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Despite its fictional roots, the phrase “Beware the Ides of March” has given the date a bad name ever since. As winter recedes this year, however, it’s worth embracing the ides (or approximate middle) as a time of triumph rather than foreboding. After all, the sky isn’t really supposed to fall until the Mayan calendar flips to Dec. 21.

2 Venus-Jupiter ConjunctionEven the universe is celebrating today as Venus and Jupiter tango for a co-called conjunction in the evening sky. During this celestial event, the two planets appear side by side, even though they are actually millions and millions of miles apart. They will delight stargazers everywhere for several more days.

3 March Madness

A different group of stargazers will set their sights on college basketball today for the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship. But it, too, will thrill observers beyond the Ides of March.

 4 Pears Helene Day

What’s basketball and “dancing” planets without something to snack on while taking it all in. March 15 is Pears Helene Day, when you’d be wise to go straight to dessert: poached pears; vanilla; sugar; cinnamon; chocolate sauce, optional.

5 Internet Domain Names

March 15 also marks the registration of the first Internet domain name, Symbolics.com., in 1985. Celebrate by losing yourself in the Internet or filling in your online college basketball tournament brackets.

 6 Professional Baseball

Basketball not your sport? Not to worry because today marks the birth of the U.S. “national pastime,” March 15, 1869, when the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first all-professional baseball team. Celebrate with a box of Cracker Jacks, which apparently are not quite as old as the Reds.

Source: ABCNEWS.GO.COM

It could be argued that Minecraft was a 2010 release, but it just came out of beta in November, so we’re putting it on the list; anyway, it’s so great, it should be on the list every year. Minecraft isn’t a complex pitch: you’re in a very big, rather retro-looking low-res world. You can walk around, you can pick up things, and you can make other things out of them. While you’re doing this, various animals try to eat you. The end. The complexity comes from you: the Minecraft universe is so endlessly, pleasurably reconfigurable and customizable that it rewards you for the zillions of hours you sink into it by becoming a reflection of your imagination.

2. Portal 2

Never mind the ingenious permutations of bouncing momentum, gravity and light required to progress through this game. Portal 2‘s biggest surprise came from experiencing how developer Valve left the cool, minimalist remove of its predecessor behind for a messier, more emotionally textured path. Where the first Portal delivered an antagonist for the ages in bitchy AI GLaDOS, the follow-up peels back the layers of her computational psyche and shows us how she got that way.

As you plumb the conjoined secret history of GLaDOS and mad-science corporation Aperture Science, you feel not only your mind expanding but your heart too. Long after the physics-manipulation conundrums have been solved, the poignancy of Portal 2‘s man-and-machine pas de deux lingers on.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

You could call it serendipitous that Nintendo delivered one of the best-ever entries in this beloved adventure franchise during The Legend of Zelda‘s 25th anniversary year. But nothing in this intricately built escapade happened by chance. Skyward Sword evolves the series’ trademark elements by letting you inject some individual style into how Link achieves his goals and by extruding more of the game’s puzzlelike environments into the larger world. The top-shelf game mechanics get help from the sharpest Wii motion controls yet and a watercolor aesthetic that makes you feel like you’re adventuring through an Impressionist masterpiece. The first-class creators at Nintendo say the Zelda games form a saga that repeats through history. With Skyward Sword, they’ve crafted a classic that should stand the test of time.
4. Uncharted 3

When it comes to storytelling, Uncharted series developer Naughty Dog likes to peer into history’s cracks and tease out conspiracies. In Uncharted 3, they involve T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, the Rub’ al Khali desert and the legendary lost city Iram of the Pillars. Off you go, then, on a wild-eyed adventure, channeling the Oscar-winning Peter O’Toole epic as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark by way of Romancing the Stone in what amounts to a lovingly crafted action-adventure that rises above all others in its celebration of the interactive cinematic experience.

5. Batman: Arkham City

We thought 2009′s Arkham Asylum was the best Batman video game that could ever be made — it was a moody, assured outing that let players skulk, brawl and detect among the hero’s craziest enemies. Amazingly, developer Rocksteady’s second effort with the Gotham Guardian tops that game in almost every way.

Arkham City takes place in a superprison carved out of half of Gotham that is run by a psychiatrist mastermind who knows Batman’s secret identity; it’s chock-full of ordinary thugs and dozens of supervillains. The sequel boasts a deeper (yet just as accessible) combat system set in an epically scaled environment where players can swoop, glide and pounce in a plethora of missions. Each white-knuckle fight sequence and spot-on character moment is evidence that the British gamemakers have soaked up every available reservoir of Batman lore. What they’ve squeezed out ranks among the best Dark Knight material that any medium — film, comic, television — has yet offered.

