Emma Kiely

From the directing to the script to the acting, All of Us Strangers is a film that will stay with you long after you watch it.

The Sound of Falling may be one of the most grim films on the female experience you’ll ever see, but it never rises above this darkness to deliver anything illuminating about being a woman.

An Cailín Ciúin is one of the most masterful meditations on childhood, family, and love.

Dahomey may not be for everyone. Unless you’re a history nut or anthropologist, there will be lulls when you find your concentration lagging. However, at a runtime of just over an hour, Diop makes every shot count and packs centuries of history, injustice, and triumph into a dense but vivid documentary.

It’s a crowdpleaser that will plaster a smile on your face from beginning to end with a high chance of some tears. Just when it teeters on overly saccharine territory, its hilarious script and earnest performances dial it back.

It doesn’t coast on its set-up, Skarsgård’s presence, or the taboos it approaches. It handles all these and then some, combining a compelling coming-of-age story, an endearing comedy, and a sex-positive odd romance into one of the best films of the year.

The chemistry between all of the Paira family members forms the beating heart of the film, devastating the audience by reminding them how happy they used to be, but promising them that nothing can shatter their sense of spirit, because they are together.

Sinners is an electric film sparkling with energy and passion.

Laxe is aiming to shock the audience, and in that, he succeeds, but the final product suffers as a result.

A first-hand retelling of how easily racism can become deadly, The Perfect Neighbor is one of the most compelling documents of how inherently dangerous it is for Black people to exist in America today.

It’s not only counterprogramming to the same formulaic true crime series that streaming platforms continue to churn out, but it’s also in direct dialog with these shows and the audience's unrelenting obsession with them.

It is at first a beautiful and ultimately tragic story of teenage dreams, lost innocence, and how abusers’ grasp extends far past their victims.

It’s an electric, atmospheric, and deeply soulful look at what it means to be human, what it means to have empathy, and how faith should never come before people.

You’ll Never Find Me gets lost in its own madness. Its ending is less ambiguous and more thoughtless.

It's a maddening and heart-pounding portrait of bureaucracy amid war and the mental torture of being helpless in the face of terror.

What keeps the movie going when the script starts to run out of ink are the brilliant performances all around.

The Balconettes is the announcement of a formidable comedic voice.

How to Have Sex is a fearless, uncomfortable, and mesmerizing watch from start to finish.

Instead of a flowing narrative, it’s a series of scenes, the worst and best parts of their 13-year relationship, and doesn’t come together well enough to feel like a complete story. This combined with the lack of Coppola’s vibrant, feminine, and electric aesthetic makes Priscilla a major disappointment from a true cinematic visionary who's capable of better.

All held together by a transcendent performance from Imogen Poots, The Chronology of Water isn’t the strongest directorial debut, but it does hold glimpses of what Stewart is capable of.

With a phenomenal performance from Frank Dillane and a thoughtful, open approach to those who lose their way in life, Urchin is a worthy contribution to the cinematic portfolio of British realism.

Carmoon establishes a plot that could have been great, but becomes too caught up in the visuals of it all, and the script pays the price.

Maestro is a refreshing subversion of the classic biopic.

An exciting and terrifying horror movie, a fresh and nuanced entry into the zombie catalog, a mesmerizing philosophical tale, all packed into a coming-of-age structure, 28 Years Later is one of the best zombie horror movies we’ve been given in years.

Father Mother Sister Brother does have little pockets of Jarmusch's genius scattered throughout, but not enough to make up for how unfulfilling the entire experience is.

It is a beautiful, haunting, and heartwarming look at the tidal wave that trauma brings not just to one person but their entire circle. With subtle but sharp notes on MeToo, cancel culture, online trolling, and sexual assault, I Used to Be Funny is a searingly relevant film without making that its main objective.

If you don’t like horror movies, then don’t go see this movie. This isn’t for you! This is for the Final Destination fans who’ve waited patiently for over a decade. It’s also for those who enjoy a ride of a movie that will raise and drop your heart rate multiple times over an hour and 47 minutes. With horror franchises constantly coming back from the dead, Bloodlines is one of the freshest we’ve seen in a while. It’s the perfect blend of going back to basics and cooking up something new, drenched in blood and snapping bones.

