The best Disney Plus movies to stream right now

If 10 Things I Hate About You isn’t quite as perfect as Clueless, it’s certainly the best of the 1999 teen romantic comedies. And it holds the distinction of being the year’s thinking person’s teen rom-com, largely thanks to the unconventional choice of its two romantic leads. Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger are weightier, more thoughtful actors than usually get cast in these kinds of roles. (The other people up for the Ledger part were Josh Harnett and Ashton Kutcher, charming actors who would’ve made this a very different movie.) Stiles and Ledger were both unknowns, and 10 Things was Ledger’s first American movie. Their naturalistic performances lend the otherwise fairly heightened film a realism akin to later, more grounded teen films like The Spectacular Now and The Edge Of Seventeen. That’s best exemplified by Stiles’ heart wrenching delivery of the poem that gives the film its title, which solidified her as an iconic talent for a microgeneration of teen fans. [Caroline Siede]

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The fullness of classic Disney adventure films still makes other movies about sweaty men in exotic locales look weak. Leagues has only the faintest aroma of “art,” but the odd nods toward maturity are enough to counteract such concessions to broad commerciality as Kirk Douglas’ pet seal, or his incessant singing of the maddening “A Whale Of A Tail.” The action lets up frequently for amazing undersea footage–most impressively, an extended hunting and farming expedition–and for explorations of character that reveal James Mason’s complex sense of morality and Douglas’ dangerous loutishness. Most vitally, the filmmakers never let the audience lose track of how cool it would be to cruise the bottom of the ocean in an elegantly appointed super-boat. The secret of good escapist fare, as Disney’s crew knew, is giving the audience someplace remarkable to escape to. [Noel Murray]

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Though partly overshadowed by the very public departure of original director Edgar Wright, Ant-Man stands apart from the rest of the Marvel pack simply by being small. A sci-fi caper movie about an inventor who drafts a thief to steal a knockoff of his shrinking technology before it falls into the wrong hands, it feels a world away from the cross-cut planetary peril climaxes that have become the studio’s default mode. Even its humor—usually seen as one of the stronger points of the Marvel house style—is different. Though some viewers may find themselves playing spot-the-author with the patchy script (e.g., a fight scene gag involving The Cure’s Disintegration, which smacks of Wright), it still makes for an enjoyable, intermittently inspired effects-driven comedy and a welcome antidote to the over-burdened world-saving that seems to define big-screen superhero stories. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Blessed with the wackiest superpowers and least essential backstory in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a.k.a. Ant-Man, has become the little guy of the blockbuster franchise, the closest equivalent to an everydude in this world of supersoldiers, geniuses, aliens, and kings. While other headlining heroes wrestle with the sins of the fathers, the reformed small-time crook is just trying to be a better dad to the daughter he co-parents with his ex-wife (Judy Greer) and her husband (Bobby Cannavale). In Ant-Man And The Wasp, which is set before the mega-events of Avengers: Infinity War, we find that he’s been living under house arrest in San Francisco ever since the kerfuffle of Captain America: Civil War, though he’s still got his little girl on the weekends. He’s been learning magic tracks (which, in a running gag, only seem to impress other grown men) and trying to start a small business called X-Con Security with his chatterbox buddy Luis (Michael Peña). If the overarching theme of the MCU has been one of responsibilities, Scott Lang’s remain relatably small. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Part travelogue, part slapstick comedy, and part action extravaganza, Around The World In 80 Days benefits from a likable tone and a quaint, refreshing optimism about the possibilities of progress, science, and technology. Steve Coogan seems intent on single-handedly dragging the British Empire into the 20th century, and the film is sunny and boyishly exuberant enough to suggest that that’s entirely for the best. Around The World finds a winning formula: Jackie Chan provides the action, various exotic lands serve up props begging to be employed in Chan-style combat, Coogan brings the dry wit, a minor constellation of surprise guest stars provides razzle-dazzle, and a steady stream of mild chuckles helps the whole fandango fly by painlessly. [Nathan Rabin]

