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 "The problem is I got a fifty-year-old lust and three-year-old dinky."

—Baby Herman's irreverent response to being labeled a ladies' man pushes the envelope of cartoon decency in Disney's groundbreaking film from 1988.

All children take their play very seriously, and you might be one of the many adults who look back on playtime as one of the most engaging and memorable aspects of your youth. Children create a world and mimic what they see when they are playing, and this activity is, without a doubt, a fundamental building block for our species. When Toy Story came out in '95 it was a big success. The story of a group of toys who were loyal to their owner and overcame outlandish obstacles was brilliant. Seeing toys that actually felt emotions and had attachment issues helped me understand and define my relationship to my mother. It also urged me to take care of my toys and stop chopping off Barbie's hair. The family featured had a single-mother, which was an interesting dynamic and something that many children can relate to. It also gave me a silly curiosity growing up; I checked on my toys to see if they actually had a life of their own. The documentary The Pixar Story explains the company's success with its animation techniques and its first film, Toy Story. Toy Story 3, made over a decade later than the first, would become one of the highest grossing animated films, and one of three to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.

For those of you who haven't seen Toy Story 1 or 2, let me indulge myself with a brief synopsis. The first film is about the anxiety of being replaced. Woody and his preschool-appropriate buddies fear that Andy will get a new toy for his birthday and replace one of them. He gets a Buzz Lightyear action figure and goes through a brief phase of being obsessed with space and the new toy. The quarrels between the delusional Buzz (who thinks he's a real space ranger) and the former favorite, Woody, leads to a huge accident. The two end up outside and in the hands of a kid who likes to torture toys. They decide to work together in order to get home before their family moves to their new house, or the sinister kid across the street blows them up.

Watership Down is a beautifully animated film, based on the novel of the same name, written by Richard Adams. It tells the story of a group of rabbits who, much like humans, has their own religion, language, and culture. It evokes a classic English gothic world of green meadows, hallucination, and the grim, shadowy, underbelly of human nature...errm, I mean, rabbit-nature.

The story begins when Fiver, a young rabbit with prophetic abilities, has a vision of the destruction of the peaceful warren in which the rabbits all live. Fiver and his older brother, a rabbit named Hazel, make an attempt to persuade the other rabbits to leave to warren and run for safety, but the chief rabbit of their warren dismisses their ideas and sends them away. Fiver and Hazel, both firm in their belief in Fiver's prophetic abilities, decide to leave the warren on their own with a small group of other like-minded rabbits.

Based on a book by Dr. Seuss (Theodore "Ted"’ Geisel), this little 26-minute television special has been a holiday tradition since it first aired in 1966. But it’s more than just a Christmas cartoon. Besides being a moving story about the power of love, it may be the greatest animated (long) short ever made. It really is a tribute to three unique talents coming together: the prose of author Dr. Seuss, the voice of actor Boris Karloff, and the vision of the legendary animation director Chuck Jones (co-director Ben Washam was also a very respected animator and a long time collaborator with Jones).

The Grinch is a grumpy, old, green, Scroogey creature with a heart "two sizes too small" who lives with his sweet little mutt, Max, atop a mountain overlooking Whoville (though his actual color varies on different DVD versions). In a spat of bitterness listening to the Whos prepare for their Christmas festivities, he decides to ruin their Christmas. Disguised as Santa he descends on Whoville in a sled, with poor Max dressed as a reindeer and forced to pull the sled down the steep, snowy ledge. Then he slithers around the homes of the Whos and steals everything Christmas related, including trees, candy, gifts, and even burning fire logs.

Having a realistic, almost The Battle of Algiers docudrama feel helps give Born Free an even bigger heart. The line between real life and film is pushed in so many ways; though as a child seeing this film, I didn’t quite know what a documentary was, that’s what Born Free almost appeared to be. The film is based on the best-selling book by Joy Adamson about her and her husband’s experience raising a lion named Elsa from cub to full-grown. Real life married acting couple Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers play Joy and her husband George, adding to the realism. But what really separates the film from one of those Disney pseudo nature docs is its nice score by John Barry with that moving theme song.

The Adamsons are a naturalist couple living in the Kenyan bush - he’s a game warden and she’s an artist/writer and a big animal lover. After a couple of lions in the jungle behave like lions, per his job, he goes and casually shoots them. But then he is stuck with their three little cubs, and he and Joy bottle-feed and hand raise them. She really takes a shine to the runt of the trio whom she names Elsa. Under pressure from their boss, Kendal (Geoffrey Keen), eventually the other two are shipped off to a zoo while Elsa stays behind to become one of the family. As she reached her full grown state, Joy makes a bold choice, instead of sending her to a zoo they release her back into the wild, because after all she was born free and deserves to live free. The dilemma though is, like any wild animal raised by humans, she is too tame and doesn’t have the skills to live in the wild. The Adamsons must teach Elsa to be a wild lion, all leading to a gut-wrenching conclusion as the Adamsons will eventually have to say goodbye to their giant pet cat.