6. Bastion

Created in a small San Jose, Calif., house by indie game studio Supergiant Games, Bastion ushered players into a bluesy science-fantasy fable in which a world lies fractured by a civilization’s poor choices. Typical role-playing tropes like leveling up weapons and adding party members were transformed into achingly personal milestones, thanks to gravel-voiced narrations that reacted in real time to how you played. The downloadable title evokes the look and play of video-game cartridges from 20 years ago, and that’s by design. Its triumph, though, lies in commanding metaphor and nostalgia so powerfully that players of all sorts feel as if they’ve come of age all over again. The hero may be called the Kid, but he stars in an exceedingly mature game.

7. Skyrim

Take one part George R.R. Martin, two parts Beowulf, mix with Grand Theft Auto‘s open-world, go-anywhere angle, and out pops Skyrim, a fantasy role-playing game that’s definitely not a kite-surfing sim. Beneath the fantasy tropes of Skyrim, in which you play a classic zero-to-hero type with progressively dragon-powered abilities, lies a remarkably mature commentary on the nature of empires, with racial- and gender-related undertones. But Skyrim‘s greatest triumph is its ability to coax you from its beaten paths at every turn. What’s the farmer over there do? Why? What’s that strange light in the forest? Want to help someone kick a nasty drug habit? Who’s supplying the drugs? Skyrim invites you to find out and to craft your own story on your own terms in a world more breathtakingly realized than any before it. If you want a glimpse into gaming’s crystal ball, you’ll want to check this out.

8. Dark Souls

Dark Souls could well be the hardest (and most rewarding) video game you’ll ever play: a grueling action-adventure about a hero who storms through gloomily lit castles and caverns, smashing, skewering and sometimes setting alight enemies who, upon dying, relinquish souls. Those souls, which manifest as hovering points of light, whoosh toward you like fireflies drawn to a bug zapper, filling your pockets with eldritch currency. If you die before spending it on upgrades, you lose it all, making Dark Souls a game of wagers, or “gothic-flavored investment banking.” Do you push forward or turn back, breaking stride, to cash out before trying again? Call it gaming on tenterhooks, an improbably satisfying experience drizzled in dread — a return to form for gamers who relish playing on tightropes, net-free, wrapped in a gorgeous, alien ax-murdering otherworld.

9. Sword & Sworcery

Easily the most beautiful mobile game of the year — maybe the most beautiful game of the year, period — Sword & Sworcery (personally, I like to pronounce that extra w) is a slowed-down, chilled-out, highly self-aware D&D-type fantasy adventure set to an ambient track of sublime mellowness. You, a hero, have come to this lush, overcast, pointillist world in order to solve puzzles, liberate sylvan sprites, kill something every once in a while and generally bask in the powerfully calm atmosphere of a game unlike anything else on the iOS platform. You have to take it at its own pace: it’s a zero-adrenaline ride. Just groove on the spacey vibe and the smart writing and the post-Impressionist gorgeousness of the world — if Georges Seurat made a fantasy RPG, it would be Sword & Sworcery.
10. Battlefield 3

There was a lot of hullabaloo about the two big first-person military-combat games that came out this fall: Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. As it turns out, they’re both very, very good: dark, satisfying, sometimes disturbingly authentic, with remarkable state-of-the-art destructible environments and physics models. (Practically every object you see is fully modeled.) Modern Warfare 3 was a big-budget thrill ride: disposable enemies swarming at you, begging to be mowed down by large-caliber automatic weapons. Battlefield 3 was a subtler high, and it felt newer and edgier, which is why it gets the nod here. It’s a grittier, slower-paced, more naturalistic experience, darker and more novelistic. You’re more inclined to take it slow in Battlefield 3 and make as few mistakes as you can, because you actually care when you and your virtual buddies die. But both games are excellent entries in the genre. If they were Spielberg movies, Modern Warfare 3 would be Indiana Jones and Battlefield 3 would be Saving Private Ryan.

