[Insert unforgettably snarky headline here. Someday.]

Around the new year it becomes easier for the purveyor of high-minded motion pictures to decide what movies to go see, because it's increasingly clear which ones are angling for an award or two. After the mindless pablum of summer entertainment many viewers are hankering for something a little more substantial to sink their teeth into, and look to the year-end awards for clues as to what might pass for serious cinema. (There are always exceptions to these sweeping generalizations - American Beauty was released in the summer, and The Grinch, though a winter film, won't be in the running for much of anything come Oscar® time.) "It's supposed to be good" replaces "it's supposed to be fun" as the standard theatergoing reason during the colder seasons, and anyone with the slightest interest in the film scene starts feeling that anticipatory thrill when contemplating a beloved film's Oscar® chances.

If The Emperor's New Groove garners any critical citations, such a windfall should advise Disney they may have stumbled upon a satisfying new formula for their regular non-live-action releases. I haven't seen an animated Disney production since Aladdin (excluding Toy Story, which we'll say for convenience's sake is by Pixar), having a distaste for doe-eyed waistless females and anthropomorphized forest animals and housewares, all of which burst into song at the slightest prompting. Since resuming their tradition of G-rated animated fare (and the concomitant merchandising deluge) with The Little Mermaid over a decade ago, the folks at Disney have quite possibly started to bore filmgoers with their endless stream of reliable instant classics. It's like how Merchant-Ivory fell out of fashion - too much of a good thing, no matter how good, eventually loses its appeal. Formula is still formula.

All the "Making of…" TV specials may have clued you in to what happened in the development of Groove. Production ultimately ran itself into the ground after millions of dollars spent, and to shake itself out of a creative rut the masterminds jettisoned all of the songs (save the opening theme), stopped obsessing over churning out no less than mind-boggling animation, and pared the film down to its bare essentials: a script bursting with zingers, a cast with attitude, and visual creations if not so realistic like Snow White then sufficiently wacky to guarantee no one gets too tired of staring. This is closer to the frenetic "Animaniacs" school of thinking, and it's an absolute bullseye, just what we needed to break the mold and restore our faith in Disney's collective and corporate talent.

Of course, you could have David Spade provide the voice for a sock puppet and be assured laughs. The time is right for Spade, the master of all things sarcastic, to flesh out an animated character and hurl a neverending stream of condescension at unsuspecting cartoon personae. Irony has a higher comic currency than ever before, especially among children, and Disney did right to avoid all the trademark earnestness that plagued their earlier protagonists. Also brilliant to cast Spade not as the hero, but instead a self-centered egotistical crypto-Mesopotamian dictator named Cuzco who doesn't think twice of appropriating the idyllic hilltop residence of a peasant named Potcha (voiced by John Goodman) to construct his own summer getaway, Cuzcotopia. Finally, it's the central Disney character who's in need of redemption, not the one trying to right wrongs in between musical numbers.

Stroke of genius number two, lure no less than the ageless Eartha Kitt to voice yet another femme fatale, the emperor's advisor Izma who plots to knock Cuzco off and replace him on the throne. Izma is both a completely fabulous and a fantastically withered crone, and it's a credit to Kitt to consent to so many cracks on her character's looks and age. (The equally-eternal Tom Jones sings the opening salsa number, suggesting Disney's casting office is now keeping one eye on its older viewers who could appreciate the potential for camp in its selections.) Izma dabbles around in magic potions, and in the course of attempting to poison her boss, instead morphs him into a llama. (Note to the Disney Store: where are the llama stuffed animals????? Did you have so little faith in this film you under-merchandised?)

After escaping the palace, it turns out Cuzco's only chance to reclaim his throne and his humanity (external and internal, the latter in greatest need) is with Potcha's help, and the peasant agrees to help only if he reneges on his summer home plans. It takes most of the movie for Cuzco to discover how heartless (and friendless) he's been as emperor, a very believable pace for a change of heart, and in the meantime they're trying to avoid Izma and her young studmuffin assistant Kronk (Patrick Warburton, also blessed with a tolerance for self-mockery while once again cast as a dumb jock) who intend to finish what they started. Also thrown into the mix is Potcha's wife ChiCha, no less cunning than Izma herself and played brilliantly by that other "Just Shoot Me" staple Wendie Malick.

