* THE DESCENDANTS

For its first hour or so, Alexander Payne's new movie chugs along like just another installment in his series of great, smart, idiosyncratic adult comedies, this one charting the exploding family life of a reluctant Hawaiian zillionaire (George Clooney, so good). But where Election and Sideways wound their ways to bittersweet tableaux of hope, The Descendants plunges viewers, in the film's home stretch, into unprecedentedly raw emotional territory, and Payne is just as adept with loss and heartbreak as he is with human comedy. It's amazing. (DAVID SCHMADER)