What finally sticks in the mind about "ZDT" is its precision. What the film says about getting information from terrorism suspects in an era of high-tech surveillance depends on your point of view. What is unquestionable is how powerful its full scope is.

Together and apart, Hatami and Maadi are magnetic. Hatami, a star in Iranian cinema, lets us see Simin's intelligence and defiant sense of self-worth often with nothing more than a gesture.

Rotates around a rusty little robotic hero who's built, as the movie is, with such emotion, brains and humor that whole universes exist in his whirring tones and binocular eyes.

Small victories that turn into defeats, long walks to gain little ground, little wounds that get deeper every day - growing old is a war, and movies rarely go there. Michael Haneke's amazing, dignified Amour is the exception.

The film is a mystery uncovered like a detective story, wrapped in a love letter.

While the vocal performances of Hanks, Allen and company make up a perfect ensemble, and its visual leaps astound, TS3's real power sneaks up on you.

A fascinating and informative, if sometimes stodgy, documentary about the most secret wing of Israel's anti-espionage unit.

Amid all the hokey hill stuff, Lawrence's hard eyes and manner draw us in.

History has made his midair stroll meaningful, but the film shows how even then, everyone - from Petit to his accomplices to the cops who were waiting for him atop the North Tower - recognized the stunt's crazy poetry.

A kind of historical detective story made up of haunting montages, including a theater performance featuring a heartbroken musician that's absolutely chilling.

Ferguson doesn't aim to entertain; he wants answers, and talks to many of the enabling weasels.

Despite being about a royal family at a critical moment in history, The King's Speech doesn't shout about its many strengths. Rather, it urges you to lean in close, where its intelligence and heart come through loud and clear.

This extraordinary hybrid of a movie lives and breathes the game, yet its achievement is bigger than that. There's a touch of old-fashioned romanticism here, but more crucially there's strategy going on inside Bennett Miller's movie that turns it into something cool and special.

The history lesson in Steven Spielberg's austere, engrossing Lincoln is less about the revered President himself but his method for justice.

Mary's search drives The Tillman Story, and throughout this taut, true epic, we see a smart, sometimes angry, always loving family find their destiny: to speak truth to power, to call wartime myths what they are and to show how the American character is not about blind obedience.

Director Werner Herzog's latest cinematic mind trip blows you away with its beauty.

Quiet, soulful and wrenching.

Argo is movie magic. Ben Affleck's third directorial outing, is an entertaining, real-life, race-the-clock thriller that nabs you at the start and never makes a wrong move.

This superb, cerebral film about unchecked belief is a fictionalized and cutting drama hinging on the origins of Scientology. Scratch around a bit, though, and its wider indictments become clear.

Trippy in the right way, and wholly enchanting.

This is crucial work, evidenced by a line on a wall of R.I.P. graffiti that reads simply, "I am next." This film of common folks fighting the seemingly inevitable is just as moving.

Winds up feeling like a form of emotional tourism. The images recall Terrence Malick, but the film fills "atmosphere" into dry narrative holes where a story should reside.

Like a more personal, less pretentious version of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel," this spiraling dissection of circumstance, choice and fate is more about thoroughness of vision than tricky storytelling.

Director Samuel Maoz's gripping you-are-there feel does for tanks what "Das Boot" did for submarines, and that chokehold only gets tighter as this taut drama about the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war goes on.

Watch Mulligan's face as she goes from weary to awakened, and see it all come together.

There’s visual poetry here and haunted performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi -- who plays two roles, and is especially gripping as Dalser’s grown son.

Even after experiencing the film, what they've gone through - and how they deal with it - deliberately remains a mystery.

Like so much in this astounding, consistently beautiful and challenging movie, the answer depends on what you bring to it. Think of it as the Ultimate Anti-Summer-Blockbuster.

Director Lee Chang-dong's soulful, affecting film is as quiet as a tomb and has a disturbing, critical underside that's hard to shake off.

The final result somehow undersells a man whose life and death were watershed moments in the gay rights movement.

