No film here is good or bad. It is only like something.

2025 · Thriller

A tired driver hits a bike on the way home in 2014, and the decision he and an ambulance driver make about the baby they pull out of the wreck sets everything off. The film jumps years ahead from there, and takes its time.

• RealisticClearly realistic

2026 · Comedy

The adopted son of two British secret agents washes out of MI7, learns he is of Indian origin, and is sent to Goa to get a woman out of a crime boss's factory. A broad spy comedy, played for laughs throughout.

• LightClearly light

2015 · Drama

The son of a famous heavyweight, who never knew him, turns up in Philadelphia and asks his father's old rival to train him. The usual boxing shape, with the fights shot in long unbroken takes.

• RealisticStrongly realistic

2016 · Comedy

A city kid placed with a foster family in the New Zealand bush ends up out in the wild with his grumpy uncle while the whole country hunts for them. Jokes every minute, and a lot of scenery.

• SimpleClearly simple

2007 · Comedy

A sixteen-year-old finds out she is pregnant and picks a couple in the suburbs to raise the baby. Everybody talks in a very particular way, and the whole thing is over in an hour and a half.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• IntimateStrongly intimate
• Character-drivenClearly character-driven

2015 · Drama

A five-year-old falls asleep on a train and wakes thousands of miles across India, and grows up adopted in Australia. The first half is a small boy alone in a huge country; the second is a man at a computer.

• RealisticStrongly realistic

2024 · Animation

A woman in Melbourne tells her life story to her pet snail: a twin brother sent to the other side of the country, foster homes, and a collection of things she cannot throw away. Clay animation, narrated all the way through, and sad more often than not.

• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• IntimateStrongly intimate
• HeavyStrongly heavy

2022 · Drama

A twenty-five-year-old adopted from Korea and raised in France lands in Seoul on a whim and asks the agency to find her birth parents. It follows her on and off for years, and she is not easy company.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• IntimateClearly intimate

2018 · Drama

A family in Tokyo living off part-time work and small thefts takes in a little girl they find alone in the cold. It is quiet and slow, and most of it is the six of them crowded into a tiny house.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• IntimateStrongly intimate
• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• HeavyClearly heavy

2007 · Horror

A woman moves back into the seaside orphanage she grew up in to reopen it as a home for children, and her young son starts talking about friends nobody else can see. An old-fashioned ghost story built on quiet, not jump scares.

• HeavyClearly heavy
• IntimateClearly intimate

2024 · Animation

A shipping robot washes up on an island with no people on it and ends up raising an orphaned gosling, with a fox helping. Lovely to look at, made for kids, and it does not pretend nature is gentle.

• FantasticClearly fantastic

2001 · Science fiction

A couple with a dying son take in a robot boy built to love them, and he wants to become real enough to keep them. Long and strange, and much sadder than the fairy tale it borrows from.

• FantasticStrongly fantastic
• HeavyClearly heavy
• EpicClearly epic

2021 · Science fiction

When the android who acts as older brother to an adopted daughter breaks down, her father goes through his memories looking for a way to repair him. Very slow, very quiet, mostly domestic.

• SlowStrongly slow
• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• FantasticClearly fantastic

2025 · Horror

A brother and his blind stepsister are placed with a foster mother who has recently lost a child of her own. It gets very unpleasant, and it does not look away.

• HeavyStrongly heavy
• IntimateStrongly intimate

2002 · Animation

A lonely girl in Hawaii adopts what she thinks is a dog, and it is an escaped genetic experiment. Funny, and the family part is played straight.

• FantasticStrongly fantastic

2016 · Animation

A boy is sent to a children's home after his mother dies, and meets the others living there. Stop-motion, sixty-six minutes, and it takes all of them seriously.

• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• IntimateClearly intimate

2013 · Drama

Staff at a residential home for at-risk teenagers look after them while managing their own histories. Handheld and warm, with very hard scenes in it.

• RealisticStrongly realistic
• Character-drivenStrongly character-driven
• IntimateStrongly intimate
• HeavyClearly heavy

2003 · Animation

Three homeless people in Tokyo find an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve and set out to return her. Coincidence piled on coincidence, on purpose.

• Character-drivenClearly character-driven