It is one of the 10 best films of 2011, but when you describe Wim Wenders' Pina, it sounds like fodder for SNL's Sprockets. The documentary is a cinematic festschrift for the German choreographer Pina Bausch, who passed away in 2009; it's also an introduction (visible in superb 3-D) to her works. » Read More

The inflationary quality of The Grey begins early, even before the finish, with a four-line bit of indomitable Irish doggerel. Liam Neeson plays Ottway, an Arctic legend busted down to wolf shooter on an Alaska oil-drilling rig. We can see how he feels about this job when he stops to pet the fur of his victim. » Read More

Another brilliant movie from the land of brilliant movies, Iran's A Separation unfolds in layers, with a secret revealed in the last 20 minutes. There isn't a lead actor per se; the cast is more of a circle than a hierarchy. But director Asghar Farhadi has cast his daughter, Sarina, in an auspicious debut. » Read More

The heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen will never be forgotten. Red Tails, however-forget about it. Executive producer George Lucas once stitched in excerpts of World War II-era movie dogfights to let the studio know what he had in mind for the battle sequences in Star Wars. Red Tails seems to have rewoven all those snippets together. » Read More

Stephen Daldry's film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, like Jonathan Safran Foer's source novel, concerns a child's act of denial about Sept. 11. He ultimately reverses time's arrow through his arts and crafts. Like It's a Wonderful Life, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a greeting-card-size fantasy. But the adaptation has been beefed up with movie stars. » Read More

After the American Civil War, politicians used to make hay by reminding the crowd of Confederate atrocities. "Waving the bloody shirt" was the expression. Whatever the Bosnian word for "shirt" is, director/writer Angelina Jolie windmills it for In the Land of Blood and Honey. The title's awkwardness is well matched in the script. » Read More

The new Meryl Streep film The Iron Lady fails even as a handkerchief-soaker for an audience of wonks from the Hoover Institute. Banking on historical amnesia, The Iron Lady transcends its surpassing political naivet– by trying to sleaze its way into Margaret Thatcher's personal life. » Read More

A Quartet of nasty bourgeois, played by four top-drawer actors with crack timing, make Roman Polanski's Carnage a civilized entertainment. Based on Parisian author Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage, the film is about an after-school mediation session that goes bad. » Read More

Xavier Durringer's The Conquest reiterates de Gaulle's idea that France is ungovernable-much like our own state of California. Snobbery may be the reason why this mordant film has it in for its protagonist. President Nicolas Sarkozy (Denis Podalydes) is known, as if he were a lost Marx brother, as "Sarko." » Read More

Habits of secrecy, habits of arrogance, breed monstrous behavior in the stunning new version of John le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The story unfolds in the early 1970s. The Cold War still has England frozen. The dome of St. Paul's is always rimed with frost. It's as if World War II had never stopped. The enemy never stopped listening. » Read More

When a doddering lunatic from Alameda predicted that the world was ending, he found enough appreciative listeners to get himself on the TV news. Likely, he gained traction since there were enough people who felt that we were at the end of something. In the movie world, people were mourning the end of 35mm film, the end of 3-D as the savior of the theatrical experience, maybe the end of cinema itself. » Read More

It is slicker, anyway, than Niels Arden Oplev's original version of the first book in Stieg Larsson's sloppily plotted series of novels. In Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher slathers on style, ultimately turning the facially perforated, Moe Howard-haircutted heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara, miscast), into a softer little-girl-lost who talks like a Star Trek android. » Read More

Show up early and get into the center-back sweet spot at a full-size 15/70mm IMAX Theater. Not only will you be the first person on your block to see, via the preview for The Dark Knight Rises, Bane's inadvisable method of catching a plane, but you will also get the full effect of Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol's money sequence: a technical marvel of cinema. » Read More

The worst thing to be said about The Adventures of Tintin is that Andy Sirkis' voice isn't quite what elder ex-kids associate with Captain Archibald Haddock. Paul Frees dubbed the voice of that bibulous captain when the French TV series of the 1950s came to the United States. » Read More

