Steve Rose

There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.

The freshness of the approach, combined with the substance of the stories, works the same strange magic on the viewer as on the inmates. It is easy to be swept along.

Beneath the bro-friendly, fantasy-art trappings, Onward finds a little bit of that old Pixar magic.

It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t break what didn’t need fixing about the original.

Director Brad Bird deserves praise for packing such big ideas into such an accessible, rip-roaring, retro-futurist adventure.

Vintage screen Dickens with a cutting edge: the French terror is vividly, hauntingly realised, all chaos and guillotine ghouls. [16 Aug 2000, p.23]

The story almost comes off the rails, but Beetlejuice’s charm lies more in the execution. The movie is crammed with visual invention and snappy comedy. The afterlife is richly imagined as a macabre bureaucracy. The living world is no less outlandish, especially with those eye-popping interiors and costumes.

It remains a nightmare experience that’s not easily brushed off. And despite its ramshackle scrappiness in production terms, and some dated gender politics, the storytelling is first class, pitching us straight into the action, but only revealing its full hand gradually.

The political and the supernatural come together beautifully (and violently), and the unsentimental portrayal of childhood is refreshing, with terrific performances from the boy actors. It’s altogether a supremely satisfying tale.

This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie.

It is not a simple film to summarise or describe as a comedy, satire or drama. Renoir was too generous to deal with such absolutes, and that's one of the reasons the film endures: nobody is good or bad, they just make good or bad decisions – hence the title.

This sunny 1989 fantasy by master animator Hayao Miyazaki broaches the issue of female sexuality more boldly than any Western children’s movie would dare.

Hayao Miyazaki's family fantasy is full of benign spirituality, prelapsarian innocence, but little icky sentiment.