Toy Story 3 (2010) NYT Critics' Pick

Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is hoisted by his friends in “Toy Story 3.”
Voyage to the Bottom of the Day Care Center
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: June 18, 2010

“Toy Story 3” begins with a rattling, exuberant set piece that has nothing to do with the tale that follows but that nonetheless sums up the ingenuity, and some of the paradoxes, that have made this Pixar franchise so marvelous and so successful. The major toys — Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), the Potato Heads (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Jessie (Joan Cusack), Rex (Wallace Shawn) and the others — are in a setting at once wholly unfamiliar and instantly recognizable. They’re in a western, albeit one made in the amped-up modern action style, rather than the more stately idiom of old-time oaters. A train is hurtling down the tracks; a bridge explodes; stuff is falling out of the sky. There are force fields and laser beams and a big noisy surprise every time you blink. More

I Am Love NYT Critics' Pick

Tilda Swinton, as a Russian matriarch married into a wealthy Milanese family, with Edoardo Gabbriellini, as a young chef.
From Tapestried Villa to Sylvan Glade, Aristocratic Women in Love
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: June 18, 2010

Amid all the luxuries on display in the Italian film “I Am Love” — the chandeliers, tapestries and paneled walls, the paintings, statuary and white-gloved servants — nothing holds your gaze as forcefully as Tilda Swinton’s alabaster face. The first time you see that vision, her character, Emma Recchi, a Russian who’s married into a wealthy Milanese family, is stage-managing the lavish birthday party that opens the film. By the end of this often soaringly beautiful melodrama, which closes with a funeral, Emma’s face will have crumpled into a ruin. But it will also be fully alive, having been granted, like Pygmalion’s statue, the breath of life. More

Let It Rain (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

IFC Films
Agnès Jaoui, from left, Jamel Debbouze and Jean-Pierre Bacri in “Let It Rain,” a comedy of manners directed by Ms. Jaoui.
You Have Issues? So Does Everybody
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 18, 2010

The personal is political in the films of Agnès Jaoui, a sort of Gallic Woody Allen whose comedies of manners reveal a sensibility acutely attuned to the tiniest nuances of the mind games people play. Ms. Jaoui’s films may lack Mr. Allen’s comic shtick, quotable one-liners and showy metaphysical angst, but they are precisely calibrated dissections of the pretensions and insecurities of the French chattering class. As critical as she can be of her characters, Ms. Jaoui portrays them with the evenhanded sympathy of a wise therapist who likes her clients despite their annoying foibles. More

45365 (2009) NYT Critics' Pick

A scene from the documentary “45365,” set in Sidney, Ohio.
Tiny Moments That Tell One Small Town’s Story
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: June 17, 2010

A beguiling slice of Midwestern impressionism, “45365” drops in on the residents of Sidney, Ohio, to observe their lunches and haircuts, trials and transgressions. Filmed over nine months in 2007, this remarkable patchwork of unremarkable lives was assembled by Bill and Turner Ross, brothers, native sons and natural filmmakers. Alighting on county fair and high school football game, retirement home and voting booth, their detached, glancing gaze requires neither narration nor intertitles: the images — and the chatter of local radio — say it all. More

Stonewall Uprising NYT Critics' Pick

A patron of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village confronts the police in “Stonewall Uprising.”
June 28, 1969: Turning Point in Gay Rights History
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 16, 2010

“The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” More