Make sure to catch ‘Ghost in the Shell’ — in IMAX

Above: Mamoru Ishii's 1995 anime "Ghost in the Shell" will play at AMC River Park Square beginning Friday. (Photo/Lionsgate)

In addition to the several new films that will be opening on Friday, AMC River Park Square will be bringing back a classic bit of anime.

Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animated film “Ghost in the Shell” will play a couple of times a day most of next week. Better yet, the film will screen in IMAX.

Oshii’s film, of course, is the original – based on the manga of the same title created by Masasori Ota (pen name Masamune Shirow) – and not the controversial 2017 live-action version that Rupert Sanders directed with Scarlett Johansson cast as the lead.

Anyway, whenever critics compare something to Ridley Scott’s original “Blade Runner,” you know they’re not just throwing around empty compliments. And both of the two below are in the category.

Richard Harrington of the Washington Post wrote, “Mamoru Oshii's ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is masterly Japanimation, a cyber-tech thriller that's miles ahead of such recent live-action cyber-splatter films as ‘Johnny Mnemonic.’ In look and spirit, ‘Ghost’ is much closer to ‘Blade Runner,’ another moody post-apocalypse fable involving sentient cyborgs and their will to live.”

Jay Carr of the Boston Globe wrote, “It's not the mega-tech or the shootouts that make ‘Ghost in the Shell’ memorable, but the ghostliness of it, its ability to convince us that Kusangai – no less than Rutger Hauer's strangely noble android in ‘Blade Runner’ – has a human's ability to conceptualize her own mortality.”

Enjoy.