Source: Time

In another context, this “No Light, No Light” could be the sound of a religious revival. Florence Welch’s rich voice has never sounded better than on this track; her fervent, even rapturous, lamentations about her partner’s lost love resonate like requests for salvation made by a faltering believer with arms raised to the sky. “Heaven help me, I need to make it right” she wails, but gets no reply. Replete with harps and a tribal drum beat, “No Light, No Light” operates as a plea for salvation that will soon have you running to your deity of choice.
2. Adele, ‘Rolling in the Deep’

Sometimes you hear a tune and you just know that it will last; that in twenty years you’ll be scanning the radio dial, and the singer’s opening wail will find you again, accentuated by a kick drum and beat so recognizable that they feel like an old friend. That song — one of them, anyway — will be Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” The British singer’s passionate retort to a man who has hurt her is one of the boldest, bluesiest ballads ever written. Since its release last winter, “Rolling in the Deep” has become pervasive, appearing on Glee, on The Voice — hell, even John Legend covered it. It’s the story of two people who “could have had it all,” but one of them threw it away, leaving the listener aligned with the wounded one (that would be Adele). Adele’s voice is in top form here, alternating between high and low notes smoothly and quickly, just as she switches between mournful and vengeful emotions. Anger and resentment never sounded this catchy.

3. Mayer Hawthorne, ‘A Long Time

With just one song, the 32-year-old Detroit DJ-turned-singer has reinterpreted the Motown sound. “A Long Time” is an ode to Hawthorne’s hometown, about how Barry (Gordy) and Henry (Ford) built up the Motor City only to see it come crashing down. “We’ll return it to its former glory,” Hawthorne promises, “But it just takes so long.” Given the state of the economy right now, his words could easily apply to entire country. But it’s hard to feel downtrodden with a beat this funky — “A Long Time” is practically begging to be accompanied by Soul Train-type dance moves.

4. Jay-Z and Kanye West, ‘Otis’

The lead single off Watch the Throne mixes and loops Otis Redding’s passionate shouts and screams from “Try a Little Tenderness,” paying homage to his soulful style while mixing it up by adding heavy beats and chopping up the original track’s piano tune. “I guess I got my swagger back!” Jay-Z declares as Redding’s impassioned “gotta-na-na-na” line provides a pounding backdrop. Hova and Yeezy then trade witty, lighthearted verses (standout: “last week I was in my other other Benz”) to create a genre-defying tune drawing equally from soul, hip-hop and pop. “Otis” is clever, upbeat and irresistibly fun.
5. Nicki Minaj, ‘Super Bass‘

Nicki Minaj is the rare female artist making headway in a hip-hop world still largely dominated by men; Kanye West and Drake have both featured her on their albums only to find that her snarled guest raps outshine their own. She largely cages her wild side on her own debut album Pink Friday, but one exception is the peppy “Super Bass.” Here, Minaj spouts bubbly raps so fast that they’d even make speed-rapping titan Busta Rhymes do a double-take. With a simple refrain — “You got that boom ba-doom boom, boom ba-doom boom, super bass” — Minaj has found a way to mold her savagery to fit pop music’s standards. The way her voice switches from a coquettish coo to a violent roar in that first verse belies what would otherwise be just another soft, innocent pop song.
6. tUnE yArDs, ‘Gangsta’

A police siren, alarms that cut in and out and children’s voices kick off tUnE yArDs’ “Gangsta,” a rollicking anthem inspired by singer Merrill Garbus’ move into a violent neighborhood — Oakland. “Gangsta” is the audible representation of what it’s like to move to a big city: it’s loud, it’s disjointed, it doesn’t feel familiar, and its dissonant sounds can make your head hurt. But eventually, those sounds coalesce in a rhythm, as wild drums and explosive horns turn “Gangsta” into a full-blown dance song. It’s easily the strangest, most creative pop tune this year.

7. Cults, ‘Go Outside’

The dreamy, distorted, lo-fi Cults have produced an effortlessly breezy song with a melody that isn’t so much sung as it is released into the air. The lead single off the band’s self-titled debut album, “Go Outside” sounds like an innocent call to play in the sunshine. But don’t be fooled by its chiming glockenspiel or the children’s voices in the chorus, for the tune has a sinister side: it’s preceded by an audio recording of Jonestown cult leader Jim Jones saying, “To me, death is not a fearful thing. It’s living that’s treacherous.” Jones’ message gives added weight to the lyrics’ subtle references to depression — “You really want to stay inside and sleep the light away” — and turns the song from a celebration of life into something much darker.

Bonus trivia: Jones’ followers also appear in the music video; director Isaiah Seret spliced together original footage to make it appear as if the People’s Temple are actually singing along.

