In live-action mode, Lilo & Stitch has some of the charm of an ’80s Amblin movie, like E.T. or Gremlins.

Chomet builds this beguiling symphony of sadness to a poignant finale that does ample justice to the many layers of Tati's tale, both in text and out.

The film flows like a Joy Division song: moody and ethereal until it escalates into a burst of sonic violence.

It’s a timely and galvanising telling of a remarkable story that every football fan should know, and one that will hopefully go some way towards ensuring that Copa 71 finds its way into the sport’s history books.

Relay is an old-school thriller with a drum-tight script and real style.

The director’s latest—a lighthearted romance set in 1920s Germany and France—won’t do much to sway proponents or detractors from their own perspectives, though taken at face value, it’s one of Allen’s most charmingly conceived and performed efforts.

The Mend finds the truths that bind families together, but it knows that everyone has to hack their own path to get there.

The Sisters Brothers may be a violent movie but it’s not an especially graphic one; the bad guys are coolly dispatched from a distance and with minimal Peckinpah-ish splatter. The one genuinely stomach-turning moment comes at the hands of a surgeon, not a gunman. Prepare yourself.

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga bring music but zero merriment to a bold and often brilliant sequel.

The more Shepard & Dark rewinds through their shared history, the more the film blossoms into something far richer than a simple tribute to a long, beautiful friendship—it becomes an ode to a long-lost era of bohemia, an insightful look into male psychology and pathology, a valentine to the art of letter writing and an illustration of how the past is never dead, because it’s not even past.

Mercifully, the book has escaped the typical Disney demolition; Bakshi's version, using animation and live-action tracings, is uniformly excellent, sticking closely to the original text and visually echoing many of Tolkien's own drawings.

Well-paced and directed with gusto, On the Basis of Sex finds an accessible, near-perfect tone, balancing serious courtroom drama and frequent legal jargon with tastefully Hollywood-ized emotional embellishments.

Bravo’s movie is so pacy, so compelling that it doesn’t quite have space to land the full horror of Zola and Stefani’s situation. But what it does do is demonstrate that telling your story is a kind of performance, just like stripping is.

While Finding Dory is definitely the kind of visual pleasure we’ve come to expect from Pixar, its storyline doesn’t always reach the heights of inventiveness upon which the gigantic animation studio has built its reputation. The film lacks the psychological probing of Inside Out, the existential ponderings of Wall-E, the gentle, stoic sadness of Up.

Kinji Fukasaku's slick, sick nightmare is best left to the quasi-banned realm where it exists as a perfect satire; when brought into reality, it's a touch awkward.

The finest of three screen versions of PC Wren's tale of heroism in the French Foreign Legion (the others were made in 1926 and 1966, the latter a travesty). Pictorially ravishing, it features a memorable opening with a fort garrisoned by corpses, and the high adventure tone carries on from there.

Nothing about the movie is showy, except for Shelton's palpable love of good people making a mess of things. Barring some late-inning coyness, it's some of the truest, dinged-heart couples' circling of the year.

You don't get much explanation, and the overall plot may not withstand detailed analysis. But the atmosphere and pace are superbly handled, and the performances of the sinister, inhumanly intelligent 'children' never falter.

For all its eye-opening material, The Dog still feels unfinished, but for students of New York scuzziness, it’s an essential addition.

The film has its narrative flaws and, occasionally, distracting stylistic flourishes. Harrelson's portrayal of a swinging dick staring down the abyss, however, is perilously close to perfect; it's the finest, most harrowing thing he's ever done.

A monument to Australia's thriving music scene, it will have you whooping with joy one minute, then fighting back the tears the next.

Bloodlight and Bami defiantly reflects the experimental whirlwind of Jones’s existence: her ability to look and feel relevant decades since she started out.

Both a baroque thriller set in New York's ballet demimonde and a portrait of artistry as schizoid perfectionism, Darren Aronofsky's new film percolates parallel lines of fine madness-but then, doubling down on duality is this movie's raison d'etre.

The real-life setup is a knockout, both ancient and timely, and even though Rohrwacher never quite passes — she looks too much like Barbra Streisand’s "Yentl" — the movie is on to a larger point, namely about the fluidity of sexual identity and our universal penchant for self-reinvention. The film builds slowly but deserves an audience eager to discuss it.

With his first movie for a major studio, Meyer simply did what he'd been doing for years, only bigger and better. That's to say, he turned the homely story of an all-girl rock band's rise to fame under their transsexual manager into a delirious comedy melodrama, soused in self- parody but spiked with dope, sex and thrills.

It's one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.

This film's effectively wrought communion between once-spooked man and animal is more than enough for any entertainment. It rides easily into your heart.

As with the previous Knives Outs, the satire is applied in broad but enjoyable brushstrokes.