Sherilyn Connelly

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.)

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.

Whatever cautionary point I.T. may be trying to make about privacy gets lost in the formulaic ugliness, and not even the constant stream of facepalm moments make it entertaining or watchable.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.