The Adventures of Tintin The 3-D animation unleashes the Rube Goldberg slapstick poet in Steven Spielberg, who takes the Indiana Jones template to dazzlingly kinetic new heights. My face literally hurt from the inability to stop grinning at the end of those two hours.
Beginners Melancholy and madcap, Mike Mills' inventive weave of past and present ushers you into the mind of its hero (a superb Ewan McGregor) as he agonizes over his emotional inheritance. As the dad who comes out of the closet at 75, Christopher Plummer is light and lithe, buoyed by his new life among the boys.
Coriolanus Ralph Fiennes stars and directs from John Logan's canny script. Not definitive, but taut, brutal and unsettling — Shakespeare's surly warrior by way of The Hurt Locker.
The Descendants Alexander Payne is eitherAmerican cinema's nastiest humanist or its most empathetic jerk. Whichever, his brusque, sometimes ungainly film zigzags movingly between comedy and pathos, pettiness and anguish.
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life Joann Sfar's inventive Serge Gainsbourg biopic uses fancy temporal leaps and the surreal presence of a hook-nosed, bat-eared doppelganger to create a portrait of the artist as a brilliant, riven horndog — and a genius.
Hell and Back Again Danfung Dennis' documentary is a grueling portrait of a soldier leading his men through war in Afghanistan — and at home, after a bullet tears through his leg and hip. Dennis jumps back and forth between this supremely potent fighter in the middle of a war he doesn't understand, and the agonized and impotent man at home with a new and tragic perspective.
Into the Abyss Werner Herzog's second documentary of the year earns its comparisons to In Cold Blood, depicting a sick, tragic ecosystem of senseless crime and uncomprehending capital punishment.
Margin Call The view from among the 1 percent — a lacerating business melodrama in which the bad guys win. With Kevin Spacey's best performance in years, plus stellar work by Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci and even Demi Moore.
Mysteries of Lisbon Raoul Ruiz's final film (he died a week after its U.S. release) is a Dickensian epic with a dash of magic realism. You study it like a series of paintings — then realize, with a gasp, that it has hold of you like a fever dream.
War Horse Steven Spielberg's World War I epic, opening Christmas Day around the country, follows a horse from rural England to the bloody battlefields of Europe; it's sometimes cornball and too self-consciously mythic, but the director's complex humanism — his view of men at their worst and best — shines through. It's grim, yet thrilling.
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