Disney's ultimate coup, however, is in finally being brave enough to mock itself. As the bad guys chase our heroes through the jungle, our perspective switches to a higher altitude so we can follow their paths in blue and red dotted lines along a map, and when we return to their level they notice these same lines appearing on the ground beneath them. When Izma descends to her subterranean lair, she boards no less than a Disneyland ride knockoff to get there. And deconstructing one of the oldest conventions of narrative elision, Cuzco and Potcha arrive back at Izma's den to look for an antidote well ahead of their pursuers, but Izma and Kronk appear almost instantly behind them: "How'd you get here so fast?", asks an unbelieving llama. "Well, it's quite simple, we - " (pause) " - How did we get back so fast???" Hilarious labor-saving device for scriptwriters: don't bother explaining why we should suspend disbelief - just acknowledge its implausibility and move on. And to those who argue their children will bemoan the lack of musical interludes in Groove, may I point out that same absence in all the Pokemon movies, which none of the munchkins seemed to mind? Songwriters nationwide may be fearing for their livelihoods, and to that I say, too damn bad.

You Can Count On Me has found audiences on the strength of Laura Linney's lead performance, and if she can't swing a Best Actress Oscar® nomination then I don't know what it takes anymore. As Sammy, a bank employee in a small upstate New York town with an eight-year-old son and a taste for country tunes, Linney ably portrays a woman who initially appears to be the hero of the tale but is bit by bit knocked off that pedestal. Linney exhibits moxie in undertaking a subtly and increasingly complex role which spares us few faults of her character. This is the sort of portrait we'd be treated to were we, in the afterlife, to ask to see the movie of our life. And we might regret making the request.

We're initially led to equate Sammy with the wholesome town she's lived in her whole life. After both her parents were killed in a car crash in her adolescence, it appears Sammy never left her parents' house, eventually raising her own child, Rudy Junior, within the same walls, a child who's constantly curious who his absent father was. (All signs point to Sammy having made some rather poor choices in men in the past, Rudy Senior being the least wise.)

Soon enough we witness three significant events in Sammy's life occurring almost simultaneously, all involving men: her younger brother comes back to visit after a long absence, she gets a new boss at the bank, and her on-again-off-again boyfriend proposes to her. Her brother Terry was clearly disinclined to stick around in their hometown after high school, and since leaving has become little more than a vagabond. Her boss (Matthew Broderick, reprising his uptight performance in Election) fully intends to make his mark at his new domain, and starts cracking down on such unprofessional displays as lively computer screen colors, endearing himself to noone in the process. And though its apparent Sammy has often settled for less in her romantic life, somehow she can't accept her (painfully cute) boyfriend's proposal. It's a self-assured decision we applaud, but only briefly, for she instead finds herself inaugurating an affair with her previously contemptible boss (who has a wife, and a child on the way). In interacting with these three men Sammy fluctuates from moments of high moral clarity to extremely poor judgement. (She can't believe herself she's fooling around with Broderick, and the spectrum of emotions she displays one night driving home from the hotel is priceless, and all too familiar to many of us who've gone with the carnal flow.)

Central to Sammy's inner conflicts is her brother Terry, whose presence back in the house almost instantly starts generating havoc with her carefully preserved domestic order. Mark Ruffalo is virtually indistinguishable from his character's slacker persona, a young man who always means well but somehow always meets with crushing disapproval. Asked to look after Rudy Jr. (the outstanding Rory Culkin, taking everything in silently with his eyes, as kids are wont to do), Terry either forgets to pick him up after school or takes him late at night to bars to wager on pool. Even at the worst moments, though, Rudy Jr. seems to grow increasingly attached to his uncle, mostly because Terry always talks to him like he's twenty, not like a kid. Terry is undependable at best, however, and after confessing to Sammy his prolonged lack of communication is due to a prison term and then asking for money for his pregnant girlfriend in Massachusetts to get an abortion, Sammy's patience starts to wear thin.

The brilliant irony in Ken Lonergan's script is that in between trying to fix her brother's life, Sammy realizes her life is at least as empty as his. Everything eventually goes to hell and, realizing she has never been, as she perceived herself, the only person with her act together, Sammy has to try to put things as they were. Longeran slowly pieces together Sammy's character in mostly short scenes, throwing little moments at us in succession that gradually humanize her. His ear for dialogue is dead-on, but his choices of soundtrack music (most intrusively, an oft-repeated and incongruous cello piece lifted from The Hunger) prove less seamless. And, sadly, more than once the spell is broken by the sight of the sound mike descending from above, an amateurish gaffe we have to try very hard to ignore.

