Lisa Schwarzbaum

Don't tell Walt Disney, but Hayao Miyazaki really holds the keys to the magic kingdom.

The nervy style of this newfangled Western, with its eerie, insinuating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is so effective that long after Pitt and Affleck have left the screen, emotional disturbance lingers like gun smoke.

Damien Chazelle's extraordinary black-and-white retro dream of a feature debut.

Without ever dipping into indignity among wet, half-naked men, Shower sparkles with joy.

Beautiful, compassionate, articulate domestic drama.

Filmmaker Yung Chang finds a sad and beautiful way to glimpse the big picture of dislocation through an exquisitely poised small study.

It's an intoxicating feeling when a movie excites and enlivens us like this -- and there's a particular giddiness to be had in thinking about what movies can (but don't often) do for one's soul after imbibing such a fine vintage.

This beautiful, terrible story is not easily forgotten.

Soaring and romantic, wild and serene, feminist and gutsy, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the best movies of the year.

Unfolds with a simplicity that's as breathtaking as its inevitability is harrowing.

Flight opens with one of the most harrowing in-flight-disaster depictions of all time.

So superb, so graceful, so strong -- another beauty in this year of good documentaries -- that I do believe it will influence career choices, sending inspired viewers to study pedagogy, or cinematography.

Yet another outstanding little movie in the exciting Romanian New Wave.

It's a great, IQ-flattering entertainment both wonderful and wise.

The third starring the totally captivating cool cucumber Daniel Craig as Agent 007 - is both an elegy and a mission statement. It's also a great, long-lasting jolt of pleasure.

Pay attention to the enhanced detail audible in a new six-track sound mix, which may be the most important cleaning job of all; silence and Jerry Goldsmith's score have never twined so hauntingly.

The ensemble cast shared the best-actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival -- and rightly so.

Gets weirder and meaner and darker and sadder as it progresses, which is amazing since it simultaneously remains funny and horrifying right up to the end.

Gruesome stuff — and yet Body Bags moves along with such jaunty, good bad taste that it’s hard not to smile.

The movie is enchanting.

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

This is essential viewing for understanding our world.

The filmmaking is as strong as the subject matter, with an elegant structure.

The stunning, must-see drama Crash is proof that words have not lost the ability to shock in our anesthetized society.

The result is an intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground.

It’s only when you’re in the grip of the climax that you realize how richly the filmmaker has painted a landscape that to other eyes might appear so parched.

The antidote to every square tough-guy caper you've ever seen, and the inspiration for many great ones. It is an existential imperative to seek out a showing and burn rubber to get there, preferably in an excellent car.

It's thrillingly original, lyrical, and wise, and the filmmaker conveys the mutable intensity of young love with the authoritative originality of an important filmmaker.

The Savages is terrific -- a movie of uncommon appreciation for the nature and nurture that go into making us who we are, a perfectly calibrated drama both compassionate and unsentimental.

A lovely, thoughtful, and yes, uplifting adventure.

Miller's theme is innocence, the loss of it, and the reclamation of equanimity in the face of that loss, and the music she makes is haunting.

The uncoagulated anguish of parents mourning the death of a child has rarely been more powerfully depicted than in the collected vignettes of grief, rage, and retribution that make up the riveting domestic drama In the Bedroom.

An exhilarating puzzle, one of the grand cinematic eruptions of the year.

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 calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect.

With In Between Days, the filmmaker captures feminine melancholy with rare precision. Find this movie.

Vibrantly, intricately alive on its own terms. This is what magic the movies can conjure with an inspired fellowship in charge, and unlimited pots of gold.

In a class by itself.

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.

A witty, stylish, beautifully made charmer of a family picture.

An amazing thing -- a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing.

One of the year's most original and emotionally profound movies masquerades as the tiny story of a young couple who take a backpacking trip in the Caucasus Mountains the summer before their wedding.

This outstanding work — so meditative — is clearly an affirmation of life (and never more provocatively than in the film’s unusual coda, in which moviemaking itself becomes part of the discussion). It’s also so grounded in the real emotional scope of ordinary people that the magnitude of the subject is answered in the most mysteriously matter-of-fact way.

It took writer-director Samuel ''Shmulik'' Maoz nearly 30 years to make this disturbing, visceral, personal film.

(Denis's) visual style is hypnotic, rapturous, and she makes barren landscapes look gorgeous, hard men look vulnerable.

It's raunchy, outspoken -- and also a smart and agile dissection of art, fame, and the chutzpah of big-budget productions.

A riveting and unexpectedly inspiring essay on the peace that comes from shared physical and mental concentration.

Masterpiece of voyeurism.

Miller hit documentary gold when he met Levitch. But this marvelously structured, sensitively edited, deep and compassionate portrait (in atmospheric, made-for-Manhattan black and white) of one man hopscotching a fine line between verbal genius and psychological miswiring is Miller's own jewel, the work of a gifted filmmaker.

