I found. out even Bambi and the 1930s Snow White is there too:
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The 50 Best TV Shows and Movies to Watch on Disney+ Right Now
The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites.
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Of all the companies to enter the streaming wars, Disney has significant advantages with Disney+. It can draw from a deep vault of its own animated and live-action movies and from popular shows on its own cable networks — as well as from company properties like Marvel, Pixar, National Geographic and Star Wars. And that’s not counting the platform’s slate of original TV shows and movies.
That’s a lot of material: nearly 500 films and 7,500 TV episodes at the time of its debut. Below is our guide to the 50 best titles on Disney+, arranged in reverse chronological order with an eye toward variety. As the service continues to build its catalog, this list will change too.
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Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best of both on Hulu and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.
‘The Book of Boba Fett’ (2021-present)
After memorable death in the belly of a Sarlacc in “Return of the Jedi,” the bounty hunter Boba Fett took root in the imaginations of “Star Wars” fans, and his brief resurrection in “The Mandalorian” presaged this first starring vehicle from it creator, Jon Favreau. Much like Mando, Boba (Temuera Morrison) is a grim-purposed gunslinger in a space western, but “The Book of Boba Fett” frames him as a darker figure, hellbent on seizing control of Jabba the Hutt’s former criminal territory. Our critic Mike Hale notes “the quiet atmosphere and deliberate pace” that firms up the crossover appeal of the two shows.
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‘Encanto’ (2021)
Living in the impossible lushness of a Colombian paradise, the Madrigals are a family in which everyone has magical talents, like super-strength, healing powers and the ability to communicate with animals. “Encanto” focuses on the one Madrigal without any special gifts and her touching quest to figure out what role she has in the family dynamic. With songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda that cover a wide emotional spectrum, this whimsical and heartfelt film is also a feast for the eyes. Our critic Maya Phillips calls the computer animation “some of the best from any major studio in the last several years.”
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‘The Beatles: Get Back’ (2021)
Culled from over 60 hours of footage and 150 hours of audio around the making of the Beatles album “Let It Be” and the extraordinary rooftop performance that followed, Peter Jackson’s three-part, nearly eight-hour documentary may be a fans-only proposition. But those fans will be treated to a unique creative journey, chronicling the ardors of songwriting and recording at a moment when a great collaboration was coming to an end. Jackson’s focus on process requires patience, but once these lads from Liverpool step onto the London rooftop of their Apple Corps headquarters, the catharsis of their final live performance is fully felt.
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‘The Rescue’ (2021)
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s follow-up to their superb rock-climbing documentary “Free Solo” (also on Disney+) follows adventurers in the opposite direction, as a small group of cave-diving specialists go spelunking in an effort to save 12 boys trapped in the flooded Tham Luang cave in Thailand. The rescue effort attracted global attention, but Vasarhelyi and Chin’s scrupulously detailed documentary, supported by incredible footage, brings the fullness of the achievement to life. The critic Jessica Kiang called it a “gripping, rousing, triumph-against-the-odds narrative.”
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‘Hawkeye’ (2021)
Perhaps the least-loved (or most-neglected) Avenger, the arrow-slinging marksman Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), a.k.a. Hawkeye, has mostly been relegated to the backbench as popular heroes like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor and Spider-Man have taken center stage. This TV series jokes knowingly about second-tier status by having his kids drag him to see “Rogers: The Musical.” But “Hawkeye,” too, makes him almost a supporting player on his own show, as Kate Bishop, a plucky young archer (Hailee Steinfeld) attempts to follow in his footsteps. As our critic Mike Hale writes, “Steinfeld and Renner are good foils for each other, as Bishop pushes Barton to relax and he tends to her like a fussy aunt.”
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‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ (2021)
Through the character of “Shaun,” also known as Xu Shang-Chi, the Marvel Cinematic Universe seizes the opportunity to introduce the martial arts tradition to younger audiences. (Ageless legends like Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh are also on board as ambassadors.) Shang-Chi (played as a likable naïf by Simu Liu) is a humble San Francisco valet who once trained to be an assassin for a secret organization in China. Forced to confront a father (Leung) who possesses immortality and near-limitless power, he answers the call and returns home to lay the darkness of his past to rest.