In the end Terry takes Rudy Jr. to a trailer park to finally introduce him to the father Sammy tried hard to shield him from, a reunion that quickly turns into a pathetic tussle we've seen all too often on "Cops." That's the last straw for Sammy, and ensures Terry's expulsion from their house. Lonergan refuses to tie things up in a tidy ending, and the film's ultimate saving grace is in refusing to state the obvious punchline as Terry boards his bus to leave town. ("Remember what we always said to each other when we were kids?" Hint: what's the title of the film.) Once again we're shown all you need is a solid script and competent actors, and you can put most of Hollywood to shame (sound mikes notwithstanding). You Can Count On Me may eventually fade into indie obscurity like most Sundance success stories, but one hopes Linney's performance will convince the world of an enormous talent they've been missing.

"I've a naughty tale to tell," begins the Marquis deSade in Quills, one of the oft-mentioned films in discussions of impending Oscar® glory. It's Paris 1794, amidst all the furor of the Revolution, and the Marquis' pornographic writings have contributed in no small part to the antiaristocratic sentiment sweeping the land. Imprisoned at the insane asylum in Charenton in lieu of execution (thanks to his longsuffering wife's connections), deSade arranges for his works to be smuggled out for publication under the nose of the abbe' (Joaquin Phoenix, expanding his range with each film) who oversees his "rehabilitation" (the prescription mandating his continued writing, but strictly for the Marquis' eyes only).

The conjoined themes of Eros and Thanatos are what bind this film from the start, as we mistake for physical ecstasy a maiden's terror before she is guillotined. Her crime? Reading banned literature, specifically that of the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush), whose "encyclopedia of perversions" are in vogue among commoners and nobles alike. We know early on that things are going to go very badly for many people thanks to deSade's boundless pursuit of taboos to break within his literary imaginations. And how far it looks as though things have to fall: the asylum which houses him is surprisingly humane, the inmates well-behaved and creative despite their obvious unsuitability for public life, and the abbe' who looks after their needs more than loving to them all. The Marquis is sufficiently pampered in his cell, deprived of none of his earthly possessions, and the abbe' sincerely wishes to regard deSade as a friend. Kate Winslet, as Madeleine the washwoman, is also willing to bend the rules for deSade, as she turns out to be the agent exporting his writings to the printers. She is also the same washwoman the celibate abbe' seems to have strong feelings for…which establishes an intriguing triangle for the duration of the film.

Everything seems to be going fine until the Emperor Napoleon learns of the subversive books circulating clandestinely throughout his empire, and he sends the draconian Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to accelerate deSade's "reform" with more stern (read: medieval) methods. The essence of deSade's works is defiance, however, and it's possible he knows more about the exercise and underpinnings of power than anyone; increased repression only inspires increased rebellion, and the death spiral among all the dramatis personae commences. The doctor sorely underestimates the power of literature in politically unstable times, and deSade's licentious thoughts even find their way into the doctor's own home, that is to his highly impressionable underage orphan bride. Though Royer-Collard states his intentions to keep his beloved Simone "caged" in their marvelous mansion, like deSade it only increases her appetite for the forbidden.

Rush, with his diabolical smirks, will be rewarded with yet another Best Actor Oscar® nomination for his deliciously uninhibited portrayal of a man more honest with himself than most, never denying his needs to pursue pleasure in all its forms nor his maddening caocethes scribendi (the "incurable itch to write"), perhaps the true prerequisite of the great writer. DeSade is all free will and antiauthoritarianism and theatrical dialogue, one hell of a show, and we spend the duration of the film looking for a sympathetic streak within him (not unsuccessfully, which best testifies to an outstanding acting job). His heedless ambition to find literary expression at any cost is not without consequences to others, however, confirming everyone's worst fears of the power of art. No one escapes Quills untouched, no one survives the tale without scars. In fact, the film is more about those individuals the Marquis' life touches than seeking to understand deSade himself. Madeleine, for example, likes feeling naughty much like a child gets a thrill saying the word "butt," and despite never acting on those carnal impulses insists "if I wasn't such a bad woman on the page, I couldn't be such a good woman in life." (Pay attention, readers, for many of you have just been psychologized.)

The ending is more than a little excessively theatrical at the cost of historical fact, but it remains in the spirit of the film, and satisfies no less. Philip Kaufman directs with dramatic aplomb and is as playful as the protagonist himself in his visual tricks. But above all what he's accomplished is a provocative treatise on the purpose of art itself, arguing a place for even those as morally questionable as deSade: as one of the few surviving characters observes in the end, "in order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice - only then may we know the true meaning of man." The conservative critics effectively silenced, we now await the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences®' seal of approval.

Surprisingly, in a year often derided as among the weakest for films, the sensation of Quills was followed by an even greater event, where the public could finally see what the big deal was with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That the lines for this film were the longest I'd ever seen might suggest the public is starved for some serious filmmaking on a grand scale, and they may have just found it. Any film risks being crushed and sabotaged by so much anticipatory hype, but Tiger remains very much one of a kind, such that all it has to fear is making everything playing on the other screens look utterly facile.