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Since making an Avengers movie requires lining up so many moving pieces in an orderly row, it’s something of an accomplishment that The Avengers even exists. But beyond that logistical nightmare is the double agenda the film has to serve, advancing the stories of the individual characters as begun in previous films while telling a coherent, self-contained story. Factor in another wave of Marvel movies and an inevitable sequel, and that agenda gets even more complicated. All of which raises the question: Is there room for any movie within this Avengers movie? Decidedly, yes. [Keith Phipps]

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The first thing everyone remembers about Walt Disney’s 1942 animated classic Bambi is that Bambi’s mom gets shot, traumatizing generations of America’s youth, from Baby Boomers to the present. And yes, the moment is still shocking, even though it happens offscreen and the body is never seen again. Yet Disney showed a willingness to go to dark places in his previous films—the “Pleasure Island” sequence in Pinocchio, the elephant’s alcohol-fueled hallucinations in Dumbo—and since Bambi is fundamentally about life, it must also include the reality of death. The studio revisited the same territory half a century later with The Lion King, but the differences between the two films are stark: Unfolding with minimal dialogue, Bambi doesn’t need to explain away its themes with a “Circle Of Life” production number. It simply illustrates them with a quiet, subtle, and ultimately reassuring touch. [Scott Tobias]

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Just one film occupies the peak of Disney’s Renaissance period, proving so brilliant and influential that the studio has tried and failed over the last 25 years to replicate its power: Beauty And The Beast. The film stands apart from Disney’s other modern hits, as well as those from its sister company, Pixar, and its animation-studio competitors. It’s the first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. (Up and Toy Story 3 have since gotten the nod, but only when the field of nominees was doubled to 10.) It’s the first Disney film used as the foundation for a Broadway musical. And at the time, it was Disney’s most financially successful animated film. Creatively, Beauty And The Beast is the apotheosis of everything Walt Disney Animation Studios made in between its first Golden Age (ending with Bambi) and the present. [Josh Spiegel]

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Sure, Bedknobs And Broomsticks is a kid-lit fantasy adaptation that casts a titan of musical theater as a magical caregiver improving the lives of British moppets. And yes, the film takes place in a bygone era of Old Blighty, blends live-action with animation, boasts a supporting turn from David Tomlinson, and is packed to its colorful cartoon gills with sticky compositions from the Sherman Brothers and Irwin Kostal. But it’d be a mistake to dismiss Bedknobs And Broomsticks as a pretender to Mary Poppins: First and foremost, the kids are orphans this time around—“three cockney waifs” as the trailer voiceover booms. But Bedknobs And Broomsticks is also unencumbered by the Best Picture-courting import of its more prestigious predecessor, possessing a ramshackle charm embodied by Lansbury’s apprentice witch, Tomlinson’s street-corner charlatan, and the practical-effect regiment of antiquated armor and weaponry they sic on invading Nazi forces. Add a splash of Main Street Electrical Parade psychedelia, and Bedknobs And Broomsticks makes for an absolute hoot from a transitional era for Disney. [Erik Adams]

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When [Beyoncé] released The Lion King: The Gift, a collection of original tracks inspired by the film, it became clear that it would function as something deeper than a soundtrack. Songs like “Bigger” and “Brown Skin Girl” embraced Blackness so intentionally, expressing sentiments that extended beyond a single film. Black Is King, a nearly 90-minute-long visual companion to The Gift created by Beyoncé for Disney+, recontextualizes the album as a broader celebration of Black identity...

Through a parade of breath-snatching vignettes filmed across a number of continents, the visual spectacle reveres the inherent beauty of the Black diaspora. Appearances from Lupita Nyong’o, Wizkid, Kelly Rowland, Naomi Campbell, Adut Akech, Pharrell, Tierra Whack, and others inject the effort with the kind of star power that one would expect from a project of this magnitude. It’s the latest from an artist who continues to place culture directly at the center of whatever she touches, a bold choice in an industry that often discourages aggressive cultural expression from anyone who isn’t white. [Shannon Miller]