The Thirties-ish Mavis (Charlize Theron), the antiheroine of Young Adult, is a hack writer for a series of young-adult novels. Needing a break, she drives her Mini Cooper from her tower home in Minneapolis to Mercury, Minn., the small town where she grew up. » Read More

Artist turned director Steve McQueen's last film, Hunger, was about an imprisoned man starving to death. His new film, Shame, is the story of a free man gorging himself; perhaps there's intrinsically less drama in this second situation. » Read More

In Guy Ritchie's hasty and frequently low-class sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the detective is treated as a clown throughout-with cheap wigs and beards and long underwear scenes. Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) wears humorous goggles; he is even painted with mascara and lipstick » Read More

Takeshi Kitano's new film is almost plot-free but rich with incident, visual skill and loads of violence. Outrage shows the Japanese filmmaker at the top of his craft. The action consists essentially of a cascading series of assassinations in the world of Japanese gangsters. The ritual finger-chopping apology, yubitsume, isn't enough to smooth over the anger of rival families. » Read More

British director Ken Russell, who passed away last week at age 84, was the point man in a flying squad of Fellini-Goes-to-Soho filmmakers, who often loathed each other's work: Nicolas Roeg, Donald Cammell, Alan Parker, and Peter Greenaway and to a lesser extent Terry Gilliam (and, in far Australia, Baz Luhrmann). » Read More

Former SJSU drama teacher Amy Glazer's Seducing Charlie Barker is an adaptation of a play by Theresa Rebeck titled The Scene. It's a kind of light tragedy with a penumbra of comedy glowing around it. We see the title character, a man on the way down, drinking right out of a bottle of Blue Angel vodka, and that's a clue. » Read More

The middle-aged German is all the more emotional for his dispassionateness. There's a tone of respect in that easy-to-imitate voice—an oncologist's note of quiet doom. Into the Abyss is Werner Herzog's excellent documentary on a triple murder in Texas, carried out by a pair of then-teenagers. One of the convicted was the chipmunklike Michael Perry, who, as of the time of the film, was awaiting execution. » Read More

It may be Tim Burton, and not Martin Scorsese, who is the most trendsetting filmmaker of the last 20 years. For Hugo, Scorsese worked with Burton scriptwriter John Logan, Sweeney Todd production designer Dante Ferretti and a few of Burton's past and future stars. » Read More

Almost everyone will enjoy the George Clooney/Alexander Payne film The Descendants. In the lead is our most unambiguously appealing movie star, looking, as Mary Astor described Clark Gable, "crumbly" in a handsome array of Hawaiian shirts, glowing with a tropical tan as if he'd been regularly rubbed with tung oil. » Read More

The godless tyrant Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) seeks the legendary Epirus bow that destroys everything in its path. Theseus (Henry Cavill), a fatherless peasant, survives Hyperion's latest massacre and frees the imprisoned Sybil Phaedra (Freida Pinto). The gods watch, but they are forbidden by Zeus (Luke Evans) himself to intervene. » Read More

The world's Greatest Film Critic, Slavoj Zizek, addressing Occupy Wall Street on Oct. 9: "It's easy to imagine the end of the world—an asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism." In his new film, Melancholia, Lars von Trier tries to imagine just that by killing two birds with one planet. » Read More

Clint Eastwood's shot-full-of-curare biopic J. Edgar takes on a half-century of history, from the Palmer Raids to Nixon's regime. But the movie unfolds entirely in a few rooms. It's a defensible stance when telling a lifelong bureaucrat's story, but a chore to watch. » Read More

In one sentence: Revenge of the Electric Car is promotional in the way its predecessor, Who Killed the Electric Car?, was prosecutorial. Former Palo Altoan Chris Paine's new documentary observes four figures in the electric-car industry as they try to midwife the all-plug-in vehicle. » Read More