"Don't tell, show" has been the writer's imperative for generations; Coppola takes that edict to its most visual and satisfying extremes.

Kato's often the best part of the movie. Britt calls him a "human Swiss army knife," and he's right; Kato is not a sidekick, but a fully formed hero who's full of surprises.

A more daring script might have found ways to tell the stories in parallel, doling out just enough information to keep viewers involved. But, as it is, The Debt grasps the viewer pretty firmly, delivering thrills without trivializing the moral quandaries that set it in motion.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance, who with Blue Valentine makes an astonishing debut.

Even in an increasingly virtual world, the filmmakers suggest, keeping it real still matters.

Sometimes a movie makes a point that's been made before, but makes it so beautifully and so quietly that it feels like you're discovering it for the first time. Hideaway does that, with the obliqueness of an off-hand comment. The glancing touch makes it all the more hard-hitting.

In addition to all the rollicking, ribald humor, Tamara Drewe also has a couple of flashes of darkly comic violence. In a literary sense, it's poetic justice, really. Punishment meted out for bad behavior.

The kind of taut, serious adult drama Hollywood rarely produces anymore. Quality-starved audiences should flock to it, if only to ensure that more of them get made.

From the story itself to the way it's told, Unstoppable is a hymn to stylish, unpretentious competence.

Feels retro in all the right ways; it's a bump-in-the-night tale that, if not for the occasional glimpse of a cellphone or reference to Adderall, could have been told decades ago.

At its heart, it's about the communities we forge - real and imagined - to save our own lives.

A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.

True Grit has sweep and scope and entertainment value to burn, but it's Mattie who invests even the grandest aesthetic elements with meaning.

It's enough to make you laugh if you didn't feel like crying.

Another Year allows viewers to occupy both psychic spaces, nesting into the warm comforts of a long-lived-in home and then, on a dime, seeing it through the searching eyes of the marginalized figures that, over the course of 11 films, Leigh has so often championed.

The final, deeply satisfying conclusion to the trilogy of Swedish thrillers based on Stieg Larsson's bestselling novels.

Client 9 doesn't make any excuses for Spitzer, who is interviewed extensively in the film and who wisely insists that he alone is responsible for his fate.

If Richard J. Lewis's film can't re-create the novel's complex stew of grievances, dirty jokes and misremembered anecdotes, it's still a warm tribute.

What on the surface seems to possess all the melodrama and photogenic suffering of a banal prime-time weepie instead becomes a lucid, tough, deeply sensitive examination of emotional fortitude.

Spend some time there, thanks to the documentary Waste Land, and you start to get the sense that, amid the trash, something really is blooming.

Biutiful soars to its highest points once it shifts its focus away from death to ask us how we are choosing to live our lives.

A funny, affecting movie about growing up in the shadow of a formidable mom.

Any film that dares to cast the bat-chewing heavy-metal legend as a gentle, ceramic reindeer named Fawn is okay in my Bard book.

The weakest link in Unknown - okay, other than the utter preposterousness of its entire premise - is Jones, who as a modern-day version of Hitch's ice queens can't hold her own with the likes of Kim Novak, Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint.

Depp possesses one of the finest speaking voices in the business - a nimble, mellifluous instrument that can go from sexy growl to fey warble in no seconds flat.

As if love triangles aren't complicated enough, the bittersweet Peruvian film Undertow offers a couple of twists on the archetype.

The animal's striking resemblance to a human is part of what makes Nicolas Philibert's documentary Nenette so evocative.

This meditation on violence explores the toxic knock-on effect of powerlessness and overcompensation, delivering a potent essay on the roots of society's most primal evils.

It delivers the most entertaining "Fast and Furious" adventure while also getting 2011's summer movie season off on the right lead foot.

A taut, mostly well-crafted race against the clock that combines the time-loop conceit of "Groundhog Day" and the postwar paranoia of "The Manchurian Candidate."

This is a movie that imbues even the hoariest quest-peril-life lesson tropes of family animated films and imbues them with new life and rhythm.

Ultimately, this is a universal story about how these wild mothers, like their human counterparts, sacrifice again and again - all to make sure their children are happy, healthy and well fed.

One of the reasons Haywire is such a pleasure to watch is that its director, Steven Soderbergh, doesn't overplay the film's hear-me-roar subversions.

On Stranger Tides feels as fresh and bracingly exhilarating as the day Jack Sparrow first swashed his buckle.

