Sherilyn Connelly

Makoto Shinkai's lush mindbender Your Name has many elements that are familiar on their own but here combine to create something unique.

Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is its own unique, damaged creature.

Approaching the Unknown is the best science fiction movie since Gravity, and certainly the most melancholy since Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris.

It's both an important part of Ghibli's history and a gem in its own right.

Postman Pat: The Movie is one of the best family films to come down the pike this year.

Many independent animated films in recent years have adopted a hand-drawn and/or collage-heavy aesthetic, but few are quite as heartfelt and charming as Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming.

Beautifully animated and often moving.

Twinsters is a heartwarming true story that might not have happened without social media, so score one for modern technology.

Yoshiura keeps the story fairly linear, while playing with perspective and composing many stunning, vertiginous images that consider the different possibilities of being at war with gravity.

At its most beautiful, Yonebayashi's picture is about the magic of female friendship at its purest.

Many filmmakers have tried in recent years, but few have nailed the elusive formula of the two-hander romantic comedy quite like Emily Ting with Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong.

I Am I is a remarkably assured debut for director Towne, especially since she's onscreen the majority of the time, and her script eschews the rules of the standard Hollywood amnesia plot, instead following its own internal logic while not shying away from the darker implications of its premise.

Sinking Into the Sea is fun, but an hour of just Rudolph and Watts in the recording studio would be no less buoyant.

Tension between the city and the country has been a fertile topic for as long as there've been cities, and Alê Abreu's phantasmagoric The Boy and the World explores the eternal conflict in a familiar yet wholly original way.

The picture is beautifully rendered in pencils and watercolors, with some CG, giving it an appropriately timeless storybook look, even though it's set in a mostly modern world of buses and 3-D glasses.

An all-too-rare example of steampunk done right — which also acknowledges that, however pretty such industrial imagery might seem from afar, actually living in such a world would be kind of horrible.

Novice actor Hwietat is terrific in the lead role, and even if we go in knowing the historical backstory, we still discover it all from his point of view — and never stop wondering how the wolf will survive.

Maya the Bee Movie does what it does very well, moving along at a brisk pace and with a strong underlying message for its young audience.

It’s notable that since her hair is cut short and she’s wearing male clothes, none of the men suspect that she’s not a boy despite her chosen male name being only slightly less conspicuous than “McLovin.” Being evil is not the same thing as being intelligent or observant.

Johnson is genuinely talented. He's often the best thing in bad movies, and Ratner's Hercules is, at the very least, pretty good.

Though never sentimental, the picture is hopeful about breaking the cycle of violence.

That the most vicious homophobes are often closet cases is not news, but Dolan seems less concerned with that self-evident fact and more about creating a mood of unease.

Bening and Harris have excellent chemistry.

The fast-paced Gravy is kind of like a Rob Zombie film by way of Bobcat Goldthwait's Shakes the Clown... and succeeds where so many other horror-comedies fail by remembering to be funny first and shocking second.

Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's superhero story Phantom Boy is no April and the Extraordinary World — but still fine for what it is.

Ian Edelman's comedy Puerto Ricans in Paris is a much sweeter film than its Snakes on a Plane–caliber title would suggest.

The characters aren't quite stylized enough; though they have skinny bodies and disproportionately big heads, their just-realistic-enough facial features often veer into the Uncanny Valley.

Viewers looking for a shoot-em-up will be disappointed, but those hankering for an old-school Italian broodfest will find plenty to soak in.

Hugh Hudson's Finding Altamira is a rote but engaging historical drama about the eternal debate between truth and mythology.

To Be Takei is never less than joyful — much like the man himself.

A Girl Like Her focuses on the characters' emotional traumas while eschewing moral panic about how Kids These Days are so wrapped up in their phones and the internet.

Billy Kent's charming HairBrained comes from a long legacy of collegiate comedies but still finds its own identity.

Jones and Connolly have terrific chemistry, particularly as Lottie works through the fact that adults encourage dishonesty and lying when it suits their own needs, and that secrets are more pervasive than openness.

The bickering goblins make a boffo comedy team, and while there's a recurring fart joke, it borders on classy. That's the power of good anime.

The rom-com elements don't always work, and the conclusion is a bit pat, but Always Woodstock is never less than charming and funny along the way.

Blethyn is wonderful as an all-too-rare character, a middle-aged woman who holds her own in a position of authority over violent men.

Like much of the anime that influences its source series, the picture is continuity-heavy and not particularly accessible to newcomers, but for the faithful, Rainbow Rocks does, in fact, rock.

Expelled isn't going to change the world, but it's a fun and promising debut film.

Greenwood brings his usual A-game, generating great chemistry with Purnell in their ad hoc paternal relationship, but she's the revelation.

Except for the presence of the Internet, the picture feels like a retelling of an ages-old fable. In fact, Moebius is almost weird enough to be a creation myth, and that's no small accomplishment.

Charles Hood's Night Owls is a mostly satisfying two-hander that never quite lives up to its full potential.

Ultimately, Advanced Style presents these women not as objects of curiosity, but as what they truly are: role models.

O'Hara and Attie never judge the players, letting their words and actions speak, though those actions are often intercut with footage from the real war.

Keiichi Hara's episodic anime Miss Hokusai is a lovely biopic, even if it never quite picks up and focuses on a single thread. (Then again, neither does life.)

The heart of this mostly bloodless picture is Max's relationship with her mother's film character, and there are some genuinely touching moments about grieving and the acceptance of loss.