In truth, this is exactly what we've been waiting for, what with kung fu films slowly encroaching into the popular consciousness from the margins. They've been around for decades as largely guilty and esoteric pleasures, but once we got The Matrix, Charlie's Angels, and Jackie Chan here in the mainland, filmmakers realized martial arts didn't always have to predicate trashiness. (To see how degraded the genre can be, compare those examples with the "A Fistful of Yen" episode in Kentucky Fried Movie.) Tiger blends both high and low art, becoming not a kung fu film but a film that happens to have kung fu in it. It was always the cinema's prerogative to combine high art aspirations with the baser appeals of trash, but this balance has eluded most films, falling to one side or the other. Tiger heralds a new direction for cinema, one it's tried to attain all along, presenting effectively the visual marvels of martial arts but being no less artful for it.

Ironically, many of Tiger's story elements look almost cliché on paper: the stoic martial arts master (Chow Yun-Fat) resolving to retire from violence but eventually dragged back into the fray one more time, a female (Michelle Yeoh) whom he loves (but to whom he cannot bring himself to confess his feelings), a young martial arts prodigy with truckloads of potential but needing guidance from a master to truly achieve enlightenment, a fantastically unique sword before which all other weapons are destined to be bisected, and the frequent intrusion of various toughs whose self-assessments quickly take a beating. It's in director Ang Lee's unconventional handling of these elements that keeps the film from feeling typical for even a moment - and this from a director whose previous work exhibited great quality but never suggested he could come up with such an accomplishment. At first you think this story is about discovering the identity of the masked and seeming super-powered thief who steals the formidable Green Destiny sword, but that's hardly a mystery to viewers. Instead the tale shifts its focus onto the young female thief Jen (Zhang Ziyi) and flashes back to gradually reveal how she came to possess such skills and such a willful attitude.

Top billing may go to Yun-Fat and Yeoh, two lions of the Hong Kong cinema who've both achieved some degree of celebrity in the States, but they are in truth foils to the rogue adventuress who was not only the protegee of Yun-Fat's arch-enemy the Jade Fox (yet another fearsome female), but surpasses the Fox in skill and caprice. Her selfish behavior remains largely inscrutable from start to finish, but the film labors to find a spark of goodness within her. You admire her spunk, but she refuses to rise to anything better than anti-heroine status. It's an ambiguity Lee risked much for asking American audiences to accept, but apparently one we can handle. (Welcome to the twenty-first century, Hollywood, are you listening?)

There's even more to it than that, though. Tiger is so much more than the sum of its narrative parts, as Lee sprinkles the film with a multitude of delightful moments that both helps humanize all parties involved and guarantees notice by the Oscar® power brokers. Yeoh looking meaningfully, if briefly, at a pair of street children performing balancing acts in Peking, suggesting an identification with her own past; Jen catching a falling teacup with speed unexpected of a mere governor's daughter; Yeoh, addled by the theft of the sword, forgetting she asked Yun-Fat to join her in Peking; and the most amazing courtship among equals you may ever see, conducted first on horseback, followed by repeated kung fu tussles in the sand, and then some knife-stabbing as foreplay. That last sequence involves Jen, of course, who pursues with a bow-n-arrow the bandit king simply for stealing her comb, but ends up staying for quite a while longer. It's that feminist spirit and take-no-prisoners attitude that astonishes throughout the film, one we're enjoying seeing more and more in our film heroines. Lee saw the curve and has managed to stay just ahead of it.

What most people will be talking about, however, is the flying about and exactingly choreographed ass-kicking, all in the fictional school of "Wu Ban" which evidently allows its practitioners to defy all laws of physics. This is perhaps the best films will ever get at depicting the power of unassisted flight (also without digital assistance), a feat so astounding one cannot begin to guess how much work was involved, pulling on and swinging ropes at just the right moments. (That Lee has signed to next direct a big-screen Hulk movie, and with the visual accomplishments of last summer's X-Men movie, indicates the time has definitely arrived where all the impossible feats of the comic-book universe can finally be translated to the screen.) The beginning of cinema's second century brings us displays of artistry improving by leaps and bounds - literal leaps and bounds, in the case of this film. Tiger may very well represent the apotheosis of film's ambitions; if the Academy can't get past the subtitles and recognize that Lee has pointed the way to film's salvation, they may find their Oscars® slipping into irrelevance like the Grammys did in the nineties.