8. Tyler the Creator, ‘Yonkers’

(Warning: this song contains obscene language)

The Los Angeles rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (also known as OFWGKTA or just Odd Future) has incited controversy for its violent and misogynist lyrics. But whatever your opinion on the artistic validity of this controversial group, there’s no denying that 20-year-old Tyler the Creator’s “Yonkers” has sprouted a new branch — minimalistic rap — on hip-hop’s family tree. “Yonkers” has no chorus. It has no discernible beat save for the horror movie-esque screeching sound that runs through the entire track. It’s not a song that you’d want to play at a party, groove along to in your car, or even put on when you’re relaxing at home. No, it’s so sparse and inaccessible that it functions more like a piece of performance art. “Yonkers” creates a thrilling sense of uneasiness that the music world hadn’t seen since the early days of punk.
9. St. Vincent, ‘Cruel’

St. Vincent (née Annie Clark) has a knack for making the macabre sound merry. Her ode to abuse is a unique combination of art rock, disco and baroque pop. The muddled, messy guitar riffs add a bit of grime to the otherwise cheerful tune, as Clark sings about “waving flares in the air” for help only to have her rescuers “blow past,” laughing. On “Cruel,” Clark has crafted a melody so beautiful it could be sung by a Disney princess, bound it, gagged it and dragged it through the mud.

10. Foster the People, ‘Pumped Up Kicks’

This surprise hit finds frontman Mark Foster declaring that the kids with the cool shoes, cool clothes, and cool attitudes better run away from him before he shoots them. And yet, he’s delivered this murderous threat as a fuzzy dance pop tune; the exact type of song that those oh, so cool kids are going to want to sing. With a subdued drum beat and spoken-word verses, the electronic-tinged track is one of the most undeniably enjoyable tunes to hit the Billboard charts this year.

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.

2. Hugo

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.

3. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

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.

4. The Tree of Life

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.

5. War Horse

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.

6. Super 8

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.

7. Cave of Forgotten Dreams

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.

8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

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.”

9. Rango

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.

10. Fast Five

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.

Source: Time

Unlike many of my critical brethren, I have in the past found merit in Adam Sandler’s comedy, and not just in his cute Wedding Singer days. As recently as February I sat through Just Go with It without suffering much. I even laughed some; you could say I just went with it. That proved impossible with Jack and Jill, in which Jack (Adam Sandler), a commercial director, endures a holiday visit from the embarrassing twin sister he loathes, played by Sandler in drag. The question arises: Does Sandler have it in for some female relative — an aunt, grandmother, sister or cousin? Was there an elementary-school incident during which he was beaten by a frump with cankles and a tendency to whine and lisp? The level of anger in his portrayal of an idiotic, crass, needy Jewish lady from the Bronx suggests some deep-rooted trauma somewhere. Or maybe he hates us, the audience. It certainly felt that way.

2. Sucker Punch

Wildly exploitative sexism, couched as girl power, from 300 director Zack Snyder. A teenager named Baby Doll (the entirely dull Emily Browning) is tossed into a mental asylum by her evil stepfather, who either raped and killed Baby’s little sister or just killed her. Within the confines of the loony bin, Baby Doll visits various alternative realities, all populated with other beautiful young girls wearing rompers, schoolgirl kilts and such. The other realities include a busy bordello and ongoing martial-arts/steampunk/dragon-filled battles directed by the Wise Man (Scott Glenn). Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone, poor things, are fellow inmates in all realities. Baby Doll hatches a plan to escape using a combination of kung fu moves and supersexy dancing that the audience never sees (Snyder chooses a strange time for discretion), but it’s a race against time, since she’s scheduled to be lobotomized by a handsome doctor (Jon Hamm). Snyder, who has a story and screenplay credit, appears to have been influenced by everything from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to Sin City and maybe some old episodes of Charlie’s Angels. That’s a combination that can make you beg for the ice pick and mallet.

3. Red Riding Hood

Amanda Seyfried’s big eyes are mesmerizing. Her blond hair falls in pretty waves. She looks wonderful in red. Those are the only good things to be said about this grotesque version of the classic fairy tale, which was directed by Catherine Hardwicke. In keeping with Hardwicke’s Twilight past (she helmed the first film), Red is ripe with twisted messages about sexuality and beckoning werewolves, but, hard though it may be to believe, it’s much, much sillier than Twilight. Seeing what Hollywood did to this fairy tale is a reminder to not get too excited about the prospects of next year’s Snow White & the Huntsman and Mirror, Mirror. On the other hand, the movie is proof that Gary Oldman, who chews the scenery as a witch-hunting priest in Red Riding Hood and stars as the perfectly reserved George Smiley in December’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, can rebound from anything.

