Golden Globe Best Pictures

With her dignity and most of her pretty hair gone, Fantine has fallen as far as she can. She has become one of the abject castaways of the musical’s title, a wretch of the earth.

The tale of two alienated lovers that run away together on a New England island, Moonrise Kingdom doesn’t shy from depicting adolescence as a time of bewilderment, anger and pain.

Some animators have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, but the “Life of Pi” crew was careful not to do that, keeping the co-starring digital tiger fierce and spontaneous with animalistic instincts.

Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a gentle comedic drama about disparate British retirees who decamp to India. It's reception has been robust, especially among the generally overlooked audience of older adults.

Director David O. Russell relishes the escalating momentum of people who rub each other the wrong way. Tiffany likes Pat, but Pat wants his wife back. Because of the friction, they bond indelibly.

Some of the violence in Django Unchained is raw and brutal, as expected with the exploitation film conventions Tarantino is riffing on here. But he's clearly sensitive about what he chooses to show.

We know going in that CIA tracker Maya will prevail. But the hows and whys make Zero Dark Thirty, freighted with the history of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a riveting investigative procedural.

In "Argo," CIA agent Tony Mendez goes to Hollywood to try and devise a simulacrum of a genuine film set in the Middle East. The ruse is needed to rescue six American embassy workers from the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.

Steven Spielberg's biographical drama portrays the 16th president of the United States as an ambivalent leader, not above twisting arms and exploiting the system to get the right thing done.

Two regular folks with names like Fred and Harriet are lifted out of the funk of unsatisfying unions, and whisked off to the Glamorous Abroad. There waits love, landscape, and a mission grander than simply chugging along.