent chaos of revolution.

The script is a steady accretion of small stabs to the heart, propelling the gorgeous performances of Berling, Regnier, and especially the 76-year-old French cinema veteran Bouquet, whose every faint smile is killing.

Jammed with banner-ready political rhetoric, and the relentlessness of the lectures is wearying. The plot, on the other hand, is a standard contraption built on enduring urban anxieties and involving a nasty hotel-room trade.

Reflect the robust status of Yiddish theater in the early 20th century, and its post-Holocaust decline.

Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in "About Schmidt" would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain.

Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.

Talented filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers), armed with an outstanding compositional sense, keeps control over the storms of melodrama that swirl in this rich weepie.

Chaos reigns for much of The Dark Knight Rises, often in big, beautiful, IMAX-size scenes that only Nolan could have conceived. Yet when the apocalyptic dust literally settles on this concluding chapter, the character who lingers longest in memory is an average Gotham City cop named John Blake, wonderfully played with human-scale clarity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.

The nonprofessional cast of Bahman Ghobadi's remarkable, slow, rough edged feature reveals a simple, piercing grimness and determination framed by the gray, icy landscape of Iranian Kurdistan.

Oldboy caused a love-it-or-hate-it stir at Cannes last year, and how could it not: It's an onslaught made to cause a sensation. Consider me simultaneously jolted and depressed.

But the story is, still and all, only a pause, deferring an intensely anticipated conclusion. And it's in that exquisite place of action and waiting that this elegantly balanced production emerges as a model adaptation.

Theatrically ambitious, musically busy, and in the end cinematically inert - clearly reflects the authorship of myth-loving director Julie Taymor.

Suicidal depression has rarely looked so amusing.

But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons ("The Silence of the Lambs") in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own -- a fluid, feminine, African-American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps.

Up and Down captures Prague life with a fervor that's comical but a longing that's serious; no one is easy to pigeonhole.

Breillat, the flamethrower who made "Romance" and "Fat Girl," artfully twists period-piece drama to suit her provocative modern notions about sex, gender roles, and power.

Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.

The three kindergarteners make up for their lack of irony with laser-power eyes, radical post-post-postfeminist blithe confidence, and some of the coolest retro-futuristic animation style this side of Gerald McBoing-Boing.

Directed, with overfondness for the goofy ways of guys, by Ted Demme and written, with overfondness for the sound of guys pontificating about nothing, by Scott Rosenberg.

Another grotty drama about junkie love? Well, yes...I make an exception for Jesus' Son.

Anderson's big, showy flower of a movie unfurls brilliantly, each plot petal a thing of exquisite design. Then it ripens. Then it disintegrates, leaving a mess of color and a faint whiff of rot.

The Island begins with a whimper of interest as a cool-hued, cautionary exploration of the ethics of cloning, and ends, in a hail of product placement, with a dumb bang.

The storytelling may be ordinary, but the cast is one of those all-star reunions.

Ricardo Darín, wearing a mild-mannered expression of emotional remove, plays the unnamed antihero, obsessed with imagining the perfect robbery. The ''aura'' is the clarity with which he sees -- or imagines he sees -- the world in moments preceding an epileptic attack.

There are many places a visitor may go astray in 2046 -- places where the filmmaker appears to be a bit at loose ends too. Still, Wong's invitation -- ''Let's get lost'' -- is irresistible.

When it's dull, which it is too often for a kidnap caper, this movie is about a woman chirping ''notice anything new about my outfit?'' to a man whose idea of style is a jacket not crusted in human blood.

A rich, dark, pulpy mess of entanglements that fulfills all the requirements of the genre, and is told with an ease and gusto that make the pulp tasty.

Exquisitely structured, pitiless study of a middle-aged man trapped in a stagnant emotional weather pattern.

Out of a harrowing story set in a foreign thicket, Herzog has found American beauty.

A moderately adorable, musically wacky, ecologically activist CG family comedy.

A mesmerizing work of disturbing power and unease.

Ballard, working from a screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, lets the melancholy hang in the air with a few too many poetic shots of the lonely girl. But as Thomas teaches Amy how to spread her wings, any lacy sentimentality (as well as the jarring tree-hugger subplot about meanie land developers) falls away, revealing the soaring beauty of the flying sequences.

A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary.

Pfeiffer reveals an emotional nakedness that's almost shocking. Never has she exposed so much and done it so simply. Who knew she could be this good?

Also starring: the landscape, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Lu Yue. The look is rosily glamorous in sophisticated Shanghai, and mistily poetic on the quiet island to which the mobster and his party escape.