A movie set in Hollywood's silent era that is virtually wordless: a gimmick? No: sustained cinematic inspiration. For our first No. 1 movie since 2007 that's not an animated feature (you could look it up), we choose this delightfully inventive comedy about a swashbuckling star (supreme Gallic charmer Jean Dujardin) and the peppy waif (Bérénice Bejo) he befriends. Historians of antique cinema will tell you to imagine that Douglas Fairbanks had John Gilbert's talkie troubles while Ginger Rogers was on the rise. We'll just say: Think Singin' in the Rain, but silent and in black-and-white, and reveling in the same fondness, acumen and effervescence. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius transported the two stars of his OSS 117 films to Hollywood, hired American actors (James Cromwell, John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller) in supporting roles, had the cast speak their dialogue (shown in intertitles) in English and somehow achieved the impossible balance of comic pastiche and earned emotion. There's also an adorable dog. Skeptical readers are welcome to discount the praise of old movie critics for a movie about old movies, but we see a treat in store for anyone open to sheer joy. Here's a film so seductive it could leave you...speechless.
A young orphan (Asa Butterfield) works furtively regulating a train station's clocks while pursuing his dead father's dream of bringing a machine to life. What sounds like a grease monkey's Frankenstein is really a parable of creative ingenuity. For lifelong movie obsessive Martin Scorsese,Hugo is also an imaginary autobiography. Like Brian Selznick, author and illustrator of the source novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese believes that films are both the stuff dreams are made of and the product of supreme technological expertise. The camera is a machine that makes art, and filmmakers can be tinkers and tinkerers of genius. In this urban adventure with dewy Dickensian elements, Hugo finds a kindred soul in Georges Méliès (played by Ben Kingsley with the pained grandeur of an exiled king), who virtually invented cinema fantasy with such films as A trip to the Moon, then fell into obscurity. Scorsese's love poem, rendered gorgeously in 3-D, restores both the reputation of an early pioneer and the glory of movie history — the birth of a popular art form given new life through a master's application of the coolest new techniques.
Judge Di Renjie, the legendary sleuth of 7th-century China made famous to Western readers in the novels by Robert van Gulik, takes on the case of the flaming monks in this epic martial-arts whodunit from veteran Hong Kong director Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues, Once Upon a Time in China). Always a swami of cinematic compression, Tsui Hark can pack reams of exposition and sensation into a dozen pristinely composed shots that take only a few seconds of screen time. His trickster genius is shared by the main characters — the Empress (Carina Lau), her loyal adviser (Li Bingbing) and Detective Dee himself (Andy Lau) — each of whom is supremely adept and understandably suspicious of everyone else. The films boasts nonstop stunt work in the great Hong Kong tradition: tree-hopping, a fierce battle on two galloping horses and plenty of dexterous swordplay, all choreographed by veteran Hong Kong star Sammo Hung. Packed with a magic talking deer, a red-robed river king and characters transformable by acupoints, Detective Dee is a pinwheeling narrative and cinematic delight. We call it Crouching Tiger, Freakin' Masterpiece.
This is the movie with the 17-min. history-of-the-cosmos section that drove ordinary customers out of the theaters to demand their money back. So timid have films become in the past few decades that any deviation from the norm, even a spectacular planetarium show, requires lodging a formal protest. The outraged citizens should have hung around for the rest of writer-director Terrence Malick's movie: a pristinely observed portrait of a midcentury Texas family, with stern Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt in a boldly acute performance) lording it over Mom (Jessica Chastain) and their three young sons. Just Malick's fifth film in nearly 40 years, The Tree of Life has the elliptical intensity of his '70s masterworks Badlands and Days of Heaven. Family affection or animosity is revealed in a glance, a tilt of the restless camera, a cut from a parental argument in the house to the apprehensive kids outside. You can see the dinner-table tension in each of the boys' faces, dreading an explosion. The movie says, or rather shows, that to a man looking back on his youth, a father's harsh word can have the seismic effect of a crack in the cosmos.
After six years when he directed just one feature (the commissioned fourth episode of Indiana Jones), Steven Spielberg launches two films within four days; and both reveal the old boy wonder in splendid form. On Dec. 21 comes Spielberg's 3-D motion-capture animated feature The Adventures of Tintin, from Hergé's world-beloved comic books, a kind of Raiders of the Lost Art of boys' adventures and the niftiest pirate movie ever. Then, on Christmas day, the perfect holiday gift: this traditional, live-action adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo novel about an English boy and the horse he loved as the first World War was ravaging Western Europe. War Horse also inspired the every-prize-winning stage production in which Joey and the other equine characters are full-size puppets manipulated by actors inside them. Viewers coming to the movie version might think it's no fair using real horses (seven played Joey), but Spielberg's team wrangled eloquent performances from all of them, and from the human stars Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan and Tom Hiddleston. In his most painterly film, Spielberg has appropriated the lavish visual palette of John Ford movies: The Quiet Man for the rural settings, The Horse Soldiers for the war scenes. Boldly emotional, nakedly heartfelt, War Horse will leave only the stoniest hearts untouched.
