Pokémon: Detective Pikachu

It was hard to decide which Pokémon adaptation to put on this list. There are a lot of real good ones. Pokémon Concierge, Netflix’s stop-motion series, would easily hang with the best stuff here, and those early seasons of the anime are still remarkably funny, endearing, and heartfelt. But the live-action Detective Pikachu movie is still, almost five years later, such a remarkable feat in adapting the series’ mystery adventure games to the big screen. Props to Legendary Pictures for deviating from Pokémon’s usual competitive battles for the first live-action movie and instead choosing a detective story to make it more approachable to a wide audience.

Casting Ryan Reynolds as the titular talking, quipping detective was inspired, and he gets as close to an all-ages Deadpool as he can. The mystery that he and his partner Tim solve takes them on a tour of an idyllic vision of the Pokémon universe, and interrogates parts of the series’ culture that have been established norms within the franchise for decades. What if a city outlawed Pokémon battles and humans lived alongside their favorite little guys? Detective Pikachu has layers, even if it sometimes gets in its own way with cheesy dialogue and a genre shift into a disaster movie in the eleventh hour. That final reveal? Chef’s kiss. — Kenneth Shepard