Sherilyn Connelly

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.