4. Your Highness

This was a year when the charm of wasted slackers wore very thin. Russell Brand was wholly obnoxious in the Arthur remake, Seth Rogen a useless bore in The Green Hornet. But the most repellent of them all was Danny McBride as Thadeous in Your Highness. The movie seemed to have Mel Brooksian potential: two medieval princes, one saintly (James Franco), the other a lazy stoner (McBride) set out on a quest to save a damsel in distress (Zooey Deschanel). With David Gordon Green directing, this was basically a Pineapple Express reunion. But Your Highness turned out to be a bewildering disaster that even a dozen bong hits couldn’t save. McBride, who co-wrote the screenplay, is a funny guy, but the film’s jokes skew toward appealing to homophobes and fifth graders. It truly feels as though something is missing, almost as if McBride and Green sketched out a series of situations that they planned to fill in with improvisation before being unexpectedly called away. How did Natalie Portman justify the gift of her bare bottom to a movie like this?

5. Zookeeper

The worst children’s movie I saw this year* didn’t immediately present itself as such. Watching an affable zookeeper (Kevin James) putter around a Boston zoo wasn’t painful. Not that I cared about his romantic dilemma — instead of noticing his lovely colleague (Rosario Dawson), he twists himself in knots to woo back a superficial twit (Leslie Bibb) who dumped him because she inexplicably disapproves of his job. Who doesn’t like animals? Or enjoy the powerful beacon of a Rosario Dawson smile? But then the animals start speaking and the tasteless torture begins. Sylvester Stallone voices a blowhard lion, Cher is his emasculating mate, and most gruesome of all, Nick Nolte is a gorilla who longs to dine at TGIF’s. The combination of inane human behavior (the zookeeper takes urinating lessons from a wolf) and gross imaginings of conversations between animals is toxic.

6. Trespass

Director Joel Schumacher’s home-invasion drama stars two Oscar winners, Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage. So how bad could it be? Extremely. Signing up for a screenplay like this was an unfathomable choice, at least for Kidman. (Let’s face it, the Cage rule is to make at least four bad films for every good one.) “I just feel like there had to have been Soviet blackmailers involved,” my local video-store clerk said as he handed over the DVD of Trespass, released less than a month after its video-on-demand/theatrical rollout. Kidman is the neglected wife, Cage a diamond broker who secretly mortgaged their home to the hilt. Her performance is wan and his is cold, even when they’re clinging together on the floor, awaiting death. The home invaders are familiar types: a hunk, a jittery stripper and a slavering muscleman whose principal duty is to up the rape-fear factor. It’s all titillation, though; these yahoos aren’t remotely scary. I never thought I’d say this, but here is a movie that made me look back fondly on both versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in which at least the brutality was honest and the threats vivid.

7. The Future

I very much enjoyed writer/director/performance artist Miranda July’s smart 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. I also very much enjoy cats, and rarely a day passes when I don’t narrate something as my own kitty. So don’t think The Future gained its place on this list simply because it features cloying feline narration (voiced by July), although it did confirm my hunch that imagining cat conversation, like clipping one’s nails, is best not done in public. The film’s two youngish Angelenos, Jason (Hamish Linklater), who does tech support on the phone, and dance teacher Sophie (July), are so aimless that their decision to adopt Paw Paw, a stray recovering from an accident, is a huge event, a life changer. In the month before they are to take the cat home, Sophie debases herself with a lover outside her hipster class, while Jason quits his job and makes friends with an eccentric elderly man. Presumably we’re meant to find this infantile couple representative of a generation adrift, because otherwise, what’s the point? Yet July holds them at such an ironic remove that they seem like cardboard cutouts. July positions herself as a provocateur, but she’s more of a scab picker, and the wounds she’s toying with here are minor.

8. I Melt with You

In Big Sur, four longtime friends gather for their annual reunion. There’s a doctor (Rob Lowe) who arrives bearing pharmaceuticals, a sleazebag (Jeremy Piven) with suspicious business dealings and a high school teacher (Thomas Jane) who once was big man on campus. The fourth friend (Christian McKay) is gay and guilt-ridden. They pop pills, snort powders, booze it up and invite hot young locals over. Then one of them drags out a 25-year-old pact, and they confront the disillusionment of their lives. Despite director Mark Pellington’s attempts at suspense — he keeps showing fragments of the pact, but we can’t see what it says, and there’s a local cop (Carla Gugino) whose inopportune investigations might divert the dudes from their mission — there’s no question as to what resolution he has planned for this collective midlife crisis. The journey there is agonizingly long, loud and false. Even the dissipation feels like an act. Only the scenery has merit.

