You should see Happy Feet--not only because it's stupendous, but also because it features the best dancing you'll see on the screen this year.

Bird clearly knows the great silent clowns: The slapstick he devises is balletic.

For all its portentousness, this is the best Harry Potter picture yet. In some ways, it improves on J.K. Rowling's novel, which is punishingly protracted and builds to a climactic wand-off better seen than read.

Might be the most provocative teen sex comedy ever made; it is certainly one of the most convulsively funny.

Above all is Langella, achingly vulnerable under layers of flesh. In one scene, alone, he eats peanut butter intensely, thoughtfully, and nothing he could do as Hamlet would seem deeper or more poetic.

The film is a masterpiece in which "locked-in" syndrome becomes the human condition.

Anderson's fearless, bighearted filmmaking is an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny. He has made a mad American classic.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.

I've never seen a movie with this mixture of fullness and desolation. Rachel Getting Married is a masterpiece.

Cantet's real-time classroom scenes are revelations: They make you understand that teaching is moment to moment, an endless series of negotiations that hang on intangibles-on imagination and empathy and the struggle to stay centered. This is a remarkable movie.

It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't--to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream.

Hats off to Olivier Assayas's plain yet hauntingly beautiful Summer Hours, a true--albeit nonsecular--meditation on art and eternal life.

The end of The Cove is as rousing as anything from Hollywood. Manipulative? Sure--but isn't that fitting? Capitalism has driven an entire village to massacre dolphins and keep its work hidden.

Pantheism, Cameronism: In Avatar, what's the diff? Now he's king of a world he made from scratch.

For grown-ups, the film will touch something deeper: the heartfelt wish that childhood memories will never fade.

For all the horror, it's the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer, and Winter's Bone is the year's most stirring film.

The self-satire of The Kids Are All Right is so knowing, so rich, so hilarious, so damn healthy that it blows all thoughts of degeneracy out of your head.

This is, no doubt about it, a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director's ambitions.

The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.

Spielberg has been ridiculed for shooting his actors from below against impossibly Spielbergian skies and a denouement that lays the love on copiously. But there's nothing simpleminded about how he uses movie magic, as a spell to dispel nihilism, to save us from the worst of ourselves by summoning up the best.

Everything he did in live-action movies with rolling boulders and runaway convoys he does bigger and better - by a factor of ten - in every frame. At the end of two hours, my jaw ached from grinning.

The Avengers is both campy and ­reverential. Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast.

The film is phenomenally well directed by Kevin Macdonald and edited by Justine Wright to bring out every bit of scary volatility in the most casual interactions.

Ulrich Mühe gives a marvelously self-contained performance. There isn't an ounce of fat on his body, or in his acting: He has pared himself down to a pair of eyes that prowl the faces of his character's countrymen for signs of arrogance--i.e., of independent thinking.

Indigènes is a stupendous work--and why that new title stinks to heaven.

Anyone who loves live-wire acting will gasp in awe at Blanchett, more emotionally exposed than ever, and, most of all, at Dame Judi, who's so electric she makes you quiver.

It's a Parisian romantic roundelay with sundry couples connecting and disconnecting, but it looks and sounds like no sex comedy ever made: It's transcendentally yummy.

I've sat through so many claustrophobic examples of the genre I forgot how exhilarating, how pure a great one could be. Interview is a great one--electric as theater and cinema.