Best Adoring Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of adoring cinema — measured across 4,184 indexed frames from 54 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Adoring films over-index on girl, snow and child — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Wolfwalkers (2020)
Tomm Moore, Ross StewartIMDb 8.0TMDB 8.2See in full on FrameThrower →
Honor Kneafseyas Robyn Goodfellowe (voice)- Eva Whittakeras Mebh Óg MacTíre (voice)
Sean Beanas Robyn's Father, Bill Goodfellowe (voice)
In a time of superstition and magic, when wolves are seen as demonic and nature an evil to be tamed, a young apprentice hunter comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack. But when she saves a wild native girl, their friendship leads her to discover the world of the Wolfwalkers and transform her into the very thing her father is tasked to destroy.
- 2
Chris ColumbusDP John SealeIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
This is the tale of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), an ordinary eleven-year-old boy serving as a sort of slave for his aunt and uncle who learns that he is actually a wizard and has been invited to attend the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry is snatched away from his mundane existence by Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), the groundskeeper for Hogwarts, and quickly thrown into a world completely foreign to both him and the viewer. Famous for an incident that happened at his birth, Harry makes friends easily at his new school. He soon finds, however, that the wizarding world is far more dangerous for him than he would have imagined, and he quickly learns that not all wizards are ones to be trusted.
- 3
Beasts Of The Southern Wild (2012)
Benh ZeitlinDP Ben RichardsonIMDb 7.2TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →
Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink's tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he's no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack, temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink's health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.
- 4
Mary Poppins (1964)
Robert StevensonDP Edward ColmanIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
When Jane and Michael Banks are faced with the prospect of a new nanny, they are pleasantly surprised by the arrival of the magical Mary Poppins. Embarking on a series of fantastical adventures with he and her Cockney performer friend, Bert, they try to pass on some of her sunny attitude to their preoccupied parents.
- 5
The Dead Zone (1983)
David CronenbergDP Mark IrwinIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.
- 6
The Fabelmans (2022)
Steven SpielbergDP Janusz KamińskiIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Loosely based on Spielberg's childhood growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, from age seven to eighteen, a young man named Sammy Fabelman discovers a shattering family secret, and explores how the power of movies help us see the truth about each other and ourselves.
- 7
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)
Dean DeBloisDP Gil ZimmermanIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →
It's been five years since Hiccup and Toothless successfully united dragons and vikings on the island of Berk. While Astrid, Snotlout and the rest of the gang are challenging each other to dragon races (the island's new favorite contact sport), the now inseparable pair journey through the skies, charting unmapped territories and exploring new worlds. When one of their adventures leads to the discovery of a secret ice cave that is home to hundreds of new wild dragons and the mysterious Dragon Rider, the two friends find themselves at the center of a battle to protect the peace. Now, Hiccup and Toothless must unite to stand up for what they believe while recognizing that only together do they have the power to change the future of both men and dragons.
- 8
Apocalypto (2006)
Mel GibsonDP Dean SemlerIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Set in the Mayan civilization, when a man's idyllic presence is brutally disrupted by a violent invading force, he is taken on a perilous journey to a world ruled by fear and oppression where a harrowing end awaits him. Through a twist of fate and spurred by the power of his love for his woman and his family he will make a desperate break to return home and to ultimately save his way of life.
- 9
Bumblebee (2018)
Travis KnightDP Enrique ChediakIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
On Cybertron, the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, are on the verge of losing the Great Cybertronian War to their enemies, the Decepticons, had begin making preparations to leave the planet. The Decepticons led by Shockwave, Soundwave and Starscream ambush them during the evacuation, and Optimus sends a young scout, B-127, to Earth in order to set up a base of operations where the Autobots can regroup. B-127 reaches Earth alone in 1987, crash-landing in California and disrupting a training exercise being conducted by Sector 7, a secret government agency that monitors extraterrestrial activity on Earth. Sector 7 agent Colonel Jack Burns presumes B-127 to be a hostile invader and attacks, driving B-127 into the forest, where he is then ambushed by the Decepticon Blitzwing. When B-127 refuses to reveal Optimus' whereabouts, Blitzwing spitefully tears out his voice-box and damages his memory core. B-127 manages to destroy Blitzwing before collapsing from his wounds. Before entering stasis, B-127 scans and transforms into a yellow 1967 Volkswagen Beetle.
- 10
Will SharpeDP Erik WilsonIMDb 6.8TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →
The true story of eccentric British artist Louis Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose playful, psychedelic pictures transformed the public's perception of cats forever. Set in the early 1900s, we follow Wain as he seeks to unlock the "electrical" mysteries of the world and, in so doing, to better understand his own life and the profound love he shared with his wife Emily Richardson (Claire Foy).
What adoring films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a adoring frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — girl is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- girl2.1×
- snow1.7×
- child1.6×
- boy1.5×
What breaks the pattern
Come To Daddy (2019) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 4,184 frames from 54 films carrying the adoring label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/adoring
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