9. Miral

It would be very easy to make a list of the worst movies of the year if one limited oneself simply to those made for the teen demographic. I’m still smarting over I Am Number Four‘s cheesy performances, barely there story and loud pyrotechnics. But a movie like Miral edges out the average trash because of the dashed hopes involved. Director Julian Schnabel brought his artist’s sensibility to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, turning a sappy book into an achingly sensory experience. That and Before Night Falls suggested that whatever he’d have to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this adaptation of Rula Jebreal’s novel would at least be unusual and visually alluring. But Schnabel was defeated by the size of his canvas. He tried to jam decades’ worth of history into two hours and in the end threw up his hands; even the story he used as his framework remained unfinished. Finally, there was his peculiar casting of Indian actress Frieda Pinto to play the title character, a passionate Palestinian schoolgirl — a choice that undercut his good intentions. The performance he got from her in no way validates it.

10. Breaking Dawn

Yeah, I didn’t get it, as scores of you reminded me in our comments section. But the appeal of this cinematic chastity belt about the noble vampire (Robert Pattinson) and the girl who loves him (Kristen Stewart) was not always completely lost on me. I love Anna Kendrick. I like Bella’s buffoonish dad. Somewhere around the second installment of Twilight, an entertaining sense of self-parody emerged. But this entry, which held within it the teasing promise of explosive consummation, instead delivered soap-opera-level dry humping in high-thread-count sheets. The film’s crisis was something genuine — a hybrid fetus sucking the life out of Bella from the inside. Yet the vapid cast of Cullens standing around the old manse made the topic about as compelling as a debate over whether to order new curtains. The birth itself should have been exciting. Instead, the arrival of the youngest Cullen, as directed by Bill Condon, felt like just another anticlimactic piece of this prim, weirdly pro-life, anti-fun saga. This was the bloodiest of the Twilight movies but somehow the most bloodless.

Forty-eight on Dec. 18, he still hears the music of dreamboat squeals from his fans. Now an alto chorus of critical approval has joined the Brad Pitt symphony. The New York Film Critics Circle gave him its Best Actor award for two exceptional performances. In The Tree of Life he plays Mr. O’Brien, a demanding father of three boys; he loves them but is unable to express it, barking out commands, because that’s what a father does, when he wants nothing more than to hold them and be held in their esteem. In Moneyball, Pitt plays the sort of man Mr. O’Brien might wish he could be: Billy Beane, the real-life general manager of the Oakland As, who has a vision (of reviving his team with the smart application of statistics), knows how to communicate it and gets instant results. While Pitt poured his considerable star quality into playing Beane, he also got results as the film’s producer, spending years coaxing the adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best seller through many rewrites and three directors (finally settling on Bennett Miller). We’ll add a third Pitt accolade: he does deliciously comic voice work as Will the Krill in Happy Feet Two. What actor this year could equal the man who has everything?

2. Michael Fassbender for Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method and Shame

“Michael Fassbender” doesn’t have quite the marquee zing of “Brad Pitt.” But the handsome German-Irish actor, who came to the art-house world’s attention three years ago playing Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, outgunned Pitt with four remarkable performances in films released this year. In Jane Eyre he plays the broodingly sensual Rochester to Mia Wasikowska’s sympathetic governess. He is the young Magneto (who grows up to be a maleficent Ian McKellen) in the summer prequel X-Men: First Class and Carl Jung, irresistibly drawn to a comely patient, in A Dangerous Method. All these characters, in whom Fassbender invests so much of his feral intelligence, were known to viewers through earlier films or biographies. But in McQueen’s Shame he plays a character — Manhattan office worker Brendan — who is new and unknown. In a blazing exhibition, Fassbender reveals the desperate urges of a sex addict, seeking anonymous release while denying himself human contact. Would any man want to be him? Could any woman resist him? Hollywood can’t keep its hands off Fassbender. He has already filmed roles in Steven Soderbergh’s action film Haywire and Ridley Scott’s Alien semiprequel Prometheus. So we’ll be seeing a good deal more of this Mensa heartthrob, though perhaps not as much as in Shame.