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It took a decade and 18 films, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally produced a superhero movie that feels like it was ripped from the pages of a comic book. Ditching the MCU’s familiar roster of heroes (they don’t get as much as a mention) along with many of the basics of the Marvel film formula, Ryan Coogler turned Black Panther into a highly personal crowd-pleaser in the vein of his previous film, the Rocky sequel Creed, but with all the idiosyncrasies and intrigues afforded by its main setting, the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Who could possibly replace Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther? Upon its release November 11, this is the question, both in real life and on film, that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever attempts to answer, with varying degrees of success. A meditation on grief that aspires to exercise as many emotional and intellectual muscles as the physical ones that ripple across its superheroes, Ryan Coogler’s follow-up to the ground-breaking blockbuster Black Panther is overlong and overstuffed, precisely in the way a thoughtful filmmaker leverages his earlier success for extra creative leeway—for good and ill... [Todd Gilchrist]

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When Disney disbanded its cel-animation unit and went full CGI, its feature cartoons—Chicken Little, The Wild, Meet The Robinsons—began to seem painfully calculated and pandering, more an attempt to catch up with the burgeoning kid-film market than to lead it. Bolt was the studio’s first film since Lilo & Stitch that felt like it was trying to recapture the old Disney instead of aggressively shedding it in favor of something slick and new. And yet it comes with a healthy cutting-edge Pixar flavor as well. It’s tempting to lay both aspects firmly at the feet of John Lasseter, the Pixar honcho who became Disney Animation’s chief creative officer when Disney bought Pixar; in spite of its mostly animal protagonists, Bolt has a humanity rarely seen in the CGI world outside of Pixar’s features. [Tasha Roberston]

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Like Toy Story, Pixar’s previous computer-animated outing, A Bug’s Life is both an extraordinary technical achievement and a notable artistic accomplishment. Though deliberately vague as a political allegory—the oppressive grasshoppers could represent Stalinists, fascists, or cutthroat capitalists—A Bug’s Life is still smashing family entertainment: The whole thing is quick-witted, fast-paced, and loaded with clever sight gags and colorful, engaging supporting characters. [Nathan Rabin]

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More than any Marvel Studios film since Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger feels like it’s working from a conceptual checklist titled How To Make A Superhero Movie Fun For Everyone. For mainstream viewers, there are big action sequences, a heady battle montage, a ’40s setting featuring über-Nazis with glowing laser-guns, and plenty of well-timed one-liners. For the hardcore comic-book fans, there’s the Wilhelm scream, the Stan Lee cameo, the Marvel-history inside jokes, and a self-aware humor that even includes a wry dig at Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Just so everyone feels included, the eponymous hero has a competent multicultural support team and a kick-ass love interest who never needs to be rescued. And to cover even more bases, director Joe Johnston reaches past all the modern meta humor to inject the film with the cheery gosh-wow sincerity he brought to The Rocketeer. The roster of crowd-pleasing elements seems dubiously calculated and ambitiously lengthy, but ultimately, that’s no strike against the film, which follows Iron Man’s lead in obscuring the calculation behind outsized, gleeful fun. [Tasha Robinson]

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a villain problem. With a few blessed exceptions—Tom Hiddleston’s arrogant trickster god Loki; the ex-boyfriend-from-hell played by David Tennant on Jessica Jones—its bad guys aren’t half as interesting as its good guys. That’s true, mostly, of the sneering Machiavellian schemer Daniel Brühl portrays in Captain America: Civil War, who’s about as unmemorable as the usual intergalactic conqueror or corporate scumbag making life tough for Earth’s mightiest heroes. But the film’s hook, its big conceptual draw, is that it doesn’t really need a heavy at all: In this long but brightly entertaining return trip to the ever-expanding MCU, star-spangled do-gooder Captain America (Chris Evans) and playboy flyboy Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict, their typically testy rapport flowering into a full-on showdown. The studio solves its villain problem by basically removing the villain from the equation. [A.A. Dowd]

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In this spectacularly entertaining sequel, Rogers is still running, jumping, and chucking his mighty shield like it’s 1945. But now he’s doing so with the weariness and distrust of historical hindsight. Briefed on what the homeland was up to during his six decades on ice, the Captain has become a disillusioned company man, unafraid to question the government bigwigs handing him his marching orders. The Winter Soldier unfolds in a post-Watergate, post-9/11 political climate, one in which crimes are stopped before they happen, someone is always listening, and automated death comes from above. (Add the film to a growing list of tentpole fantasies—Oblivion, Man Of Steel, the Robocop remake—to take metaphoric potshots at drone warfare.) [A.A. Dowd]

