Kristen Wiig is the best sketch comic alive, and Bridesmaids should finally make her a movie star.

Although you don't have to be a sports fan to enjoy it, Moneyball is one of the best baseball movies imaginable.

An Oscar-ready collaboration between a great director and a star at the peak of his powers, but at its heart is a message in a bottle reading: "Trapped in paradise. Please send help."

For cinematic sojourners, Hugo is a trip to the moon.

Notwithstanding the characters’ spiritual camaraderie, Salles’ emphasizes the hard physical labor and loneliness in Sal’s story, including the jittery rigors of the writing process. When he reaches a crossroads choice between down-and-out Dean and his own rising career, Sal senses that except for the words on a typewritten scroll, his life on the road is gone, real gone.

As an homage to an influential director, Submarine blows "Super 8" out of the water.

Ferrell's dryly understated performance is a shorthand for an alcoholic's denial and repressed rage, and as Nick grows increasingly desperate for a drink, he keeps his anger stashed like a last beer for emergencies.

Notwithstanding exquisite images that evoke Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," city-slicker audiences may find themselves getting saddle sore. But those with the courage to explore uncharted territory will be rewarded with a rough gem of a movie.

The performance is both an eerie imitation and a touching revelation. Oscar voters who overlooked Williams for her camouflage roles in "Brokeback Mountain," "Wendy and Lucy" and "Blue Valentine" should now throw diamonds at her feet.

An artfully observant and unexpectedly moving documentary.

Both arduous and artful, City of Life and Death is the best imaginable movie about the genocidal siege that's now called the Rape of Nanking. Anything more explicit would be unwatchable; anything more contemplative would be a betrayal of the sustained suffering.

The action is contained within a coherent dramatic structure and the puzzle-box paranoia of spy-agency protocol.

Imagine an opulent movie palace that was 30,000 years old, with posters preserved on the curving walls and the bones of the Stone Age patrons peacefully sleeping in the fairy dust. That's essentially what archeologists found in a French canyon in 1994 and what Werner Herzog brings back to life in the extraordinary documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Ultimately Skyfall is rooted in tradition - and in British soil. A pastoral drive to Bond's boyhood home (in a kind of car that will delight purists) opens the gates to some psychological background, and given the true-love subtext of "Casino Royale," it's not surprising that there's an emotional payoff here.

A blast, the best action movie of the summer.

The richly constructed first hour is so superior to any feat of sci-fi speculation since "Minority Report" that the bland aftertaste of the chase finale is quickly forgotten.

There's so much higher intelligence in Project Nim that simply digesting it feels like evolutionary progress.

An eye-opening primer in cross-species similarity. We learn that apes are violent and territorial but also that they are capable of creativity and tenderness.

When the two men compare impersonations of Michael Caine or Sean Connery, Brydon's version is always slightly better - and Coogan knows it.

Beautifully but simply wrought by director Cindy Meehl, this deft documentary is a poignant reappraisal of what it means to be human.

It's not warm and fuzzy, but for kids who comprehended "Coraline" and babysitters who savored "The Corpse Bride," this stop-motion marvel from some of the same animators is like an early Halloween treat.

May be too cute to qualify as high art, but it's highly entertaining.

An art-history lesson and a spiritual exercise disguised as a movie.

Shannon's powerfully imploded performance ignites one of the best films of the year.

At the confluence of altered states and state-sanctioned violence, this drug-fueled thriller is Stone's most successfully provocative picture since "JFK."

Star Trek Into Darkness offers much of what the fans expect and not much of what they don't. This character-driven vehicle is a supercharged example of cinematic craftsmanship.

Clear-eyed, fearless and ferociously funny, Young Adult is mature filmmaking.

Refusing to hold our hands, director Lynne Ramsay ("Morvern Callar") pushes far beyond the boundaries of topical drama into the realm of the surreal.