No less than Martin Scorsese's Hugo, J.J. Abrams' Super 8 is a chapter of a filmmaker's early movie life turned into a genre classic. One night in 1979, some kids in a Rust-Belt town are shooting a movie when a train crashes and something —some thing — escapes from its boxcar prison. Abrams, a teen-tyro director before hatching the TV series Alias and Lost, has made a tender coming-of-age story disguised as a monster thriller. Super 8 borrows elements from the early films of Steven Spielberg, the J.J. Abrams of his day (and this picture's executive producer). And not just plot devices from Jaws, Close Encounters, The Goonies and especially E.T., but their aching, innocent emotions. Did you ever cry at a boy-meets-girl picture? All right, did you cry when a monster wins? Those are just two of the surprises awaiting you in the year's most terrific mainstream movie. The some-thing you'll feel is the beating heart of J.J. Abrams, Super 8's boy genius.
A wanderlust documentarian, Werner Herzog has found his film subjects in remotest Alaska (Grizzly Man) and Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World) and on Texas' Death Row (Into the Abyss). For his first experiment in 3-D cinematography, this pioneer won permission to film our planet's earliest known artworks: wall drawings some 30,000 years old in the Chauvet cave in the South of France. Preserved by an avalanche that sealed the cave's opening 20 millennia ago, the sketches reveal visions of a time when Neanderthals still trudged across Europe and the English Channel was a dry bed. Someone daubed glorious images of wild animals — lions, wolves, bison, bears — with a sophistication that reveals the beasts' contours and propulsive power. The bison, for example, is shown with eight legs, "suggesting movement," Herzog says; "sort of a proto-cinema." In the paintings, he finds analogies to Picasso, Fred Astaire and Baywatch. At 69, Herzog has entered his 50th year of moviemaking. This is one of his most revealing and appealing journeys into the cave of the human soul.
No apes were harmed in the making of the year's finest action fantasy. In fact, no apes appear in it: all are humans, filmed and transformed through motion capture by Peter Jackson's Weta Digital company. The star is Andy Serkis as Caesar, a genetically altered baby chimp raised lovingly at home by Bay Area scientist Will Rodman (James Franco). It is Caesar's destiny to realize that he is not a near-human but a great ape, a simian Spartacus leading his kind to freedom. Director Rupert Wyatt artfully synopsizes Caesar's growth in magical tracking shots as the ape lopes through the Rodman home and scales trees in Muir Woods. The script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver creates a story of emancipation as seen from both sides: the human (sympathetic liberals incapable of stanching an armed revolt) and the animal (we gotta be free). But even if you don't buy this as a semi-profound social document, the utterly seductive integration of apes and men should slacken your jaw in amazement. Rise restores wonder to the word "movie."
A CGI Western with a passel of moviewise fun and a knockout animation style, Rango ransacks, then smartly twists, elements from dozens of classic pictures, from Chinatown to Clint Eastwood's No-Name Westerns. The clever script by John Logan (The Aviator, Hugo, Coriolanus) spins the familiar tale of a tenderfoot who's mistaken for a savior sheriff by rude hombres and the lone pretty girl. Except that the dude known as Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp) and the girl, Beans (Isla Fisher), are lizards; the Mayor (Ned Beatty) is a turtle; and the chief gunslinger (Bill Nighy) is a rattlesnake mean enough to scare Samuel L. Jackson. For his first animated feature, Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski filmed the actors in motion-capture and called on the ILM team to surround them with natural Western landscapes; this looks like the most gorgeous live-action movie. The scaly skin on its reptiles has a realism that's tactile, even if you wouldn't want to touch it. In a strong year for animation — Rio, Happy Feet Two and The Adventures of Tintin would all be worthy 10-Best finalists — Rango was the coolest, funniest and dagnab-orneriest of the bunch.
This list is short on sensitive indie dramas, heavy on mainstream mayhem, but it was that kind of year. The big boys — Hollywood technicians, from FX gurus to stunt choreographers — used their tools with more craft and cojones than the Sundance auteurs. Fast Five, fifth in the Fast & Furious series, is a live-action movie with so much whirling tumult, so many moments of low genius, that it plays like an animated car-toon. The dialogue, characterizations and acting are irrelevant to the success of this first great film of the post-human era. As if recalling the epochal heist in 1903's The Great Train Robbery and, a decade later, the auto carnage of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops, director Justin Lin goes back to basics with another train robbery and vehicular violence in police rides — souped up and stripped down like stock cars in a death race — on the streets of Rio. A carnival of roguish heroes and pretty girls, car chases and cliffhangers, Fast Five is as much a tribute as The Artist or Hugo to the cinema's primal thrills.
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