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At a glance, this musical fantasy of departed family members peering back on our world seems like an oversweet interpretation of Pixar’s sentimental themes, not to mention the perfectionist animation studio’s preoccupation with memory. (See: Inside Out, Finding Dory.) But Coco teaches a salient point: In the dead, we see ourselves. Their world bears more than a passing resemblance to ours—and to the plight of families separated by borders—because our anxieties about death mirror our worries about own lives. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Unlike its more kid-centric counterparts, Cool Runnings reached out to children not through characters they could initially relate to, but through the emotions being expressed. Brenner, the film’s stoic straight man, is the first to confront the film’s sobering life lessons when he learns that the dream home he’s long pined for is, in fact, Buckingham Palace. It’s a foregone conclusion that what he’s aspired to for the bulk of his adult life is forever out of reach. Perhaps this element of darkness has helped Cool Runnings overcome the limitations of the genre, destroying some of its inherent sentimentality. It certainly didn’t hurt the film’s commercial appeal: Despite its deviation from the crowd-pleasing formula, Cool Runnings was the most successful of Disney’s ’90s sports movies, raking in $154 million at the box-office and recouping its budget 11 times over. [David Anthony]

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David Spade and John Goodman make a terrific comic team, with the former’s barbed delivery nicely complementing the latter’s easygoing charm. They’re joined by another well-cast pair—Eartha Kitt as a cronelike villainess and Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld’s Puddy) as her dull-witted henchman—but The Emperor’s New Groove’s greatest strength comes from its willingness to think outside formula. By limiting the songs to a jokey opening number sung by Tom Jones and the obligatory closing-credits ballad, Groove gains more room for a wide variety of well-crafted gags. Willing to be unabashedly cartoonish, verbally witty, and, rare for animation, periodically silent, The Emperor’s New Groove, whatever its origins, is one of the most enjoyable animated comedies this side of the Toy Story films. [Keith Phipps]

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Where most Disney animated protagonists are lucky if they get at least one living parent, Encanto’s plucky leading lady, Mirabel Madrigal (Stephanie Beatriz), lives in a house bustling with extended relatives. (How fun to see a Disney heroine with cousins!) And far from being special, she’s actually the one ordinary member of a family defined by their magical abilities. That makes Mirabel a sort of reverse Elsa, if you will, and instead of setting off on an adventure to find herself, her quest leads inward into her own family history and the secrets buried inside it. Therein lies Encanto’s biggest innovation: It’s a Disney adventure that never leaves the house. [Caroline Siede]

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Shot for IMAX (with a conventional theatrical run planned), Fantasia 2000 combines seven new animated sequences with seven new classical pieces, with the beloved “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” the sole remnant of the old Fantasia. Yet the animators seem to have taken great care to recall Disney’s classic style of animation: Though Fantasia 2000 is loaded with computer imagery, the flashy stuff is nicely integrated into more conventional scenery. And, at 75 minutes, Fantasia 2000 is short enough to captivate the kids and mature enough to draw in adults, making it one of Disney’s more successful stabs at universal entertainment. [Joshua Klein]

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The poster for Finding Nemo references the “3.7 trillion fish” in the ocean, then, in fine print, suggests that the number might be a conservative estimate. Whatever the true tally is, Finding Nemo gives the sense that if it weren’t limited by its borders, it would eventually reveal them all. Like Pixar’s previous films, Finding Nemo mines humor from the oddities of an unknown world but stays grounded in a familiar one, finding recognizable elements of heartbreak and happiness amid the ink-jetting octopi and irritable flounders. [Keith Phipps]