If The Killer teaches us anything, it’s that any director, no matter how legendary they are, can fall victim to a bad script. While Fincher’s iconic style permeates the two-hour runtime, the hollow plot and uninspired writing are impossible to ignore.

The 2022 Matilda takes the narrative and world of a child and puts it on an adult’s terms. It completely misunderstands why so many children around the world adore these stories - because they were written for them and not their parents. Stick to the original 1996 movie folks, don’t be the boring witch.

Mad About the Boy is the disappointing end to a franchise that should have never gone beyond its first sequel.

Die, My Love is further proof that no one is doing it like Lynne Ramsay, whose technique and style continue to evolve, as she draws out a career-best performance from Jennifer Lawrence in a must-see thriller spectacle that turns a single woman’s experience into a brutally honest psychological epic.

With immersive action set pieces, heartfelt snippets of character-driven stories, and fantastic performances all around, Steve McQueen shows again his adept ability at bringing such enormous scope to deeply personal human stories.

Apart from the impeccable cast, what’s most impressive about Companion is its balance of so many differing moving parts. It’s a genuinely funny comedy, a suspenseful thriller, and has some pretty gnarly gore scenes to boot.

While Comer makes a committed effort to carry the film, it falls flat in its excessive filler, undeveloped characters, and symphony of bonkers accents.

It’s a weird film that eventually gets lost in itself, but there’s still much to be appreciated.

Stranger Eyes is a cold, disjointed, and stale mystery thriller with a thin plot and no atmosphere.

Led by brilliant performances all around with a simple but effective story, A Quiet Place: Day One may not be the most horrifying alien film, but it stands apart from its predecessors while staying true to why so many people love this franchise.

Instead of glorifying men at the top of their game (well, at least Keane), it’s a fascinating, funny, and smart breakdown of how one argument served as a microcosm for centuries of conflict, cultural values, and men’s egos.

It’s the refreshingly modern and tender depiction of intimacy and pleasure that will stay with me. After years upon years of sex scenes that are steeped in the male gaze or are shoehorned in to attract the money of horny youngsters who have no real interest in the story, it’s about time we treat sex with the tenderness, openness, and grace that it deserves on film — and this is exactly what Lady Chatterley’s Lover does.

What ultimately weighs it down is the lack of a core narrative to ground the chaos and madness around it. Still, come for the views, the insanity, and Cage giving away a priceless watch for a flat white.

If you want to give the 2024 film as fair a shot as possible, go in without seeing the original. However, if you only want to devote your time to seeing one version of this story, it should be the original Speak No Evil. It's truly one of the darkest, meanest, and most devastating horror films out there

With Joaquin Phoenix at the height of his abilities, Eddington is, if you look close enough, just as, if not more terrifying than anything Paimon or a Swedish cult could ever unleash.

Wild Diamond operates in both the very new wave of movies incorporating the ubiquitous presence of TikTok and the decades-old subgenre of class commentary.

The Fantastic: Four Steps successfully invigorates the MCU, but it’s the tectonic shift that audiences thought it would be.

Sure, the story isn’t groundbreaking, but it makes up for it in its tribute to why we love cinema, specifically horror, so much. Even though it wasn’t needed, MaXXXine secures Ti West’s trilogy as one of the best in horror history.

The style, tone, heart, and comedy of Aardman deserve better than Dawn of the Nugget’s formulaic story which doesn’t hold a candle to the original.

The twist is detailed but not too convoluted, and in my view, it's not easy to see coming. If anything, A Haunting in Venice is a reminder that even when we are inundated with mystery stories, no one does it like Agatha Christie, and it's hard to believe that someone ever will again.

With Thanksgiving, Roth brings horror back to basics and reminds us that it can be nasty, gory, gnarly, and a ton of fun all at once.

It’s the movie’s efforts to make this as digestible as possible for the audience through its light-hearted tone and simplistic dialogue that render it a movie you watch on Netflix with your parents and probably never think about again.

It may not feel as polished or suspenseful as Longlegs, but you can tell Perkins is having a whale of a time putting his years of horror filmmaking to the maximum.

Dreams is probably the same old story for Michel Franco fans, but as a first-time viewer, I was in awe of how a film could go so wrong so quickly.

Fennell’s direction outdoes her writing here, and the cinematography from Linus Sandgren is exquisite (no surprise).

