Together Murashige and Kanbei make for an unlikely odd couple in a film that at times flirts with being a murder mystery. Each turn of the season brings a new slaying or riddle in Murashige’s increasingly cut off castle. It’s an opportunity to match wits with the trickster in the dungeon, but it is also a greater chance for director Kurosawa’s movie to take a forbearing, painterly, and ever graceful stance on the merits of mercy… and their limits when seeking to be a harmonious aesthete in a starkly inharmonious world.  – DC 

The Sheep Detectives

The Sheep Detectives looks terrible. I’ll admit it. As a father of four, I’ve long since tired of seeing crass kids movies filled with big name stars who are, it turns out, awful voice actors. The idea of a bunch of sheep banding together to solve the murder of their beloved herder (Hugh Jackman) sounded like a recipe for disaster, sending my kids and I back to the safe and loving arms of Paddington Bear if we want proper children’s entertainment.

Turns out, The Sheep Detectives is the successor to Paddington, the perfect mixture of kind-hearted optimism and frank acknowledgement of the bad parts of the world. Directed by Illumination vet Kyle Balda and written by Craig Mazin of The Last of Us and Chernobyl fame, The Sheep Detectives follows Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Mopple (Chris O’Dowd), two sheep who lead the investigation into the shepherd’s death, following the techniques they learned from the mystery novels he’d read to them. What follows is, of course, a charming adventure full of idiosyncratic villagers in a tiny English town. But The Sheep Detectives also tells hard truths about bad people and dying, lessons children need to learn, but in the kindest, most loving way. – JG 

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Peter Parker must suffer! And the Peter Parker of the MCU has had it way too good for way too long. Yeah, he went to prom with a supervillain’s daughter and, sure, his beloved Aunt May was killed at the hands of an extradimensional Willem Dafoe. But he lives a charmed life compared to his comic book counterpart. That changes in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a movie that spends time with the grief that No Way Home glossed over (something Tom Holland himself admits), showing Peter getting sadder and sadder as he lives without contact with MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon).

That may sound like a dour gloomfest, but Brand New Day finds the humanity in Peter’s suffering, giving this Spider-Man an everyman quality missing from the franchise since they lost Sam Raimi. Even better, Brand New Day retains this drama without sacrificing the fun of a proper MCU film, complete with appearances by the Punisher, the Hulk, and a few other surprises we won’t spoil here. Spider-Man being Spider-Man, Peter prevails at the end, but not without going through some hard times, and the movie’s all the better for it. As always, bad times for Peter Parker are good times for fans. – JG

Toy Story 5

How, after three decades and a clear peak with the second film does Toy Story keep finding ways of making me cry? A lot of Toy Story 5 doesn’t work as well as one would hope, as the central conflict with Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) is hard to take seriously from the franchise that pioneered CGI over traditional animation. Furthermore, the Toy Story cast has grown so deep that fans are bound to be disappointed by the limited screentime of their favorites.