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Although it hits terminal cuteness sometime around the two-thirds mark—i.e., pretty much the moment a pseudonymous Paul Reubens arrives as the voice of a sentient spaceship who laughs way too much—the first hour or so of Disney’s attempt to cash in on the E.T. craze is remarkably bracing stuff. What’s most shocking about Flight Of The Navigator, to modern eyes, is what a slow, subtle burn it is; though director Randal Kleiser fills the movie’s opening act with tongue-in-cheek references to flying saucers and people staring up in wonder at the skies, the actual abduction that drives its plot takes place in the span of a single, barely noticeable cut. The upshot of all this misdirection is that the audience ends up just as scared and disoriented as poor David Freeman (Joey Cramer), who falls into a ravine near his Florida home one night, and somehow emerges eight years later, untouched by the ravages of time, and with a mysterious extraterrestrial voice yelling in his head. It’s actually a bit of a letdown once the movie gets to the kid-flies-a-spaceship parts that are ostensibly its reason for existing; it’s a better mystery movie than an action-adventure, no matter how many times Reubens does the Pee-wee Herman laugh. [William Hughes]

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Before Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis switched bodies, before even Tom Hanks became Big and Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage went Vice Versa, there was Jodie Foster in the original body-swapping romp, 1976’s Freaky Friday. Foster’s Annabelle is the coolest of cool kids, sporting a shag haircut and a puka shell necklace as she traverses her neighborhood on her skateboard, rebelling against her strict mother in the process. But then Annabelle becomes her mother, and her mother becomes Annabelle, and future Oscar-winner Foster and Second City alum Barbara Harris usher in the age of body-swap movies by taking on each other’s personalities. Foster asking her pal, “Could I trouble you for a dime, dear?” is comedy gold, as is Harris blowing bubble gum and heading out on that skateboard. Naturally, everything ends up with a car driving down stairs and a wild water-skiing stunt, because this is a 1970s Disney movie. But the two Golden Globe-nominated leads end up expertly delivering the true message of Freaky Friday: Nobody’s life is as easy as it looks from the outside. [Gwen Ihnat]

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It’s not often that Disney Animation outdoes the storytellers at Pixar. But the parent studio has much more experience with lead female characters, and a modern take on female independence is the best aspect here, especially when judged against the reductive princess fantasies in the Mouse House vault. Frozen does for sisterly relationships what Brave should have done for mothers and daughters—and the frigid distance and lopsided maturity helps the sibling bond feel more like a maternal one. Rebuking the simplistic romantic tropes of its fairy-tale predecessors, Frozen isn’t quite as accomplished as The Princess And The Frog, Wreck-It Ralph, or Tangled. But in its simple pleasures, it’s every bit as enjoyable as Winnie The Pooh, with a strong and valuable moral undercurrent to boot. Most importantly, this is a long-needed step in the right direction to a more varied depiction of female characters in Disney’s canon. [Kevin McFarland]

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Within Hollywood’s greatest trilogies, the second film is always the best. So it goes with The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars, The Two Towers and Lord Of The Rings, and 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper and the first three Muppet movies. With The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers, that’s just a symptom of a second act of a story traditionally being more engrossing than its opening passages or its resolution. The Great Muppet Caper succeeds by following a different rule of film sequels: Go bigger. Its predecessor, The Muppet Movie, wowed moviegoers by putting Kermit The Frog on a bike, so The Great Muppet Caper put an entire felt-and-fur ensemble on wheels. As an encore to the feats of contortion that allowed Fozzie Bear to drive a Studebaker in The Muppet Movie, Frank Oz submerged himself for hours in order to give Miss Piggy her Esther Williams moment in The Great Muppet Caper. But it’s not all empty showmanship from Oz, Jim Henson, and company: All the spectacle of the sequel is in service of paying tribute to the magic of the silver screen. [Erik Adams]

