Photo: Universal Pictures

Start writing your acceptance speech. "The Dark Knight Rises" star Anne Hathaway, who plays the doomed factory-worker-turned-prostitute Fantine -- and sings her tonsils off -- has hit a very high note. In her supporting turn, Hathaway sings the signature song "I Dreamed a Dream" and brings the audience to tears. She's like musical meat tenderizer -- once the tears start flowing, they don't stop for the rest of the movie. When she called us last Friday afternoon, the newlywed (she wed actor Adam Shulman last September) sounded cheery and warm following a photo shoot:

Photo: Sony Picture Classics

Marion Cotillard bedded Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises," charmed Owen Wilson's Gil in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," and beguiled Leonardo DiCaprio in Nolan's "Inception." In each film she spoke in English, but she sang in French in the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic, "La Vie en Rose," for which won the Academy Award for best actress. It was a first for a best-actress winner in a French-language role. And now she has another chance, for her magnificent anti-heroine in Jacques Audiard's "Rust and Bone," opposite Matthias Schoenaerts.

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal march into the Oscar circle with a mean, muscular real-life spy thriller

Jessica Chastain in 'Zero Dark Thirty' (Photo: Columbia Pictures)

With "Zero Dark Thirty," director Kathryn Bigelow's turns the hunt for Osama bin Laden into the ultimate episode of "Dirty Jobs." With the steely CIA Agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) driving the search, the movie slithers from Pakistan to Afghanistan to the USA, from 9/11 through multiple acts of torture and spy versus spy tradecraft to the final raid by the Navy SEALs that shut down the Al Qaeda chief permanently in 2011. The final sequence, the storming of bin Laden's Pakistani compound, recalls Bigelow's Oscar-winner "The Hurt Locker" -- but the preceding two hours is more closely akin to John LeCarre's "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." There is not one moment of dead air or narrative padding. The movie ends once -- Boom! -- not three times and with a whimper. Engrossing. Complicated. Urgent. Spare.

Photo: Music Box PicturesThere's a purity to the English actress Rachel Weisz, as she glides from playing a doctor in the popcorn thriller "The Bourne Legacy" to a love-besotted wife in the intellectual romance "The Deep Blue Sea." In the latter film, she plays Hester Collyer, a postwar English aristocrat who risks everything for an affair with the charming but vapid pilot Freddie Page ("Thor's" Tom Hiddleston). Weisz delivers an Oscar-worthy performance that merits a second look. Adapted from the Terence Rattigan play and directed by Terence Davies, "The Deep Blue Sea" is one of the best films of 2012 that you probably haven't seen: It grossed $1.1 million domestically, while "The Bourne Legacy" hauled in $275 million worldwide.

One difference between the two movies: In the big-budget "Bourne" Weisz is the chief damsel in distress; in "TDBS" she's the lead, and her character's story drives the plot. The posh Hester has married an older man for love and social position and then gets blown sideways when she meets a man in uniform who unleashes her libido. There's a thematic parallel to "Anna Karenina," another historical fiction about a women who exits a stifling marriage through infidelity and suffers the consequences.

Hathaway is a slam-dunk for best supporting actress and "Les Miserables" is poised to take the most nominations including best picture.

Anne Hathaway in 'Les Miserables' (Photo: Universal Pictures)

Anne Hathaway: Start writing your acceptance speech. Now that I've seen "Les Miserables," I can confirm that "The Dark Knight Rises" star, who plays the doomed factory-worker-turned-prostitute Fantine -- and sings her tonsils off -- has hit a very high note. In her supporting turn, Hathaway sings the signature song "I Dreamed a Dream" and brings the audience to tears. She's like musical meat tenderizer -- once the tears start flowing, they don't stop for the rest of the movie.

Photo: IFC

"The Central Park Five" is a tough and perfect feature documentary by Ken Burns ("The Dust Bowl," "The Civil War'), his daughter Sarah, and her husband David McMahon. It's about a tough and imperfect moment in Manhattan history: when a group of boys went "wilding" in Central Park in 1989, a jogger was raped, and the police put two and two together and got five.

Like a reverse view of "Law & Order," the movie captures how these dark-skinned boys aged 14 to 16 were rammed through the system, made to fit the crime by a team of detectives, and convicted without physical evidence based on confessions given under duress — and an entire city fanned on by tabloid newspaper covers allowed a shameful miscarriage of justice to occur. Many know about the convictions; fewer know that a judge freed the accused when a single serial rapist already in the police system confessed to the crime years later.