1 | AMOUR
Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are wiry 80-somethings, retired music teachers who have been together for more than a half-century. When a series of strokes robs Anne of her powers of speech and movement, Georges cares for her with the desperate ardor of a teen attending to his first love. The Austrian auteur Michael Haneke is renowned for his formidable, forbidding parables of families beset by a malefic outside force. Amour, whose villain is the decay that awaits us all, stands as his most intimate, and positive, human drama. It is performed by two icons of French films since the 1950s, here at the peak of their art in a story of devotion pushed to the limit. The body may perish, but love–amour–never dies.
2 | BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
The soggy Louisiana delta area called the Bathtub is home to Hushpuppy (Quvenzhan Wallis) and her ailing daddy (Dwight Henry). Six years old and ageless, the girl converses with her farm pets and her lost mother, endures a hurricane and spends time with surrogate moms on a floating bordello. Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature is a work of imagination as vast and verdant as Hushpuppy’s. It speaks in eloquent images and moves to the music of Wallis’ astonishing performance. As the wise-wild child, she is a tiny, irresistible force of nature.
3 | LIFE OF PI
An Indian boy, his family killed in a shipwreck, must navigate a small boat across the Pacific Ocean with no company but a ravenous Bengal tiger. Both of these lost creatures endure a rite of passage in Ang Lee’s visually spectacular, emotionally resonant film of the Yann Martel novel. Lee’s poetic use of 3-D–conjuring a looking-glass ocean, schools of flying fish and about a million meerkats–combines with the amazing key-frame technology that put an imaginary tiger in a real boat. Avatar plus Rise of the Planet of the Apes equals this entrancing feat of magical realism.
4 | ANNA KARENINA
All the world–the world of Russian aristocrats–is a stage in Joe Wright’s brazen, exhilarating film of Tolstoy’s novel about the lady, her lover, her husband and the train. Wright stages most of the action in a reproduction of a 19th century theater, while Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s virtuoso choreography sets dozens of characters awhirl and aghast at the reckless affair that Anna (Keira Knightley), wife of a respected judge (Jude Law), pursues with the dashing Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Keyed by Knightley’s fearless performance, this is tragedy played as comic opera soaring into grand opera, a triumph of art and artifice over the grubby banalities of film naturalism.
5 | THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and an idealistic cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) must save Gotham from a blight named Bane (Tom Hardy) with help or intrusion from a lovely philanthropist (Marion Cotillard) and the revived Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). All five are orphans in masks; they repress or express their true natures by playing roles. Christopher Nolan’s stupendous climax to his Batman trilogy is a masquerade too. Nolan is pretending to be a director of comic-book entertainment when he’s really out to excoriate Americans’ greed, laziness and implicit yearning for an omnipotent father figure who is as likely to be a villain as a savior–less Batman than Bane.
6 | ZERO DARK THIRTY
In the war on terrorism, the front line is everywhere, from Afghanistan to Manhattan. And among the U.S.’s most valuable soldier-tacticians are CIA trackers like Maya (Jessica Chastain), the heroine of this powerhouse docudrama from Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the director and the writer of The Hurt Locker. That Oscar winner showed the war in microcosm: a small unit of bomb defusers in Iraq. This is the macrocosm, covering eight years in the search for Osama bin Laden and climaxing in a taut depiction of the SEAL Team 6 raid that killed him. Bigelow turns Boal’s superb reporting of a complex campaign into a lucid, thrilling action movie for the brain.
7 | DARK HORSE
Abe Wertheimer (Jordan Gelber) is an underachieving schlub. Fat and 35, he lives with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken) and collects fantasy-film posters and Simpsons action figures suitable for a 12-year-old. Yet a couple of women–a fellow depressive (Selma Blair) and his father’s secretary (Donna Murphy)–love Abe the way a child may protectively cherish an injured gerbil. Or their devotion could exist only in Abe’s daydreams, which appear frequently and furtively in Todd Solondz’s sweetly, deeply neurotic love story. Solondz’s odd gift is to stir sympathy for ordinary people capable of awful things, and this ugly-is-beautiful tale is his gentlest triumph.
8 | DRAGON
When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee’s update of the wuxia (swordplay) films of the late ’60s, became a megahit, it triggered a revival of the martial-arts genre, notably in Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Peter Chan’s Dragon (original title: Wu Xia) succeeds both as a tribute to the classic One-Armed Swordsman films, starring Jimmy Wang Yu, and as a stand-alone delight. The hidden dragon here is Donnie Yen as the quiet peasant who turns out to be the renegade son of the bandits’ leader (a fine comeback role for Wang Yu). Yen also choreographed the nifty stunts in a drama that attains both gravity and buoyancy and balances familial tenderness with chest-caving kicks.
9 | FRANKENWEENIE
If Victor Frankenstein, the monster-making scientist of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, were a suburban American kid … well, he is, in Tim Burton’s feature-length remake, in stop-motion animation, of his 1984 live-action short. Victor (voiced by Charlie Tahan) is a little too weird for his conventional parents (Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara) but a perfect mate for his pit bull terrier Sparky. When Sparky is killed in a car accident, Victor resolves to bring him back to life. The movie transforms what is for most children their first shock of mortality–the passing of a beloved pet–into a ghouly-cheery tale of precocious necrophilia and a puckish pocket history of classic monster films. This 3-D, black-and-white family comedy is the year’s most inventive, endearing animated feature.
10 | THE INVISIBLE WAR
Armed forces has a second, corrosive meaning when officers force themselves sexually on the women in their command. In Kirby Dick’s almost unbearably powerful documentary about rape in the military, the brave women who testify onscreen argue that they were really violated twice: once by their assailants and a second time by the tough-boy network of commanders protecting this man’s army. These women needed the scourging disinfectant of Dick’s spotlight; it’s one of the few movies that have done provable good. On April 14, three months after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won the audience award), The Invisible War was shown to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. “Two days later,” a title card informs us at the end, “he took the decision to prosecute away from commanders.”