Here's to hoping lax multiplex security allows teenagers to sneak in to this very funny and thoughtful take on how straights often objectify queers — and how increased visibility in the media can result in an expectation to conform to stereotypes.

Because it's made by people who understand the importance of a clever script and want their audience to have fun, Lazer Team may just prove to be 2016's most entertaining superhero movie.

The original story was called "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter," but Takahata's title puts the focus where it belongs.

A fascinating character study.

It has some interesting visuals, but A Silent Voice demands investment in the redemption of someone who’s impossible to root for.

Even by anime standards, Lu Over the Wall is best enjoyed by disconnecting your logic circuits and just enjoying the pretty colors and sounds.

The way the two story lines come together, involving paintball guns and morphsuits, is more mundane and less spooky than the tone up to that point suggests, but the point of Sunset Edge isn't really the surface narrative.

This occasionally charming November-December romance has elements of a Douglas Sirk woman's weepie... but the movie eventually goes into Woody Allen territory in the best way possible.

Like burlesque itself, Exposed is at its best when it shows rather than tells.

It's occasionally imaginative, and, most importantly, never boring.

Roberto Sneider's You're Killing Me Susana (Me estás matando Susana) is a culture-clash comedy in which the clash happens both onscreen and off.

Christopher Denham's Preservation is a violent yet agreeably goofy throwback to the survival-in-the-woods genre.

After the Dark is a shaggy dog story but an intriguing and frequently beautiful one.

The whole never becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Frank Gladstone's animated kids' movie The Hero of Color City is a perfectly pleasant pastiche of other movies, the most obvious antecedent being the Toy Story films.

The story is serviceable enough.

As compelling as an individual thread or scene might be, the picture as a whole lacks forward momentum, as is often the case with films with asynchronous timelines.

Only Yesterday it ain't, and you probably already know whether One Piece Film: Gold will make you ecstatic or not.

Though Pollak's direction in his first narrative feature is solid, The Late Bloomer is mostly an excuse for predictable sex jokes and ample toplessness.

Bad Johnson is probably the most thoughtful movie possible about a penis that takes human form.

In the end, Right Now, Wrong Then is a two-piece puzzle that's less than the sum of its parts.

Southern Baptist Sissies might have benefited from some judicious editing.

Fabienne Berthaud's Sky is a road movie that never quite makes the right turns.

It’s still worth watching at least once, just to see what can go wrong when funny people aren’t allowed to be funny.

Mamoru Hosoda's The Boy and the Beast works with many common anime tropes but doesn't find anything new to say about them.

As is to be expected from Green in his pensive mode, there are lovely images in Manglehorn... But Manglehorn is also the latest entry into the tiresome Sad Man Learning to Love Again genre.

The final revelation of the big secret that haunts the family -- hinted at throughout the movie -- is more than a little maudlin, and the dedication feels like nothing so much as ass covering. Until then, After is a frequently absorbing miserablist family drama shot in appropriately chilly winter tones.

Craig William Macneill's The Boy tries so hard to be ominous that it nearly strains itself in the process.

There are some scary moments among the slapstick, and the picture surprisingly doesn't pull its punches during its Harry and the Hendersons–style denouement, but Monster Hunt is hindered by its overlong running time and often mawkish sentimentality.

The tepid Jackie & Ryan's only real strength is its supporting cast.

In Stereo is not without its merits, but it doesn't really get going until the last ten minutes, which play like the opening of a movie that would be much more interesting than the one that preceded them.

While it has its moments, Miguel Arteta's comedy relies too much on gender-shaming and emasculation jokes.

Tiger & Bunny: The Rising indulges in homosexual stereotypes that would have been regressive in the 1980s, let alone in a spin-off of a 2011 television series, and it's a damn shame.

Where Your Name’s star-crossed protagonists were fully formed characters who held equal weight in the narrative, Fireworks is very much told from the male point of view, and Nazuna seldom rises above “free-spirited object of desire.”

It's either much smarter and more profound than it's letting on, or it doesn't add up to anything at all. Or maybe both — it's all relative.

The soapy material is at odds with the largely distant catastrophe, which often feels too abstract to be a real threat.

Life of a King isn't setting out to reinvent cinema, or even a genre, but rather just to be a moderately uplifting tale that makes watching chess interesting.

It may be a low bar, but Michael Tiddes's A Haunted House 2 is actually an improvement over its predecessor.

While it doesn't quite encompass everything, the film's still a bit too busy for its own good.

The film's tone is all over the map, with weird bursts of casual racism toward its ethnic supporting cast and unnecessarily explicit sex scenes that approach a The Room level of ickiness.

There's little in Slugterra: Return of the Elementals to interest nonfans of the show, and the sheer laziness would be more forgivable if not for the equally lazy use of broad ethnic stereotypes. But at least it's over in an hour.

The original Brothers Grimm stories were hardly feminist, but The Seventh Dwarf's female characters are deplorably retrograde on both the script and design levels; they have little to do except be rescued, and Snow White is a vain, buxom sexpot whom the dwarfs leer at.

Drake Doremus's Breathe In is a star-crossed romance where your enjoyment level will depend on your tolerance for what feels an awful lot like potential statutory rape.

That the movie maintains some momentum during exposition and what passes for character development is thanks to director Lester.

Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return fails to make us care about the characters or their journeys, and the animation is shoddy and occasionally creepy.

Rob Hawk's cheap, barely competent action movie Fight Valley is by and for Ultimate Fighting Championship fans, but they deserve better.