Gordon-Levitt is flinty, and Willis, on his A-game, is fiery. Together, they take us on a helluva trip.

Payne's observational humor and attention to detail yield something emotionally epic. Everything from beachfront jogs to hospital confessions reveals layers of humanity and absurdity.

Wiseman films it all without comment, letting the rhythm of the place tell the story.

Gyllenhaal is charming and makes unexpected choices in her performance, but this is Bridges' show, and he's as Best Actor-worthy as he's ever been.

Avatar clears the hurdle in terms of being optical candy. Its story, though, is pure cheese.

The new Star Trek is more than a coat of paint on a space-age wagon train. It's an exciting, stellar-yet-earthy blast that successfully blends the hip and the classic.

Falarde, in adapting a play, has a sweet, humanistic approach reminiscent of Bill Forsyth's '80s dramedies that lets "Lazhar's" protagonist and his class shine.

If only this were a media-fueled tall tale and not one poor creature's lifelong nightmare.

Drag Me to Hell is an eyeball-gouging lesson in how to make a genre flick and live to tell about it.

It shows that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. And how, in case we forget, every age can predict the next.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilize the footage Kim and Scott Roberts had taken throughout the disaster, showing how residents suffered, survived and came together to help when official assistance let them down.

Film enthusiasts especially will appreciate this wonky but fascinating documentary about the process of making movies.

Once Franco's on his own, everything is played across this terrific actor's deceptively goofy face.

Filled with striking images and the ghosts of lives lived in hardship and war, Incendies is tough but impactful.

A thoughtful drama about guys who have a moment in the big time before returning home to an odd reflected glory.

An emotionally devastating drama that isn't for the squeamish.

Haneke's superb cast provide beautifully measured hints at the disconnect between the ribbon's symbolism and the entire town's unspoken atrocities.

This brisk but full documentary about students at a Bronx high school taking a class that promotes literacy and poetry slams is, like its subjects, multifaceted, sometimes sad but ultimately inspiring.

Director Joe Berlinger mixes archival footage, concert scenes, interviews and present-day reunions to meld a harmonious, fair-minded, energetic and enlightening portrait of one masterpiece's moment in time.

Twisted, tortured, terrifying - and terrific.

The result is a dull, high-minded soap opera.

Has moments of honesty, but more often the barren landscape - both outside and inside - drains the emotions out of the film.

Acclaimed director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's meditative, at times maddening expression of human mystery and barren landscapes is gorgeous to look at, intriguing to think about and, at times, hard to sit through.

This macabre-yet-moving Argentinian drama from director Juan Jose Campanella is nuanced and full of intelligence and emotion; just when you think you have a bead on it, it gently swerves into richer places.

Halfway into Blue Valentine, a work so beautifully acted and emotionally honest it is my choice for best movie of the year, there's an amazing flashback scene you hope never ends.

A pensive and searching drama that explores how deep into the national psyche these murders in the Katyn forest went.

Beginners is filled with crises of identity, but underneath it all is a beautifully humane, sweet and intelligent movie that knows exactly what it is at every moment.

Arnold generally steers clear of cinematic melodrama, and Jarvis infuses the entire film with the sort of kinetic spirit that heralds a new talent.

The result was remarkable, but the story of it, while true to the moment, needed — ironically — much more dynamism.

Just when we thought Quentin Tarantino had shown us all the cojones he has, in rides Django Unchained.

Though a notch below "Royale," Skyfall follows that reboot's lead, making a now 50-year-old icon as cool as when he began.

Aiming for lightness but landing with a thud, Frances Ha is a well-meaning blunder. Director Noah Baumbach’s ode to Brooklyn twentysomething life is a flibbertigibbet fable that, like a self-absorbed flirt you meet at a party, grates on the nerves despite being easy on the eyes.

Warm memories of one school under a groove and a moving ending that no screenwriter could improve upon.

As in "Purple Rose," the film works best when tweaking the disparate worlds thrown together, though "Midnight" is frothier, and so Wilson shines.

A memorable, monstrous fable that's consistently gripping.

