Brigsby Bear

In a year of charming bears lighting up the big screen to varying degrees of success, Brigsby Bear (admittedly of a different breed than Winnie the Pooh or Paddington) comfortably holds its own. It's a strangely tragic but determinedly hopeful film about the cathartic power of stories and storytelling.

This winsome tale from Saturday Night Live’s Dave McCary and Kyle Mooney – who directed and co-wrote respectively – follows James Pope (played by Mooney), who's rescued by police from an underground bunker where he was unknowingly held captive by a couple he believed to be his parents (Mark Hamill and Jane Adams). Later he learns they kidnapped him as an infant and that the children’s programme that had defined his life, called Brigsby Bear, was a ruse. But as James struggles awkwardly, if earnestly, to adapt to his new life, his obsession with Brigsby only grows until he ropes his new friends and biological family into creating a movie to end the series that shaped him.

Brigsby Bear begins a dark, quirky comedy and ends with an unexpected, lingering emotional punch.