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‘Oceans’ (2009)
Of the Disneynature documentaries, “Oceans” is perhaps the least interested in scientific utility, leaning instead on the poetic flourishes of Pierce Brosnan’s narration. But for the directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the Frenchmen responsible for the awe-inspiring “Winged Migration,” this attention to the abstract wonders of the sea is entirely by design. Their survey of four oceans marvels at synchronized harmonies of behavior, the alien beauty of deep-sea creatures and even a night shot of a rocket through an iguana’s eyes. Jeannette Catsoulis praised its “crystalline imagery and poetic immediacy.”
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‘McFarland, USA’ (2015)
Although it follows the standard arc of Disney based-on-a-true-story underdog sports movies, “McFarland, USA” tweaks the formula enough to discover a touching harmony between a white high school coach and a group of athletes from a poor, mostly Mexican agricultural community. Kevin Costner stars as a long-in-the-tooth football coach who relocates to California’s Central Valley in 1987 and starts up a cross-country running program that suits kids who are undersized but tough and full of endurance. A.O. Scott writes that the film “aims to be rousing rather than revelatory, and it mostly succeeds.”
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‘The Mysterious Benedict Society’ (2021-present)
Based on the illustrated children’s books by Trenton Lee Stewart, this stylized fantasy series gathers four gifted young outcasts on the mission to save the world from a brainwashing scheme. Tony Hale plays the eccentric who does the gathering, with the intent to harness the children’s unique powers (memory, athleticism, mind reading, etc.) to infiltrate a school called the Institute. There’s a familiar Harry Potter/Percy Jackson quality to this team of “Chosen One” types finding their purpose together, but “The Mysterious Benedict Society” values their intelligence above all, and it has the impeccably fussed-over look of a Wes Anderson movie.
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‘Cruella’ (2021)
In detailing the origins of Cruella de Vil, the dognapping villain of Disney’s “101 Dalmatians,” this energetic live-action comedy imagines her evil grandiloquence as a cross between the punk and haute couture fashion movements of London in the 1970s. Emma Stone gives the character an antihero appeal as a feisty street urchin and thief who seeks revenge for her mother’s death, and the period soundtrack matches her relentless zeal. Our critic A.O. Scott said the film “doesn’t offer much that it genuinely new, but it nonetheless feels fresher than most recent Disney live-action efforts.”
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‘Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.’ (2021-present)
It’s hard to imagine a less promising idea than a gender-flipped revivification of “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” the long-running ABC series about a teenage physician who experiences growing pains while treating literal pains. But while “Doogie Kamealoha” can’t avoid the obligatory scenes of patient after patient acting shocked that their doctor is so young, the empathy and pluck of its Hawaiian protagonist (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) grounds the show in authentic feeling. The show doesn’t dwell on the absurdity of its premise or turn her into an impossible misfit. She’s simply smart, caring and, to a young Disney+ audience, enviable.
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‘Bambi’ (1942)
No one can forget the trauma of watching a hunter kill a young deer’s mother. But after that notorious moment, “Bambi” is watercolor poetry, following the fawn as he learns and grows alongside his woodland friends and eventually becomes a father himself. Without spelling it out in a big production number, the film quietly teaches children about the “circle of life” in all its beauty, wonder and occasional loss. “The colors,” our critic raved, “would surprise even the spectrum itself.”
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‘The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers’ (2021-present)
Disney’s middling sports-comedy franchise gets a boost from the “Cobra Kai” treatment, with the once-scrappy Mighty Ducks hockey team now a joyless pee-wee juggernaut and its former coach, Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez), now a grizzled, cranky, down-on-his-luck rink owner. But it’s Lauren Graham who ties the series together as an earnest mother who wants sports to be fun again, so she builds a hockey team around her son, populated by misfits who barely know how to skate. The rest of this underdog scenario more or less writes itself.
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‘WandaVision’ (2021)
One persistent criticism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that all the movies look and feel basically the same, a natural consequence of its intersecting characters and story lines. Casting two lesser M.C.U. characters, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), as misfit newlyweds in a ’60s-style suburban sitcom, “WandaVision” is an audacious departure, which critic Mike Hale called “a high-concept combination of paranoiac mystery and nostalgic pop-culture burlesque.” Between the silly misunderstandings and winking references to old standards like “Bewitched,” the show plants some odd disruptions that suggest everything is not as it seems.
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‘Short Circuit’ (2020-present)
Much like the “SparkShorts” collection from Pixar, “Short Circuit” is Disney’s avenue for in-house, “independent” animated shorts with an eye toward narrative and visual experimentation — techniques, perhaps, that could be used in feature films. Disney employees pitch their ideas, and the selected shorts put them into collaboration with animated artists, a process that is briefly documented before each entry. The bite-size results are often charming. They include a vignette about boy whose thought bubbles take physical form (“Just a Thought”), a 2D throwback to ’80s cartoon themes (“Dinosaur Barbarian”) or a melancholic look at a young man’s changing hometown (“Going Home”).