Upstream Color is weird, but it’s worth the time.

Like a worst-case-scenario, indie-movie cliché, Wendy and Lucy throws every bone it can at the screen.

Sadly suffers from more than a dollop of boredom. Like the ornate dollhouse that plays a part, "Arrietty" is lovely and well-appointed, but filled with only what you bring to it.

This unhurried, novelistic movie is worth looking into.

Lars von Trier's end-of-days drama Melancholia feels as if it's something from another world...but even by his standards this remote yet lovely funereal dirge is in its own orbit.

This quiet drama is not for everyone. It may not even be for fans of Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, whose spare, naturalistic films can be, well, trying. (The director has said that "Horse" will be his final film.)

A wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western drama that lets the quirks of the genre gallop freely as it keeps a tight rein throughout.

Entertaining, smart and snappy, this terrific doc, a Sundance favorite, digs into the country's use of steroids and how it affects sports, pop culture and the self-image of young men.

What Room 237 is really about is how movies inspire passion. Which is a great thing, even if it comes out in wack-job ways.

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is better known for horror films; this is a movie where the horror is internalized, and hideously truthful.

Certainly, the West Memphis 3 deserve more chances to detail how the justice system went nightmarishly awry. But take this as ultimately more personal journal than investigation.

His years of success aren't as gripping as Kapadia, and Senna's legend, would have us believe. He had no demons besides fame, and no hurdles besides a recklessness that went with the territory.

The deliberate pace Mungiu employs in this incredible work is so engrossing and quietly heartbreaking that its philosophical ending may come as a shock.

It's strange to call a film with so much nudity and simulated sex "old-fashioned," but The Sessions nicely bridges that gulf.

Oduye, especially, is utterly absorbing. Even in those few moments when the movie follows a slightly more straightforward line than it needs, she is always engagingly, beautifully real.

If you're looking for an incisive portrait of self-generated stardom, you won't do better than this.

Here, in his best performance since "Spider," Fiennes plays the snarling, entitled general Caius Martius Coriolanus, whose bloody brow and bald head are stained with what's left of his soldiers.

The finished "Ring" cycle, a combination of "myth, science and legend" made to order as Wagner imagined it, was unique to every viewer's eye. The making of it will be spellbinding to everyone.

Scott Thomas breathes more emotion into Juliette's affectless, haunted demeanor than most actors do with pages of dialogue.

By far the most rousing, expertly cast movie this year, David O. Russell's movie takes a roundabout way of telling its true story.

Though diligently paced and sharp to look at, the mysteries inside Mother are, finally, bloodless.

The result is the first comic-book movie in a while that actually feels like a classic comic book: fast, furious and flip. Forget about superheroes with love problems and tortured souls.

For all the movement in Drive, the quiet, deathly still moments are the ones that count.

Though the film's setup trudges and its closing is too pat, that hour or so on the raft is something special, and few would dive into the story's soul as Lee does.

A quiet, oddly serene movie with a curious soul.

It was a true media circus, and despite Polanski's work before and since, the film shows how it will forever be his first association in the public consciousness. In the U.S., at least.

While director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale's epic of criminality and all-consuming conviction ultimately falls a bit short - missing, for instance, a villainous face a la Heath Ledger's Joker - their Batman trilogy ends with a suitably thrilling mix of guts and glory.

Fascinating and, when you see Afghan versions of Simon Cowell and Co. reacting to tryouts, a reminder of how fame and the thirst for it is the same in any language.

An extraordinary morsel of a movie, and yes, you'll want sushi afterward. But it won't taste like Jiro's.

These three films (adapted from David Peace's novels by different directors), each a singularly gripping work, together form a towering and emotionally complex achievement.

As a wry, knowing narrator guides us in and out of their symphonic affair, there’s no doubt the trip is worth it.

Smith ("American Movie") sees the poetry in everyday people, and lets his rambling story find its own rhythm.

A sweet testament to the power of intelligence to win over adversity - even in a Brooklyn middle school where the majority of students live below the poverty level.