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.