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‘The Kid Who Would Be King’ (2019)
In his follow-up to “Attack the Block,” an ingenious science-fiction thriller that brought an alien invasion to the streets of South London, the writer and director Joe Cornish again marries the fantastical with the everyday through this rousing modern twist on the King Arthur myth. The boy of destiny here is a 12-year-old from a London suburb who pulls the sword of Excalibur from a construction site and recruits his own knights to do battle against an evil sorceress. The critic Bilge Ebiri called it “a brisk, well-mounted children’s fantasy.”
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‘Isle of Dogs’ (2018)
Wes Anderson’s second attempt at stop-motion animation, after 2009’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” applies the same meticulousness to an original entertainment that uses whimsy and adventure to mask dark themes about a future teetering on the brink of authoritarianism. With a “canine flu” epidemic gripping Japan, its demagogue leader sends the nation’s dogs to quarantine on a garbage island, underestimating their frisky resilience and camaraderie. Manohla Dargis called these droll pups “surprising, touching and thoroughly delightful company.”
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‘The Mandalorian’ (2019-present)
Although “The Mandalorian” takes place between the events of “Return of the Jedi” and “The Force Awakens,” this thrilling sci-fi-adventure series makes a virtue of simplicity, casting off the dense mythology that has burdened the “Star Wars” brand. Most of the blessedly short episodes are about a Clint Eastwood-like bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal) and his precious charge — popularly known as Baby Yoda but officially known as the Child — who square off against various galactic beasts and cutthroats. Mike Hale called it “well paced and reasonably clever, with enough style and visual panache to keep your eyes engaged.”
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‘The Simpsons’ (1989-present)
Let’s face it: Of the 31 (and counting) seasons of “The Simpsons,” only about the first nine are any good, but that impressive run had such a cultural impact that quotes from and references to it have become a linguistic shorthand. The creator Matt Groening and his animators conceived the Simpsons and the town of Springfield as an endlessly elastic source of colorful characters and sharp jibes about American families, institutions and values. Our critic called its animation “ingenious” and its scripts “consistently inventive.”
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‘Queen of Katwe’ (2016)
Disney live-action films don’t exactly have a tradition of gritty realism, but with “Queen of Katwe,” the director Mira Nair scrapes some of the gloss off the rousing true story of a Ugandan girl whose prodigious gifts as a chess player allow her to see the world beyond a Kampala slum. By taking the time to detail the day-to-day struggles of a desperately poor family, Nair adds power to the girl’s efforts to maneuver around the board. If “Hoosiers” made you cry, predicted A.O. Scott, “‘Queen of Katwe’ will wreck you.”
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‘Gravity Falls’ (2012-16)
Crossing the leisure-time sibling dynamic of “Phineas and Ferb” with a much smarter version of the comic mysteries of “Scooby Doo,” this lively and sweet animated series is about Dipper and Mabel Pines, 12-year-old twins who are shipped away to the middle of Oregon to live with their crazy “Grunkle” Stan. Stan runs a beaten-down tourist trap called the “Mystery Shack,” which becomes the nexus of supernatural happenings. Voiced by Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal, the twins have a winning banter that’s underscored by real affection.
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‘The Muppet Show’ (1976-1981)
Four decades after it went off the air, Jim Henson’s “The Muppet Show” might seem alienating to younger generations, who will not only scratch their heads over the dated pop culture references but might also be unfamiliar with the variety-show format. Yet Henson’s beloved creatures have stood the test of time, and there’s no better showcase for them than this delightful patchwork of sketches, musical numbers and silly interstitials. “The Muppet Show” has been difficult to access over the years — this collection offers all but two of the original 120 episodes, many of which were unavailable on DVD — so this is a great chance to sample classic moments or skip ahead to favorite characters.
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‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ (1973-2009)
Saturday morning cartoons were always short on educational opportunities for children, but ABC decided to do a public good by producing “Schoolhouse Rock!,” a series of three-minute animated interstitials that proved to be surprisingly sticky mnemonic devices. Disney+ doesn’t have the complete run of episodes — it has 51 of the 64, the vast majority made in the mid-1970s — but it has all the classics, including the call-and-response of “Conjunction Junction,” the heart-rending multiplication song “Figure Eight” and “I’m Just a Bill,” a civics lessons that was parodied on the “Simpsons” episode “The Day the Violence Died,” which is also available on the service.
