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2035 briefs · 26452 min · 2017–2035 on page 22 of 22

There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2007

There Will Be Blood follows Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oilman, across roughly three decades of the Californian oil boom, loosely adapting Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! Daniel Day-Lewis plays Plainview opposite Paul Dano's preacher Eli Sunday, with Jonny Greenwood's score and Robert Elswit's cinematography setting a tone closer to horror than period drama. Anderson's screenplay narrows Sinclair's sprawling novel to its first chapters and lets one man's ambition curdle into something closer to a diagnosis than a character study.

Tokyo Story

Yasujirō Ozu · 1953

Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 film follows Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama as they leave their coastal town to visit their grown children in Tokyo, only to find themselves parcelled off to a spa resort by sons and daughters too occupied with their own lives to spend much time with them. Shot by Yuharu Atsuta almost entirely from a low, static camera position, with no score credited on the sheet and a cast led by Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, it has since drawn some of the highest aggregate critical scores of any film on record, sitting at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic alike.

Toy Story

John Lasseter · 1995

Toy Story follows Woody, a cowboy doll who becomes territorial once space ranger toy Buzz Lightyear replaces him as a boy's favourite. John Lasseter directed the first entirely computer-animated feature and the first film produced by the newly founded Pixar, working from a script substantially rewritten after Disney rejected early story reels as too flat. Made on a $30 million budget under a deal that gave Disney full ownership of the characters, the film earned $373.6 million and became the first animated feature nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Toy Story 2

John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich, Ash Brannon · 1999

Toy Story 2 has Woody stolen by a toy collector who plans to sell him to a Tokyo museum, forcing Andy's other toys into a rescue mission while Woody weighs eternal preservation against a childhood that will end. Originally planned as a direct-to-video cash-in, it was rebuilt into a theatrical Pixar film on a compressed nine-month schedule, going on to gross $497 million against a $90 million budget and a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.

Toy Story 3

Lee Unkrich · 2010

Andy leaves for college and his toys are accidentally donated to a daycare centre ruled by a resentful stuffed bear. Lee Unkrich's 2010 conclusion to the Toy Story trilogy pushes the franchise's premise, toys who fear abandonment, to its most literal extreme.

Toy Story 4

Josh Cooley, John Lasseter · 2019

Woody, no longer Bonnie's favourite toy, follows a homemade spork named Forky on a road trip and is reunited with the long-lost Bo Peep, who has built an independent life as a lost toy rather than an owned one. Josh Cooley, who replaced original director John Lasseter partway through a lengthy development process, uses that reunion to reopen a question Toy Story 3 seemed to have already settled: what a toy is actually for once being loved by a child stops being guaranteed.

Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood · 1992

Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven follows a widowed farmer and reformed killer pulled back into one last bounty job, made on a $14.4 million budget that returned over $101 million and won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, with Gene Hackman's affable, brutal sheriff as its centre of gravity.

Up

Pete Docter, Bob Peterson · 2009

A widower ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies to South America to fulfil a promise made decades earlier, only to find an uninvited child stowaway waiting on his porch. Pete Docter's 2009 film pairs one of animation's most quoted opening sequences with an adventure plot that keeps circling back to grief.

Vertigo

Alfred Hitchcock · 1958

Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film follows Scottie Ferguson, a retired police detective with a crippling fear of heights, hired to trail a friend's wife who believes she is possessed by a dead ancestor. What begins as surveillance turns into obsession, and after a death he could not prevent, Scottie tries to remake a second woman into the image of the first. Shot by Robert Burks with a spiralling title-sequence effect and scored by Bernard Herrmann, it earned back roughly three times its $2.5 million budget on release and has since climbed steadily in critical standing, unseating Citizen Kane at the top of one long-running critics' poll.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Nick Park, Steve Box · 2005

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit expands the stop-motion duo into a monster-movie parody, following the pair's pest-control business as a mysterious Were-Rabbit starts terrorizing a town's giant-vegetable competition. Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box for Aardman and DreamWorks Animation on a $30 million budget, it grossed $194 million and became the first stop-motion film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham · 2024

Vengeance Most Fowl brings back Feathers McGraw, the silent penguin villain from The Wrong Trousers, who hijacks Wallace's new robotic garden gnome to rebuild his criminal operation and settle an old score. Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham direct from Mark Burton's screenplay, with Ben Whitehead voicing Wallace in his first feature appearance following Peter Sallis's death. Made by Aardman Animations, the film holds a 100% Tomatometer score, won the inaugural BAFTA for Best Children's and Family Film, and became the BBC's most-watched scripted broadcast since 2002 after its Christmas Day airing.