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What’s faintly delightful about Guardians Of The Galaxy is that half of its heroes seem bored by the mythology. But Guardians requires no catch-up, just an affinity for tongue-in-cheek space opera. As in Star Wars and any number of Joss Whedon projects, surrogate family is the fuel cell: This is a group effort of a blockbuster, powered by the conflicting personalities of its ragtag roster. Where Guardians begins to lose its grip a little is in the backstretch, as it struggles to conform its winning eccentricity to what is, essentially, the Marvel franchise mold. Must all these films end the same way, with a long and loud effects reel? And must their villains be such epic bores, such stiff agents of stoic malevolence? (One could trade Lee Pace’s dastardly emperor for the evil elf of that last Thor movie and no one would really notice.) Gunn also leans a little too hard on the sentimentality in the second half, rushing the team’s transformation from uneasy companions to bona fide besties. His film, powered by antagonistic banter, soars highest when blurring the line between altruism and selfishness. [A.A. Dowd]

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James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy was a stock ragtag superhero movie with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and a hearty dose of nostalgia, but its sequel is something a little smoother. One might chalk it up to the Marvel Studios house style’s embrace of the stranger legacies of comics artists Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, or to the fact that Gunn has doubled down on nostalgia, repainting the outer space setting in a Skittles color palette while drawing quotations of ’80s pop culture (video arcades, snobs vs. slobs comedies, flirting TV couples in the Moonlighting and Cheers vein, David Hasselhoff) directly into the plot. To some degree, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 is a more offbeat film than the original, with better gags, better (and more cartoonish) action, and more visual variety. But like its predecessor, it is hamstrung by the fact that it exists in part to smirk at its own corniness and space opera trappings. “You suck, Zylak”—a line that’s earns a good laugh in context—sums it up. Vol. 2 can only be as irreverent as it is broadly and shamelessly derivative. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Over the course of two performances in 2016, nine cameras captured Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s juggernaut musical retelling of the life of America’s first secretary of the treasury, in intimate detail. Directed by Thomas Kail (FX’s Fosse/Verdon), also the director of Hamilton’s original Off-Broadway and Broadway runs, this is an experience that revels in such details. It’s also perhaps the apex expression in a long tradition of capturing live theater, dance, and opera for the screen, one that includes the canon captured by Great Performances and American Playhouse, impressive big-screen recordings from the U.K.’s National Theatre Live, and filmed concert-style performances like the 1995 “dream cast” version of Les Misérables. Here, the “dream cast” is the original cast; the number of people who’ll get to see Miranda in the role—and take in the performances that made stars of Leslie Odom Jr., Daveed Diggs, and others—just skyrocketed. [Allison Shoemaker]

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For both musical theater fans and Disney aficionados, Howard is a must-see. Don Hahn’s documentary which centers on lyricist Howard Ashman, a gay, HIV-positive man who played a major role in so many Millennial and Gen Z childhoods—even if they don’t know him by name. Ashman and his songwriting partner, Alan Menken, penned iconic songs for The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Beauty And The Beast, as well as the beloved cult musical Little Shop Of Horrors. In exploring Ashman’s phenomenal creative output, Howard inspires bittersweet reflections about just how much more he—and by extension, a whole generation of artists—could’ve accomplished had their lives not been cut short by AIDS. [Caroline Siede]

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Hocus Pocus’ plot is just the binding agent for the real attractions of the film—an animatronic talking black cat, a charming zombie ex-boyfriend, and a trio of singing witches (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker) who are blatantly copping the aesthetic and comedic patter of drag queens. Hocus Pocus stands out from a host of other films from that era because it embraces its silliness, and then goes the extra mile to make sure that silliness is executed well. It’s a film made purely for entertainment value, without extra fat or pretension. That’s why it has lingered in the hearts of audiences, even when simple nostalgia has faded away. [Sonia Saraiya]

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Like the underrated The Emperor’s New Groove, Home On The Range shares many of the virtues associated with classic Warner Bros. animation: manic energy, inspired characters and character design, a smart script equally pitched at squirmy children and parents, and deftly executed verbal and physical comedy. Perfectly cast down to minor but memorable roles like Joe Flaherty’s ornery old goat and Steve Buscemi’s wormy crook, Home On The Range is the rare animated movie whose success is attributable as much to its inventive, quotable dialogue as its kinetic, cartoony animation. It may seem heretical to suggest this of the studio that brought the world the emotionally stirring likes of Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi, but maybe Disney should just stick to comedy. [Nathan Rabin]