Let me just play my cards right now...On a lazy Sunday morning I was lying on the couch watching something called “The Family Channel” and BAM I became completely absorbed watching the 1998 remake of Disney's 1961 sorta-classic, The Parent Trap. Wow. I was blown away by it. And even with this Family Channel berating me with commercials (a 127-minute movie shown in a three hour slot), I was completely sucked in and moved by it.

Yeah-yeah, you know the deal...Two long lost identical looking little girls run into each other at summer camp. After some minor conflicts they realize that they're related, twin sisters to be exact. And then they hatch a plan to switch places in an effort to get their estranged parents back together and live briefly in the other's shoes. Before you scoff, let me remind you Shakespeare toyed with these same kinds of plots all the time (no, really, he did).

Once upon a time in Los Angeles, in the 1990s, the biggest labor strife to hit the town in fifty years was the janitor’s service union strike, a group made up of mostly legal and illegal immigrants from south of the border (giving it an especially underdog meaning). The great British “kitchen sink realism” director Ken Loach (Riff-Raff, The Wind That Shakes the Barley) came and made Bread &Roses—a very special film that uses the labor dispute as a backdrop and in doing so made one of the best films in years about both Los Angeles and the immigrant experience.

Looking for work, Maya (Pilar Padilla) sneaks into the country, joining her sister Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo) who is legal (married to an American). Eventually Maya gets work cleaning high-rise office buildings, but every corner she turns there seems to be someone wanting to exploit her and take advantage of her illegal status (both sexually and economically). After being befriended by labor activist Sam Shapiro (Adrien Brody), Maya eventually becomes a leader and helps to organize the union, becoming sort of a Mexican “Norma Rae.” This leads to complications with her sister, who doesn’t want to rock the boat and is already taking great chances boarding her.

Timecrimes is sort of like a darker version of that "Treehouse of Horror" episode of The Simpsons where Homer's toaster becomes a time machine and he keeps screwing up the future by altering the past. It starts off with a similarly dimwitted protagonist and comic dialogue, anyway, but then unexpectedly evolves into an effectively puzzling thriller that, once you think you know where it's going, manages to twist its way into a place you never could have predicted, but which only makes sense. BloodyDisgusting.com calls it, "One of the best time travel movies of all time," and I'll agree in that it's one of the most uniquely satisfying and intelligent I've ever seen.

Héctor and Clara just moved into a new home privately located in a scenic forest in Spain, and Héctor begins noticing some bizarre signs no less than a few seconds into the film. The phone rings but no one appears to be on the other end. He calls the number back but only gets a voicemail asking for a security code. "How can anyone know this number?" he asks his wife. "We just moved in." Later, while lounging on the front lawn and taking in views of the forest with his binoculars, he sees a woman stripping off her clothes. Venturing into the woods for a closer look, Héctor is suddenly attacked by a scissor-wielding maniac covered in bloody bandages. He makes a run for it, eventually stumbling on a high-tech looking science lab. He finds a radio and calls for help, where a scientist named El Joven guides him to a safer part of the building. But what Héctor finds determines his fate in ways he, and I doubt any audience watching, could predict.

Warm and wonderful, Pedro Almodovar's Volver resonates with his favorite subjects:  women, secrets and the transformative power of love. Framed with light suspense, rich imagery and sensuous color are amazing performances by the entire cast, most notably a voluptuous Penelope Cruz. Her courageous and spirited Raimunda is a struggling mother stuck in a bad marriage and bravely fulfilling the role of matriarch, not only to her sister and daughter but to a community of women loosely tied by tradition and committed through love. When her mother reappears as a ghost, Raimunda's life gets infinitely more complicated.

Violence and religious mysticism are catalysts and cards to the emotional evolution of all the characters but are hardly the point. As secrets are unveiled, the once shelled lives become full again with redemption and understanding and life seems to right itself, as if waiting for the perfect miracle. The weak become strong, the strong - weak, youth gains wisdom and age renews its joy for life.

In 1962, only a year after his hugely successful and critically acclaimed breakout film, Viridiana, Luis Bunuel created Exterminating Angel. It was fairly well received and admired in the initial release, but it would take over a decade of films to follow in its wake for Exterminating Angel to be considered one of Bunuel’s best films and as a masterpiece of surrealist cinema.

The story is simple:  guests of an upper-class dinner party find themselves unable to leave. Why? Well, no one can figure that out. More importantly, no one is willing to make an attempt to figure it out. And from this absurd circumstance, Bunuel weaves together a story filled with biting satire, debasing interactions, and a subtly repetitive time structure. In typical Bunuel fashion, humor and sadness occupy the same emotional terrain, feeding off one another in the same scene, creating a tense and anomalous atmosphere as the movie progresses.