clipped from www.nytimes.com

By the time Warner joined this new specialty business 10 years later, with Warner Independent Pictures, all the studios were in the indie business. Films like Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Ones Are” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Informant!,” both released by Warner, might represent the end of that era. Even so, I like to believe that the industry’s central irrationality (its human factor) will remain and that there will always be one madman willing to give an artist like Wes Anderson millions to make a puppet movie about a family of foxes.

And Colin Firth’s face crumbling like pulverized stone as he receives the awful news of his lover’s death in “A Single Man.” Some of the greatest filmmaking of the year was represented by the story of a happy marriage, which was represented with breathtaking narrative economy and a great depth of feeling in four sublime minutes in “Up.”