[Year In Film] Three Critics, One List, 10 Best

© Films du Losange, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

The White Ribbon

The Weinstein Company

Inglourious Basterds

Related Content

• Darkness on the Edge of Town in 'Zero Dark Thirty'
  December 20, 2012
• The 2012 Village Voice Film Critics' Poll
  December 20, 2012
• Patton Oswalt
  May 2, 2013
• The Top 10 Films of 2012
  December 27, 2012
• Quentin Tarantino's Unchained Malady
  December 20, 2012

More About

• The Hurt Locker
• Quentin Tarantino
• Michael Haneke
• Robert Siegel
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

10. Up
I know there’s a kid’s movie in here somewhere—my 6-year-old says so—but it takes a good 20 minutes to find it. That’s how long it is till Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) lets loose with the balloons and winds up in South America, where he confronts a hero-turned-villain—the stuff of every great cartoon, including every one of Pixar’s previous. But, first, the wind-up: a nearly wordless love story in which little kids Carl and Ellie meet cute and grow up and marry and suffer heartbreak (she can’t have kids!) and smile through each defeat with grace and grow old till—oh, no—Ellie’s dead. And then the old man lugs over his slumped shoulders every single memory, literally, till at last the burden is eased by another who has been abandoned. Pretty mature stuff. (RW)