A commercial towing crew, woken early by what they believe is a distress signal, boards a derelict ship and returns with something that starts killing them one by one. Ridley Scott's first science-fiction film builds the genre's most enduring monster movie almost entirely out of dread, sound design and H.R. Giger's biomechanical creature, on a budget that a science-fiction boom had only just made possible.
Chinatown sends Jack Nicholson's private investigator into a municipal water scandal modelled on the early-twentieth-century disputes that built Los Angeles, opposite Faye Dunaway and John Huston. Robert Towne's script won the film's only Oscar from eleven nominations, but the ending that gives the film its reputation was Polanski's, forced through over the writer's objections, and it is worth knowing which parts of the film are whose before deciding what the story is actually arguing.
Mulan follows a young woman who takes her ailing father's place in an Imperial army conscription by posing as a man, running that story through the machinery of a late-90s Disney musical. Directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft and produced largely at Disney's Florida studio, it paired a $90 million budget with $304 million in worldwide takings and the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature.
A widowed field mouse named Mrs. Brisby has to move her sick son before the farmer's plough destroys their home, and finds help among a colony of unusually intelligent rats who escaped a laboratory years earlier. Don Bluth directed the film as his debut after leaving Disney's animation department with several colleagues in 1979 to found an independent studio, taking on a book Disney had rejected twice before, adding mystical elements not present in the source novel, and finishing the whole project on a tighter budget and schedule than the studio he'd left would have allowed.