There's no denying that when it comes to communicating a certain delirious romanticism of character shaped by thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark, the artist who made this showpiece is a master.

Diva is based on one novel in a series about Gorodish and Alba by the pseudonymous ”Delacorta,” but the movie’s mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another.

A highly original Death in Venice-scented comedy drama written and directed with flair by British feature novice Richard Kwietniowski.

The superb screenplay won an award at Cannes this year for good reason.

The conclusion of Peter Jackson's masterwork is passionate and literate, detailed and expansive, and it's conceived with a risk-taking flair for old-fashioned movie magic at its most precious.

Brims with life and loveliness even as it meditates on the loss of childhood.

Dazzlingly beautiful, funny, and meaningful.

But it is the steady accretion of hundreds of small moments in this elegant, high-spirited, intensely satisfying production -- the director's third American movie, but the first to approach the dazzle of his Hong Kong stuff -- that, toted up, makes everything right about this des- perately welcome thriller.

Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention.

The movie is a rare uncensored postcard from a ruined place, a document at once depressing and hideously beautiful that sketches the real hardships of trampled people -- specifically women -- with authority and compelling simplicity.

Almereyda excises big chunks of plot to shape his vision, but retains Shakespeare's language and pays such rigorous attention to meaning and subtext that what's missing isn't missed.

Jaoui neatly, gently, firmly slips political commentary into Let It Rain's articulate mayhem.

More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present.

A marvel of warm collaboration and shared jokes about husbands and wives, shot both in dreamscape color and pristine black and white.

What matters is that Tiana triumphs as both a girl and a frog, that dreams are fulfilled, wrongs are righted, love prevails, and music unites not only a princess and a frog but also kids and grown-ups.

One of the wonders of the holiday season.

There's an adult life force in every frame of this luxuriously paced work, even in the sight of rain and a lady's stocking.

Loving, Playful, and spectacularly well made, Super 8 is easily the best summer movie of the year - of many years.

''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies.

There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness.

Footnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument.

It's also one of the great movies of the year - an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction.

Almodóvar's masterwork, is a spectacular synthesis of everything that has always interested him -- proud women, lovely boys, beautiful drag queens, grand movie stars, gorgeous frocks, wild wallpaper .

Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama.

If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this prize-winning honey.

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

The very opposite of a storybook romance, and also the very model of a great comedy for our values-driven time.

You could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo.

Bestows generous blessings on all that's good in Englishness, in moviedom, and, of course, in cheese.

No one charts the wilds of childhood more precisely than the Dardennes.

Beautifully led by birdlike Sylvie Testud as an ailing young woman in a wheelchair, every character (pilgrim and helper alike) exhibits a soul. And shaped with confident talent by the Austrian filmmaker, every serenely composed shot matters.

Stunning and compassionate period drama.

Hersonski quietly and insistently unravels reality from "reality"; her commitment to archival authenticity is its own tribute to those no longer able to testify.

Like everything else in this superb work of art, ''Shrinking Lover'' is exquisitely Almodóvarian. It's funny, tender, a little shocking, and it pays homage to what we know about movies: that they can move us beyond words.

This is one of the year's best. To paraphrase the Wild Thing named KW, I could eat it up, I love it so.

It took director-producer Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance When We Were Kings, his thrilling documentary about the legendary 1974 heavyweight-championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. But the lag time has only deepened the impact of this thrilling documentary: All sad thoughts of Ali as a wounded warrior fall away in the glow of seeing the champ at his best.

The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.

In this typically exquisite, nuanced, memory-infused work from master British filmmaker Terence Davies, we believe every minute of the torment of Hester (Rachel Weisz).

Facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, the older woman enrolls in a poetry class, desperate to find the words to describe beauty before language fails her. She does even better: She herself becomes a kind of poem about what it means to really see the world.

Circles the heart of noisy, modern Tehran with an informal, documentary-like freedom that is thrilling in its naturalism.

This enveloping dream of an epic narrative experiment comes from the great Chilean-born, France-based filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (Time Regained).

Mr. Lazarescu is that rich and riveting a film of universal small human moments and big-system failure.

The result: This great work of art has the potential to change the world.

The gorgeous music includes Ralph Vaughan Williams' wafting tone poem ''The Lark Ascending'' -- apt in describing an artist who might well be part bird.

Achieves its exquisite tension--deepening beautifully from a "Death in Venice" setup to an imaginative meditation, on art and life, of uncommon sensitivity.

Stunning, fully formed masterpiece.

The film, by seasoned cinematographer Dror Moreh, is a feat — of access and of passionate and appropriately unsettling political commentary.

These 173 minutes don't drag, they waltz.

Definition eludes the delicate pleasures of this marvelous, idiosyncratic movie collage.