Boy, Wonder: In a Hollywood that's increasingly in the business of telling kids' stories to adults, even an auteur as bloody-minded as Martin Scorsese gave in to the temptation of the childlike in this year's Hugo. Jaap Buitendijk/Paramount hide caption
Wills To Power: Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher — and Jim Broadbent her supportive husband, Denis — in The Iron Lady. Alex Bailey/The Weinstein Co. hide caption
The Great Divides: Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) are at odds first about whether to leave Iran for life abroad — and then about more urgent issues yet. Habib Madjidi /Sony Pictures Classics hide caption
First Love? In Bina (Aasha Davis, left), Alike (Adepero Oduye) finds a focus for the feelings she'd been coming to terms with privately. Focus Features hide caption
The narrator of El Sicario, Room 164 — reputedly a veteran assassin for a drug lord in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez — details his life and his trade in Gianfranco Rosi's documentary Icarus Films hide caption
During the early-'90s war in what was then Yugoslavia, a Serbian soldier (Goran Kostic, right) and a Bosnian painter (Zana Marjanovic) negotiate boundaries personal and political. Dean Semler/FilmDistrict hide caption
Mia Wasikowska (left) and Glenn Close are an unlikely couple in Albert Nobbs, a forlorn romance about a woman passing as a man to find work in 19th-century Ireland. Patrick Redmond /Roadside Attractions hide caption
Albert (Jeremy Irvine) enlists in the service during World War I after his beloved horse, Joey, is sold in War Horse. Andrew Cooper/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures hide caption
What Falls Away: After the Sept. 11 attacks, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) mourns his father (Tom Hanks), who died at the World Trade Center. Francois Duhamel/Warner Brother Pictures hide caption
In Beginners — based on director Mike Mills' life — Oliver (Ewan McGregor) finds out that his father is gay, and that he has denied himself throughout his married life. After coming out, Oliver's dad becomes physically and spiritually transformed. Focus Features hide caption
Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis, left) and Tintin (Jamie Bell) chase fortune and treasure in The Adventures of Tintin. WETA Digital Ltd. hide caption
The young journalist Tintin (Jamie Bell, left) and the permanently drunk Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) go on a global treasure chase in The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. WETA Digital Ltd. hide caption
Fierce Focus: Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher (second from right) is just one of many cinematic women who tore into 2011 entirely on their own terms. The Weinstein Co. hide caption
Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth Salander, the dark heroine of the American movie adaption of the Swedish novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Merrick Morton/Sony Pictures hide caption
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his Impossible Mission Force go to great heights to combat the threat of a nuclear confrontation in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. Paramount Pictures hide caption