PITY THE EMPEROR penguin. His name is glorious, but his lot in life – as incredulously documented by Luc Jacquet and narrated with morbid amusement by Morgan Freeman – is one of unrelenting duty and sacrifice. The emperor penguin doesn't much lord it over anyone. A penguin couple don't fly or swim the 70 miles to their breeding grounds, they hoof it. When they produce that precious egg together, they both have to take turns carefully stowing it away under their bodies, or on their toes, so it doesn't hit the ice and instantly freeze-dry to death. Each parent starves for months at a time while caring for their baby in the coldest, driest climate on Earth, only to watch some of those infants be kidnapped by predatory arctic birds. If social Darwinists love the traditional top-of-the-food-chain tale, only a true evolutionary thinker can really appreciate this one. Or a working parent. March of the Penguins has less in common with French adventures into animal kingdoms – Microcosmos, Winged Migration – than it does with the more moralizing cultural work of, say, Robert Flaherty. But it's still got to be the most beautifully filmed animal story of the year, in one of the landscapes most endangered by rapacious humanity: gorgeous mile after mile of frozen earth, with pastel skyscapes, brutal storms, and line after line of amazing, tuxedoed birds, devotedly marching in formation. (Susan Gerhard)