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‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937)
The first full-length animated feature remains a treasure and an institutional touchstone, establishing the outsized clashes between good and evil, the comical interludes and the lush house style that would endure as Disney hallmarks for decades. A princess’s beauty, a queen’s vanity, a magic mirror, a poisoned apple and a cottage full of diminutive miners are among the classic elements plucked from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale. Our critic called it “sheer fantasy, delightful, gay and altogether captivating.”
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‘Hamilton’ (2020)
The original production of this audacious pop musical from Lin-Manuel Miranda was a near-impossible ticket on Broadway, but now it comes to streaming as a vital and stubbornly optimistic ode to the American experiment. Leading a cast of mostly Black and Latino actors, Miranda plays Alexander Hamilton as an immigrant made good, a “young, scrappy and hungry” embodiment of an emerging nation. “Hamilton” has been described as a hip-hop history, but the music is as varied as the history is idealized and thorny. A.O. Scott wrote that the film is “motivated, above all, by a faith in the self-correcting potential of the American experiment.”
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‘Soul’ (2020)
Death isn’t usually negotiable, but when Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle-school music teacher, falls down a manhole shortly after booking his first big gig as a jazz pianist, he is willing to defy the laws of heaven to realize his dream. Although this touching and whimsical Pixar movie gets into the bureaucratic intricacies of the afterlife, “Soul” is most affecting as a tribute to the small, myriad pleasures of New York City. A.O. Scott called it “a new chapter in Pixar’s expansion of realism.”
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‘Sleeping Beauty’ (1959)
Photographed in Super Technirama 70, “Sleeping Beauty” is notable especially for eye-catching color and spectacle that sprawls across its wide-screen frame — particularly during a climax when a prince confronts a hedge of thorns and a fire-breathing dragon. Yet it’s just as elegant when Princess Aurora, cursed to eternal slumber by the vengeful Maleficent, dances to “Once Upon a Dream” against a lovely forest backdrop. Our critic encouraged readers to see it on a large screen to appreciate its “gorgeous and stirring vistas.”
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‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ (2017)
The most divisive “Star Wars” movie is also one of the boldest and best, defying the orthodoxy of the Jedi traditionalists in order to embrace a more operatic vision of the overmatched Resistance doing battle against the First Order. It starts with the shock of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) casually tossing a light saber off a cliff and keeps the heresies flowing from there, all in an effort to heighten the emotional stakes for the battles to come. Manohla Dargis called it “a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment.”
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‘Hidden Figures’ (2016)
Tucked away in a segregated building at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., in the early 1960s, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) joins her Black colleagues as a “human computer” until her computational brilliance becomes too valuable for NASA to deny. The irresistible history lesson “Hidden Figures” follows Johnson and two other Black mathematicians as they break down barriers at a crucial time for the space program. A.O. Scott called it “a well-told tale with a clear moral and a satisfying emotional payoff.”
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‘Moana’ (2016)
Disney has spent decades laboring over the creation of more strong-willed heroines, but few have embarked on a mission as consequential as Moana, who travels the seas to save her Polynesian village from environmental ruin. Her adventures are rendered in pleasingly lush ocean blues, and Dwayne Johnson has a fun role as the egotistic demigod Maui. But the true star of “Moana” is the songs, which range from the soaring (“How Far I’ll Go”) to the silly (“You’re Welcome”) to the Bowie-esque (“Shiny”). A.O. Scott wrote that they “anchor the film’s cheery globalism in a specific South Pacific milieu.”
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‘Mary Poppins’ (1964)
In this boisterous musical, Julie Andrews descends from the sky to bring discipline and magic to two spoiled English schoolchildren — and she did the same for a studio that had struggled to make live-action fare on par with its animated classics. With a twinkle in her eye, Andrews’s nanny leads the children through chores with “A Spoonful of Sugar” and more whimsical numbers like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and “Feed the Birds.” Citing the legacy of P.L. Travers’s original novel, our critic praised it as “a most wonderful, cheering movie.
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‘Inside Out’ (2015)
When an 11-year-old girl moves to San Francisco from the Midwest, the personified emotions that control her mind — Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) — go haywire. Ranking near the top of Pixar tear-jerkers, “Inside Out” is about how children develop into complex emotional beings and the important role that melancholy plays in making it happen. A.O. Scott called it “an absolute delight — funny and charming, fast-moving and full of surprises.”
