Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke gets a screening at The Beverly Theater, presented in its original Japanese with English subtitles. Hayao Miyazaki's sprawling forest epic follows Ashitaka, a young warrior cursed by a demon, as he journeys west and finds himself caught between the ancient spirits of the wilderness and the humans of Iron Town who are cutting into their domain. The film's tangled moral landscape, where neither side is simply right or wrong, gives the story a weight that's stuck with audiences since it first came out in the mid-90s.

Seeing it on a real screen rather than a laptop or TV changes the experience quite a bit, especially with the intimate setup at The Beverly. The theater's compact size and sharp acoustics suit a film built on both sweeping wide shots of untouched forest and quieter, tense character moments. Between the animation, the score by Joe Hisaishi, and the sound design of rustling leaves and distant wolf howls, this is one of those movies that rewards a proper theater setting.