3. Woody Harrelson for Rampart

For eight years the blithely innocent bartender on Cheers, Woody Harrelson has matured into an actor of wide, weird range. As a media-savvy psycho in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, a porn king fighting for the First Amendment in The People vs. Larry Flynt, a Twinkies-addicted survivor in Zombieland and a bounty hunter in No Country for Old Men, Harrelson put a swagger in every scene, carving out a stark and engaging character: the wild American cowboy riding into the present on a stallion of lunatic machismo. His career topper may be playing Dave “Date Rape” Brown, an LAPD detective in director Oren Moverman’s dark adaptation of a James Ellroy story. A dinosaur among the city’s younger men and women in blue, Dave uses brutal methods to enforce the law; now he’s under an investigation for beating a motorist, but he won’t go down without a fatal fight. Harrelson, who’s as worth watching at rest as when he detonates in calculated rage, pours such power into his character that viewers find themselves rooting for Dave even as they move to shield themselves from the imminent immolation. They become Dave’s partners in crime, and Harrelson’s willing, eager pawns.

4. Michael Lonsdale for Of Gods and Men

How would saints behave in hell? The way Cistercian monks minister to their Algerian villagers during a terrorist uprising in Xavier Beauvois’s starkly beautiful dramatization of a true event. The French monks ignore government warnings of unrest; their lives mean less than their mission. Lambert Wilson radiates a patriarchal grandeur as the group’s abbot, but it’s Michael Lonsdale as Luc, a doctor-priest, who embodies the serenity of a holy man impervious to danger. The 80-year-old actor — son of an Englishman and a French-Irish woman, and known as Michael or Michel in movie credits — played Hugo Drax in the Bond film Moonraker and the Abbot in The Name of the Rose but is familiar to international audiences as a droll, saturnine figure in films directed by Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Joseph Losey and Marguerite Duras. Of Gods and Men twists the Lonsdale persona away from the Machiavellian and into religious and humanist sanctity. He brings equally compelling conviction to creatures of the devil or the

5. Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan for The Trip

There are few deadlier rivalries than comedians trying to one-up each other. The Trip, directed by Michael Winterbottom and condensed to feature length from last year’s six-part BBC series, is ostensibly the record of a journey to English Midland restaurants that Steve Coogan took with friend and fellow actor Rob Brydon. But the movie quickly devolves into Mortal Komedybat when the two men flex their skills at vocal mimicry. “Anyone over 14 who amuses themselves by doing impressions,” Coogan harshly observes, “needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.” Yet the two instantly do dueling Michael Caines: Coogan emphasizing Caine’s nasality, Brydon the lower, slower diction that comes from decades of “all the cigars and brandy.” Working without a script or a net, and playing roles squirmishly close to their real-life personas — Brydon the happy husband, Coogan the dour womanizer — they give the viewer splendid company in this mix of My Dinner with Andre and Sideways. Their badinage provides an immediate and lasting kick as well as the spectacle of two champion word warriors at the top of their game.

6. Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady

When people say Meryl Streep is a great actress, they mean grand actress — one who calculates her moves, her makeup and her accent, and then turns up the thespic volume until her character risks becoming caricature. The tactic works when she plays Dragon Lady roles like the fashion doyenne in The Devil Wears Prada, less so in the more naturalistic settings of Mamma Mia! and Doubt. But given a famous woman to play, Streep eerily locates the voice, face and soul: of Julia Child in Julie & Julia and, with startling acuity, of Margaret Thatcher in this biopic. Smartly written by Abi Morgan (who co-wrote Shame) and directed by Mamma Mia!‘s Phyllida Lloyd, the film spans nearly the complete life of Britain’s first female Prime Minister, from her youth as a greengrocer’s daughter through Oxford and her early years in the Conservative Party (when she is played by Alexandra Roach). Streep takes over in Maggie’s middle age and escorts the PM into a restless retirement, both haunted and warmed by the specter of her late husband Dennis (a marvelous Jim Broadbent). Her performance is a miracle of inhabiting, not editorializing; it turns the boss of 10 Downing Street into a woman meriting our sympathy and sadness. This time, grand is great.
7. Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard for The Help