The result is a movie that may be geared to a nature film fan base but will also appeal to admirers of good storytelling.

With its heartening final note of hope and renewal, Deathly Hallows -- Part 2 provides an altogether fitting finale to a series that has prized the fans above all.

Captain America might hold the most promise, not just of saving the world, but of saving comic book movies from themselves.

First Class happily delivers on the escapism and rich narrative texture the best of its predecessors have promised.

A pleasantly seedy crime thriller.

A majestic musical score by the great composer John Powell somehow makes everything old feel fresh and wondrous again.

Rolls straight over silly, smashing through stupid without stopping and then barreling into a kind of insane comic brilliance without so much as a speed bump to slow it down.

Wiig has the natural beauty and self-deprecating expressiveness it takes to be a star comedienne; she spends much of Bridesmaids looking like a slightly girlier version of Lucinda Williams.

A memorable return to the Hundred Acre Wood and a lively, interactive adventure that should delight everyone from wide-eyed preschoolers to nostalgic grandparents.

It stands apart from the rehash pack by accomplishing something rival remakes rarely do: It improves on the premise it has been handed, producing a modernized version of a decades-old story that's superior to its predecessor in virtually every aspect.

The catharsis Warrior offers in the end is hard won, and it will take a steely viewer not to find it gratifying, however over-the-top it may be.

A worthy addition to the Christmas movie canon. It's funny and good-looking, with an impeccable voice cast of U.K. actors. It's also unexpectedly fresh, despite the familiar-sounding premise.

For a kids' movie, the humor, at times, strays a bit too far into grown-up territory.

Mortensen has called A Dangerous Method Cronenberg's "Merchant-Ivory picture," but it just as often resembles a Woody Allen movie - literate, sophisticated and deeply concerned with sex and manners. (It's even mordantly funny, as an early scene at the Freud family dinner table attests.)

Strangely, Scorsese's very passion for the subject matter turns out to be both a blessing and a curse for Hugo.

Spielberg has created an appropriate showcase for the magnificent creature that emerges, one that recalls the great movie horses of yore in a story guaranteed to pluck, grab and wring viewers' hearts, but thankfully not break them.

Provides a welcome seasonal dash of wholesomeness and humor.

Interspersing "real" people with professional actors, Linklater creates a vivid, gossipy Greek chorus that serves as a kind of collective unreliable narrator -- an altogether appropriate stance given the moral gray zone the sweetly confounding Bernie inhabits.

What does The Future hold? Wonders, each of them weirder and more unnerving than the last.

The director took great efforts to be true to Chinese martial arts, but he did so without sacrificing his own distinctive vision.

As von Trier's ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, Melancholia is a broodingly downbeat self-portrait but also the inspiring work of an artist of seemingly boundless imaginative power.

Sheer pleasure to watch, full of rich visuals and felicitous comic turns.

A pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps.

As a stylistic and narrative throwback, Alfredson's adamantly un-thrilling procedural reminds viewers of an era when viewers allowed themselves to be entertained by a good yarn about a few colorful or at least colorlessly compelling characters.

Like the man himself, Albert Nobbs is a sweet, sad, sensitive little film, a haunting reminder that each of us, on some level, is impersonating someone.

Life of Pi is spellbinding while it lasts. Lee's film can be appreciated as many things -- a post-Darwinian meditation on coexistence as the key to survival, a reflection on the spiritual nature of suffering and transcendence, a beguiling bait-and-switch on the vagaries of belief itself.

The most compelling thing about Winter in Wartime, the Netherlands' official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, is not the story. And the story is pretty darn compelling.

It's a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small.

An invigorating blast of cinematic adrenaline.

With The Bourne Legacy, Gilroy has brought characteristic taste and skill to a nearly impossible task: embracing the past without completely erasing it, thereby creating an invitingly complicated and open-ended future.

Like the best ad man, he makes his point by making us laugh.

From the first smoky notes of a theme song sung by Adele, it's clear that Skyfall will be both classic and of-the-moment.

Crystal, 65, and Goodman, 61, are a long time out of college, but they somehow manage to carry off the callowness of youth.

Thoughts become things. That's the message of Rise of the Guardians, a charming if slightly dark and cobwebbed animated feature about how believing in something makes it real, or real enough.

Upon leaving the theater, a girl of about 6 turned to her grandmother and said dreamily, "That.Was.The.Best.Movie.Ever." And that sums up why this little movie is so very big.

