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.