I’ve been touting “Up in the Air” as the year’s best film since I saw it in Toronto in September – and I still haven’t seen anything that has changed my mind.

With this deft, witty, smart and soulful film, writer-director Jason Reitman establishes himself as one of the most sure-handed purveyors of a certain kind of comedy, a tradition that marks him as a modern purveyor of the same cinematic tradition as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. (More…)

Disney has always set the standard for animation – so “The Princess and the Frog” arrives not just as a new animated feature, but as part of a lengthy heritage that goes all the way back to “Snow White.”

Still, this is Disney’s first hand-drawn musical in five years, after the unmemorable “Home on the Range.” Will an old-school animated film beguile digital-age tots? (More…)

Rebecca Miller’s “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” is like a sigh of relief from a writer-director whose work has been sensitive/gloomy until now.

The film is also the first role that Robin Wright has had in ages that shows her considerable range as an actress. In particular, it allows her to loosen up and be funny, something she hasn’t done in a long time. (More…)

I worry about the fate of “The Road,” John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic Pulitzer-winning novel.

It’s a moving and upsetting film – quality work that deserves to be in the Oscar hunt, both for Hillcoat’s work and for the shattering performance by its star, Viggo Mortensen. (More…)

Richard Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles” is pure delight, a backstage story set in a romantic period built around a magically charismatic character.

It’s also the movie that proves that Zac Efron is a real actor, not just a teen star with a solid singing voice and a dazzling smile. As the ‘Me’ in the title, he holds his own against the dashing figure of Orson Welles. And this is Welles near the peak of his youthful genius, played with eerie proximity and great humor by newcomer Christian McKay, in what may be the year’s most auspicious film debut. (More…)

You expect strong drama and highly watchable weirdness from Werner Herzog. But I wasn’t prepared for the lizard love in “Bad Lieutentant: Port of Call – New Orleans” (hereafter, just “Bad Lt.”).

In this high-strung, over-wrought tale of corruption and dissolution, there are two or three moments when, apropos of nothing, Herzog suddenly inserts large iguanas into the scene. Then he puts his camera right in the lizards’ faces – and leaves it there.

What does it mean? (More…)

Like a well-crafted novel, Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces” takes its time revealing its true intentions. It’s an emotional time bomb, one packed with passion, color, romance and tragedy. (More…)

There’s a tendency to always look askance at any film in which the story focuses on an African-American who is given a helping hand by a white person.

Not that there haven’t been egregious examples of films in which the beneficent white person plays savior to the beleaguered black person. But not all films with that set-up are condescending, as some would have it. (More…)

Because it’s set in 206 A.D., John Woo’s “Red Cliff” does not include a scene of two men pointing guns at each other’s heads in a wild moment of mutually assured destruction.

The climax of Woo’s gripping epic does feature that trademark image – men trapped in a potentially lethal deadlock. But it’s done with swords, rather than firearms. Some things never change. (More…)

There seem to be two kinds of documentaries about disadvantaged and troubled kids: the ones that look at the problem and make you feel angry – and the ones that examine people beating the odds and make you feel good.

“Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon” falls into the aspirational camp: a nonfiction film that starts with a problem – the high-school drop-out rate – and looks at a program that not only keeps potential drop-outs in school, but engages them in such a way as to put them on a path to a different future. (More…)