Like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday before him, Tatum is sublime at playing dumb (as a dim pretty boy, he seems to be channeling Brad Pitt in "Burn After Reading"), just as Hill shrewdly deploys his body mass for maximum physical comedy (even slimmed down, with an Oscar nomination under that tightened belt, he carries himself with a fat man's comically elephantine grace).

The Avengers has been executed with all the reverence the super-fans demand, as well as the winking, self-referential humor that has made it palatable for filmgoers disinclined to take a bunch of grown men dressed in spangles and spandex so very seriously.

Moonrise Kingdom is already shaping up to be this summer's art house sleeper hit, and no wonder: It traffics in the very kind of escapist spectacle -- in this case of a thoughtfully composed world brimming with whimsy, enchantment and visual brio -- that the season was made for.

The fourth Ice Age freshens up the 10-year-old franchise by shunning easy ­pop-culture jokes and embracing its weird side.

An absorbing, agonizing documentary about ambition, lust and anthropomorphism at their most heedless, records suffering and manipulation so extreme that description can barely do them justice.

The lines are drawn early on in "Beats," which is surprisingly tense and combative given the overwhelmingly positive and playful music in the band's catalogue. But that makes what could have been a sappy, fanboy loveletter a compelling look at the group's inner workings.

Bad role models sometimes make the most interesting movie characters. The ill-mannered, unkempt, foulmouthed and hot-tempered title character of Hesher is just such a walking contradiction.

With such classics as "El Norte" and, more recently, "Sin Nombre" and "Under the Same Moon" having addressed the subject matter already and so well, viewers might be forgiven for asking just how many immigration movies we need. As A Better Life proves, as many as there are stories to tell.

What is their passion for? Not newspapers, or even a single newspaper, per se, but for journalism itself, the practice of which is nowhere stronger than at the Times. That, at least, is how Page One argues it. It's a compelling argument.

It isn't as sad a movie as "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," another behind-the-mask documentary. It's funnier. But it's just as illuminating.

Tender, observant coming-of-age comedy.

Elizabeth Olsen delivers an utterly transfixing turn as the title character of this chilling psychological thriller.

After all, Like Crazy seems to say, haven't we all been there? Didn't it hurt? And wasn't it grand?

A movingly told tale of tragedy and its consequences, not just for the players in the original tragedy but also for those touched by their actions, in an ever-widening circle of aftershocks.

The real value of poetry - of the contest itself - is not revealed until the closing credits, when we see the impressive list of colleges that the movie's four subjects have gone on to.

A colorfully macabre stop-motion animation comedy that embraces the sociopolitical allegories of George A. Romero's zombie pictures and reworks them into a feature-length episode of "Scooby-Doo."

There's a back story to this, and it's actually sort of witty.

Majewski's film is a captivating exercise that will interest fans of art, not to mention arthouse cinema. But the movie's lasting impression is about more than novelty. It's a portrait of suffering and subjugation that urges viewers to stop what they're doing and take notice of the world around them.

The second part of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy goes a long way — and at 2 1/2 hours, I do mean long — toward righting the wrongs of the first movie, which was even longer.

The movie is called Love Crime. But its hidden message has more to do with business than with passion. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially one in a power suit, who knows how to work a room.

Some movies prove so eye-opening that a viewer may feel the urge to recount the story, start to finish, to friends and acquaintances. Crime After Crime is that kind of film.

Kristin Canty's surprisingly engrossing documentary, a worthy addition to the growing annals of movies and books advocating for sustainable farming methods.

The gritty film is realistically inspiring and, thankfully, not overly dramatized. While the interrupters succeed on many levels, a pervasive sadness remains.

The casting coup here is Benedict Cumberbatch, who exudes steely resolve and silken savagery as a villain on the cusp of becoming a legendary nemesis.

This, finally, is the Dredd movie comic book readers have been anticipating.

Lynne Ramsay's thoughtful, unnerving film works its strange power over viewers who are likely to find themselves as compelled as repelled by its fatally flawed key players.

The setting and fatalistic musings of The Grey invite comparison to Sean Penn's stirring 2007 ad­ven­ture "Into the Wild"; in its more metaphysical moments, told in impressionistic flashbacks, it recalls last year's "The Tree of Life."

It's uncompromisingly steamy, in a way that seems designed to make people who are uncomfortable with a physical relationship between two men even more uncomfortable.

Funny, moving, hip and transcendent all at the same time, The Way is both deeply thoughtful and enormous fun to watch.