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‘WALL-E’ (2008)
The first third of “WALL-E” is a high-water mark for Pixar, quietly and wondrously detailing the solitary life of the only trash-compacting robot left on an uninhabitable future Earth. The film doesn’t drop off much, either, when the robot befriends a sleeker android sent to the planet to search for signs of life — and perhaps hope for surviving humans to return home. “We’ve grown accustomed to expecting surprises from Pixar,” wrote A.O. Scott, “but ‘WALL-E’ surely breaks new ground.”
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‘Iron Man’ (2008)
The Big Bang event that started the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Iron Man” established the template for more than 20 superhero movies and counting. But it owes much of its success to Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Tony Stark, an arrogant military contractor who turns himself into the most advanced weapon in creation. While later Marvel movies were burdened by mythological baggage, “Iron Man” still feels as sleek and fleet as the superhero himself. A.O. Scott called it “an unusually good superhero picture.”
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‘Ratatouille’ (2007)
Riding high off a nonstop run of hits after “Toy Story,” Pixar gambled on the almost perversely unappealing premise of a Parisian rat with a passion for finessing haute cuisine. But “Ratatouille” pays off in the fast-paced kitchen slapstick of a rodent on the loose, a sensual appreciation for food and a rousing message about pursuing your dreams, no matter your seeming limitations. A.O. Scott called it “a nearly flawless piece of popular art.”
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‘Holes’ (2003)
After getting falsely convicted of stealing shoes, a boy (Shia LaBeouf) gets sent to a labor camp where wayward children are forced to dig five-foot holes in the desert sun for no apparent reason. Based on the novel by Louis Sachar, “Holes” has the backdrop of a Depression-era social drama and heel-turns by Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson, but its delightful eccentricities lighten the mood. A.O. Scott credited the director Andrew Davis for having “turned the book’s spare, gritty allegory into a shaggy-dog saga that is sometimes hectic but always surprising and never easy, predictable or false.”
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‘The Straight Story’ (1999)
The director David Lynch shocked the film world by following the hard-R mind-melters “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and “Lost Highway” with a G-rated, fact-based Disney film about an elderly Midwesterner (Richard Farnsworth) who travels 370 miles on a riding lawn mower to visit his ill, estranged brother. There’s plenty of Lynchian eccentricity and style, however, to his heartfelt slice of Americana, and a genuine conviction in the decency that evildoers in his other films often work to snuff out. Janet Maslin called it “a supremely improbable triumph.”
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‘Toy Story’ (1995)
The first feature-length Pixar movie was also the first entirely computer-animated feature, representing an evolutionary leap for Disney on par with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The sequels would add a more emotional component, but the original “Toy Story” may be the funniest and most fast-paced, scoring jokes off the interplay and adventures of Woody, Buzz and other toys that come to life when they’re not being watched. Our critic called it “the sweetest and savviest film” of 1995.
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‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1991)
The renaissance of Disney animation that started with “The Little Mermaid” peaked with this romance between the book-smart Belle and the tempestuous Beast, a former prince who holds her captive in his enchanted castle until the curse that turned him into a monster is broken. The technical and artistic contributions are first-rate all around, none greater than the songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, which include “Be Our Guest” and the title number. Our critic praised its combination of “the latest computer animation techniques with the best of Broadway.”
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‘Big’ (1988)
Within a two-year span in the 1980s, studios released four “Freaky Friday”-style body-swapping comedies, but none have had the staying power of Penny Marshall’s deft coming-of-age film “Big,” which uses its fanciful premise to access the funny and bittersweet experience of growing up. Tom Hanks is perfectly cast as a 13-year-old trapped in the body of a 30-year-old, faking his way through a job as a toy-company executive while blowing his salary on trampolines and arcade games. Janet Maslin called it “a buoyant summer comedy.”
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‘Pete’s Dragon’ (2016)
The goofy 1977 musical comedy turns into a sincere drama about an orphaned wild child (Oakes Fegley) who befriends a big green dragon in the Pacific Northwest. By playing this story completely straight, the director David Lowery links an earnest environmental message to a touching affirmation of family. Reviews were mostly kind, though our critic found it “sentimental.”
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‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (1988)
Walt Disney Studios had experimented with live-action-animation hybrids for decades before “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” but it never achieved anything close to the fluidity and sophistication of Robert Zemeckis’s one-of-a-kind noir. Through the story of a hard-boiled private detective (Bob Hoskins) who helps a cartoon rabbit on a murder rap, the film pays homage to Disney and Warner Brothers animation while delivering an all-ages “Chinatown.” Its best moments, our critic wrote, “are so novel, so deliriously funny and so crazily unexpected that they truly must be seen to be believed.”