Watership Down

Martin Rosen, John Hubley · 1978

A small group of rabbits flees their doomed warren on a premonition of disaster and treks across the English countryside to found a new one, clashing along the way with the totalitarian warren of Efrafa under General Woundwort. Martin Rosen took over direction from John Hubley partway through production, financed the film through a British consortium, and released it in 1978 to an audience unsure what age it was made for.

Weathering with You

Makoto Shinkai · 2019

Hodaka, a runaway sixteen-year-old scraping by in Tokyo, teams up with Hina, an orphaned girl who can part the rain with a prayer, to sell her ability as a paid service during an unusually long, disaster-scale downpour. Shinkai's follow-up to Your Name, again scored by Radwimps, pushes his interest in weather and disaster further than its predecessor by making the couple's happiness and the city's survival mutually exclusive, and then letting a teenager choose.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Robert Zemeckis · 1988

Robert Zemeckis's 1988 noir comedy places a toon-hating private eye in an alternate 1947 Hollywood where cartoon characters live alongside humans, tasking him with clearing Roger Rabbit of a murder. Produced by Disney and Amblin with animation supervised by Richard Williams, it required Disney to negotiate cameo rights with Warner Bros. and other studios, and became the second-highest-grossing film of 1988.

Wild Strawberries

Ingmar Bergman · 1957

Victor Sjöström, in his last screen role, plays an elderly professor driving to collect an honorary degree while dreams and hitchhikers force him to confront the coldness he built his life on. Ingmar Bergman wrote it from a hospital bed the same year as The Seventh Seal, and it won the Golden Bear in Berlin, becoming one of the clearest statements of his recurring interest in memory, guilt, and old age.

Wolfwalkers

Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart · 2020

Robyn, an English hunter's daughter in occupied Ireland, is sent to help exterminate the last wolf pack outside Kilkenny and instead befriends Mebh, a girl from a wolf-linked tribe whose spirit runs as a wolf by night, discovering along the way that a bite has made her one of them too. Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart's Cartoon Saloon feature, the third in Moore's Irish folklore trilogy, builds its visual design and its politics from the same conflict, an authoritarian Lord Protector's rule against nature versus everything the forest represents.

Yellow Submarine

George Dunning · 1968

The Beatles' animated counterparts, voiced by actors rather than the band themselves, sail to Pepperland to save it from the music-hating Blue Meanies, with the story mostly serving as connective tissue between sequences built around individual songs. George Dunning directed, with art director Heinz Edelmann's psychedelic pop-art style giving the film a visual identity that outlived its plot.

Your Name

Makoto Shinkai · 2016

A Tokyo boy and a rural girl who have never met begin waking up in each other's bodies, building a friendship across the swap before a hidden twist reveals the stakes are far higher than a shared inconvenience. Makoto Shinkai wrote, directed, shot and edited the film after visiting a village destroyed by the 2011 tsunami, and Your Name became the first entry in what critics now call his disaster trilogy, and briefly the highest-grossing Japanese film ever made.

Zootopia

Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush · 2016

Judy Hopps, the first rabbit on the Zootopia police force, partners against her will with Nick Wilde, a fox con artist, to solve a missing-mammal case that exposes prejudice baked into the city's design. Byron Howard and Rich Moore's Disney feature restructures a buddy-cop plot around predator-prey tension, using new fur-simulation software and years of zoo research to render a mammal metropolis that looks, and argues, like it was built for its inhabitants rather than around them.