Women aren’t offered many strong movie roles — unless those roles are all in one movie. And the film doesn’t have to be perfect: in an ensemble morality play like The Help, the characters can be drawn in broad, swift strokes, so that the heroines and harridans are instantly distinguishable. Tate Taylor’s movie, from the best seller written by childhood pal Kathryn Stockett, posits that in 1960s Jackson, Miss., black is beautiful and white is either hateful or ignorant — unless the white person is the Stockett stand-in Skeeter (Emma Stone), a young writer who plans a book of testimony by the town’s black maids. For our purposes, forget the bizarre equation of Skeeter’s publishing problems with the virulent racism the maids endure and consider the varied tones the actresses achieve. Among those playing the maids: the ferocious moral power in Viola Davis’ saintly stoicism, and the warmth incarnated by Octavia Spencer, for whom revenge is a dish best served as a chocolate pie. Among the white ladies of Jackson: Bryce Dallas Howard’s pearly villainy (a spectacular reading of comic wickedness) as a Junior League Miss who could be a Klansman in a fluffy dress, and Jessica Chastain’s blowsy young wife, unloved by the debs and blundering into a liberal take on the race issue. These fine, juicy performances have something for everyone — including the Oscar voters, if only they can decide which actresses to honor.

8. Khomotso Manyaka for Life, Above All

Charlotte Brontë’s heroine, a tough, sensitive soul lashed by grim fate and the torrid moor winds, has been played in movies by Joan Fontaine, Susannah York, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Samantha Morton. But never has an actress shown Mia Wasikowska’s composure to face both icy adversity and fiery romance (in the person of Michael Fassbender’s Rochester). Offscreen, this 22-year-old Australian, who made a powerful impression as a suicidal teen gymnast in Season 1 of HBO’s In Treatment and as a deadpan dreamer in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, is a friendly sort in a blond pixie cut who could pass for Michelle Williams’ kid sister. But when in character, she becomes a mirror into a rich interior world. Her Jane betrays neither glumness nor self-pity; she observes even Rochester, whom she secretly loves, with the poised intelligence of an extraterrestrial visitor. This illuminating stillness is a gift shared by few English-speaking actresses. Her mentor might be the French star Isabelle Huppert, high mistress of revealing a soul without making faces. Hollywood will do itself a favor if it writes new stories on her blank-slate face; if it finds the strength and mystery in Wasikowska that Rochester did in Jane.

10. Ameena Matthews for The Interrupters

Do-gooder groups, no less than Hollywood movies, benefit from star quality; and CeaseFire, the group of reformed criminals that intervenes in Chicago street disputes to prevent violence, has Ameena Matthews, a petite charisma machine in a Muslim headscarf. To Steve James’ horrifying, inspiring documentary, she lends her magnetic watchability. Her job is to stanch the impulse in some kids to go, as she says, from “zero to rage in 30 seconds.” When one young man tells her he fights every day, she smiles and says, “You’re too handsome to do that.” The daughter of the notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, now serving a 155-year prison sentence on a domestic-terrorism conviction, Matthews channels her father’s seductive eloquence into crisis management. The Interrupters, which, like James’ Hoop Dreams, was preposterously denied an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, has a full posse of heroic figures trying to stop crime on the spot. But Matthews is the prime galvanizer. Addressing mourners at the funeral of a teenager who died in gang violence, she says, “We got a responsibility to bring up our community to be vibrant. Whatever it is that’s going on, cease the fire, call the truce.”

Source: Time

Daniel Clowes continues to plot a lofty, lonely course through the subconscious of popular culture with this hilariously bleak graphic novel starring a superhero who, in his venality and triviality, makes the heroes of Kick-Ass and Watchmen look like Supermen. Andy, a skinny loser-type growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, discovers that smoking a cigarette gives him superstrength; later he comes into possession of the titular death ray, which looks like a classic Hugo Gernsback–style prop, except that it actually works. Andy is too lost and feckless to organize any kind of actual heroic activities — which, let’s face it, is a pretty realistic assessment of how things would work out — and we watch helplessly as he, with the help of a weird outcast friend, completely and utterly squanders his gifts.

Source: Time

Novelists used to specialize in entertaining, funny-sad, well-observed stories about complicated family relationships. But such books were in surprisingly short supply this year, which makes a gem like Maine all the more precious. Sullivan gives us three sunny, alcoholic acres of Maine coastline and three generations of Kelleher women: the upright matriarch, the good-girl daughter-in-law, the black sheep and the black sheep’s writer daughter. All four are busy forging complicated compromises between domesticity and career, love and marriage. Nobody is completely happy with the deal she’s struck, but they have to learn to live with it or strike another before it’s too late.

Source: Time