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A remarkably faithful adaptation of Victor Hugo’s epic 1831 novel about a lovable, golden-voiced hunchback and his trio of zany, wise-cracking gargoyle sidekicks, The Hunchback of Notre Dame should please both Disney fans and 19th century French romanticists alike. The plot: Deformed hunchback Quasimodo is trapped in the belltower by the evil Judge Frollo. Leggy gypsy Esmeralda must seek refuge in the belltower after lashing out against Frollo during the Feast of Fools. Together, Quasimodo and Esmeralda share many exciting adventures and sing many wonderful songs from the award-winning musical team of Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. [Stephen Thompson]

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With The Incredibles, an endlessly clever riff on superhero tropes, Pixar furthers a tradition of personal, character-driven storytelling that has the speed of a Warner Bros. cartoon, but doesn’t rely too heavily on verbal gags to hang together. Written and directed by Brad Bird, who also contributes the funniest vocal performance as an artsy designer for the cape-wearing set, the film expands the possibilities of what computer animation can accomplish. But for all the artisans involved in putting it together, The Incredibles doesn’t feel machine-processed: Like Bird’s superb The Iron Giant or the films of Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), it rings with the small, idiosyncratic touches of a single auteur. [Scott Tobias]

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Inside Out takes place almost entirely within the mind of a preteen girl, where five personified emotions struggle to guide her through a life crisis. Bucking the company mandate of churning out lesser sequels and prequels, it’s not just a brilliant idea, but maybe the most conceptually daring movie the Bay Area animation house has ever produced. And that’s really saying something, what with WALL-E on the books. [A.A. Dowd]

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Comic-book-to-film franchise starters often sag under the weight of creation stories, establishing conflict between the super-heroic and super-villainous and introducing a roster of iconic characters familiar to comics geeks but unknown to the general movie-going public. That’s an awful lot of exposition for any one film to handle. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man wrestles with those responsibilities as well as a relatively unique conundrum: How do you make audiences care about a character whose face is hidden under a metallic scowl? The Iron Man filmmakers’ answer is to cast Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role and keep him out of the Iron Man suit for as long as possible. Iron Man is the rare comic-book movie that makes the prospect of a sequel seem like a promise instead of a threat. [Nathan Rabin]

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Forget how much Walt Disney’s adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel series cost, and forget the (relatively) disappointing box-office. Director Andrew Stanton and his team of screenwriters and special-effects technicians made a highly entertaining retro-adventure, true to Burroughs’ epic vision of a Civil War soldier who fights monsters on Mars. Sure, star Taylor Kitsch comes up short whenever he has to bring a little gravitas to the story of war and romance, but he’s charismatic in the many light-hearted moments, and from Stanton’s years at Pixar (where he helmed Finding Nemo and Wall-E), he’s learned how to build stories and characters carefully, and to fill the screen with images that delight the eye. [Noel Murray]

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Lady And The Tramp is the rare Disney film more interested in reality than fantasy. Sure, it involves an imagined world of talking dogs, but they reflect and refract the film’s 1909 Midwestern setting. Many of the creators who worked on the project—including Walt Disney himself—grew up around that time period, and the film is brimming with nostalgia for a simpler era (which, ironically, is now much the same way we feel about the 1950s). But while it may be full of lovingly drawn worlds and bright musical numbers, underneath its charming exterior of literal puppy love, Lady And The Tramp explores its setting in a manner more akin to Howard’s End than Snow White & The Seven Dwarves. [Caroline Siede]

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At the end of a hard day, Lilo, a friendless orphan girl from Hawaii, makes a desperate wish for a guardian angel, preferably the nicest one available. Cut to a malevolent-looking, if diminutive, alien emerging from the wreckage of a spaceship. That’s the most concise example of the impressive balancing act that goes on in Lilo & Stitch, which gets to have its sentiment and keep its teeth, almost literally. Even with so much of its running time taken up with expertly executed cartoon humor—worthy, like that of The Emperor’s New Groove, of Disney’s old Warner Bros. competitors—Lilo & Stitch keeps circling back to its characters’ emotions, making Stitch’s inevitable retreat from his destructive agenda feel like a natural development rather than a plot contrivance. [Keith Phipps]

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