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‘The Princess Bride’ (1987)
Unpacking the mythology of countless bedtime stories, this fractured fairy tale from Rob Reiner, adapted from the novel by William Goldman, winks knowingly at the conventions of romantic adventures while paying them off all the same. At its center is a star-crossed love story between a would-be princess (Robin Wright) and a mysterious pirate (Cary Elwes), but much of the fun is at the periphery, like Mandy Patinkin’s hapless swashbuckler and Wallace Shawn’s Sicilian outlaw. Janet Maslin hailed the “delightful cast and a cheery, earnest style that turns out to be ever more disarming as the film moves along.”
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‘The Sound of Music’ (1965)
A year after “Mary Poppins,” Julie Andrews’s ebullience proved even more crucial in boosting the three-hour adaptation of this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which sets a bright songbook against the grim backdrop of Nazi-occupied Austria. Andrews plays another maternal-figure-for-hire, a struggling nun who leaves the convent when a widower (Christopher Plummer) asks her to look after his seven children. Memorable songs like “My Favorite Things,” “Do-Re-Mi” and the title number help her do it. Our critic didn’t care for the Broadway hit, but admired Andrews’s “air of radiant vigor.”
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‘Return to Oz’ (1985)
Disney would come to regret making a sequel to perhaps the greatest children’s film ever made, but Walter Murch’s “Return to Oz” has picked up a deserved cult following over the years for its half-wondrous, half-nightmarish reading of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels. This time, Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) goes back to a far less enchanting place, with the Yellow Brick Road and the Emerald City in ruins, her old friends turned to stone and the land patrolled by people with wheels instead of hands and feet. Our critic warned that “children are sure to be startled by [its] bleakness.”
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‘Tron’ (1982)
What did the future look like in 1982? This Disney science-fiction-adventure offered one distinctive vision, although not many people flocked to see it at the time. The film has endured as a cult favorite and technological curio, however, presaging inside-the-grid scenarios like “The Matrix.” It also provides a jaundiced look at corporate-controlled tech realms, pitting a computer engineer (Jeff Bridges) against the Master Control Program in a virtual environment. Our critic Janet Maslin praised its “nonstop parade of stunning computer graphics,” even if they weren’t accompanied by more “old-fashioned virtues.”
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‘The Rocketeer’ (1991)
Though it flopped at a time when superhero movies were neither common nor a sure thing, “The Rocketeer” is crackerjack entertainment, a pulpy retro adventure about the F.B.I. and the Nazis fighting over a Howard Hughes invention in 1938 Los Angeles. Bill Campbell plays a go-getting stunt pilot who stumbles upon a jetpack that transforms him into a self-styled hero but makes him a wanted man. Our critic found the overall effect merely “benign,” but conceded that it’s a “bustling, visually clever film.”
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‘The Parent Trap’ (1961)
Set aside the implausibility — and cruelty — of divorced parents’ including identical twins among the assets they divide, and “The Parent Trap” is a delightful screwball comedy, with Hayley Mills playing 13-year-old twins who meet for the first time in summer camp. The two decide to switch parents in a crazy scheme to bring their mother and father back together, assuming that they never married other people after the divorce because they still loved each other. Our critic admired Mills’s “cheerfully persuasive lead performance.”
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‘Oklahoma!’ (1955)
The big screen version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit musical is notable mainly for how big that screen is: Shot simultaneously in Todd-AO 70 mm and CinemaScope, this Technicolor production places its singing cowboys and farm girls against a staggeringly beautiful backdrop. Set in the Oklahoma territory at the turn of the century, where “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” the film isn’t much more consequential than the two love triangles it labors to resolve. But the songs are still memorable, and the scale, as the critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “magnifies and strengthens all the charm it had upon the stage.”
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‘Pinocchio’ (1940)
When the Italian woodworker Geppetto wishes upon a star that his marionette Pinocchio will become a real boy, a blue fairy brings the puppet to life, but that’s only the beginning of a difficult odyssey before Geppetto’s dream comes true. Modern audiences may be shocked by how dark Pinocchio’s journey becomes, particularly when he arrives at Pleasure Island, but the beauty, horror and moral simplicity of the film are still resonant. The movie bombed on initial release, but our critic praised it as Walt Disney’s “happiest event since the war.”
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