All in all, See How They Run is a derivative amalgamation of too much tribute and too little originality. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun and the perfect film to bring your Nana to, but it's ultimately pretty forgettable.

It’s clear that Boston Strangler so desperately wanted to copy the recipe for Zodiac and bought all the same ingredients.

Borderline is a prime example of how a really great cast can elevate rather frail material.

Jeymes Samuel is a master of all trades who can craft character-driven arcs with fun action-packed sequences all against a beautiful score. No actor misses a beat and it confirms LaKeith Stanfield remains not just a brilliant actor but a true movie star.

Some will definitely not be able to buy into the ridiculousness of it all, but if you can, you’ll be rewarded with a great time at the cinema. If you thought after the first movie that this killer doll was just a viral blip in the movie world, M3GAN 2.0 is here to tell you in the most deliciously over-the-top way that you are very wrong.

Parthenope is a decades-spanning slice-of-life movie that has no interest in diving into the complexities of its protagonist.

To its credit, there are some decent gore scenes, and the practical makeup is done well, but not enough to distract from some pretty laughable special effects. Compared to the original and even the 2010 version that won the Oscar for Best Makeup, Whannell’s version isn’t breaking any new ground.

To see Clooney and Roberts team up again when they have demonstrated in the past (the Oceans movies and Money Monster) that they go together like rum and coke is a lot of fun, but it also makes it undeniably noticeable that they deserve better. I don't mean an Oscar-worthy dramatic biopic. But a rom-com with some nuance and wit.

While It Ends With Us and Regretting You contained at least some decent acting and production value, Reminders of Him is a grim dose of misery and trauma porn punctuated by a terrible lead performance and an undeniable conservative sheen.

Mothers' Instinct is an entertaining, well-acted drama that falters under the weight of its shocking ending.

A fun concept does not automatically mean a quality film, as the overly intense direction, hollow scares, and imbalance of tone make it a thrown-together mess.

The film tries to pack in so much subplot and religious context that it leaves no time to build up a scare properly. The only people who would actually be scared by this movie are about five years too young to legally see it.

Night Swim is a missed opportunity of epic proportions, and it’s yet another in a streak of Blumhouse projects failing to bring anything new to the horror genre.

For now, stick with the original.

The creatively (and morally) bankrupt and downright offensive biopic glosses over Amy Winehouse’s complicated, and ultimately, tragic life to shine a more flattering light on her father and ex-husband, distorting the real-life events in her life to tell its own narrative.

Hulu's Whitney Wolfe biopic never tries to break free from the predictable confines of the genre.

Come for Lohan, stay for Harding, and watch until the end for Kristin Chenoweth — all while ignoring some of the most robotic dialogue your ears ever heard.

Every actor probably knows that this script is pretty useless, but that doesn't stop any of them from putting their best foot forward. Including Lohan, they all look like they’re having a blast and that really comes through to the audience.

Bloat really doesn’t seem like a movie that knows what it wants to be.

Instead of burrowing into their differing ideas about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and how they differ based on class and background, Anna and Jamie’s romance is based entirely on them exchanging progressively earnest platitudes, quotes taken from centuries-old poetry that the script dumbs down and shoehorns into every moment between the couple.

Tarot is a pretty forgettable horror movie. Dull characters, a basic plot, and very little to say with its themes render it a fairly unmemorable experience.

The central problem of Morbius is a lazy and uninspiring script. No weight or depth is given to any character. There’s little humor and when it tries to make a tongue-in-cheek joke, it fails miserably.

What was once considered revolutionary or sharp commentary is now so passé and outdated that it makes the film feel like an ancient relic — a bad one.

It all falls apart as there are no personal touches, character specificities, or horror sensibilities that fill in the many gaps of this hollow script.

Polished off by a vibrant cast, Annick Blanc’s feature debut is an impressive feat and a refreshing and minimal twist on the “eat the rich” trend in Hollywood.

It's trying to be a slasher movie so we ultimately have to judge it by those standards. And as a slasher, with its thin plot and flat killer, Haunt Season doesn't cut it.

Chain Reactions finds the beauty in the despair, and how fine cinematic storytelling isn’t confined to tales of good winning over evil. It’s a love letter to horror, art, influence, and how Tobe Hooper and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre changed cinema forever, whether you can stomach it or not.

With a lack of any undersea horror action, off-kilter characterization punctuated by poor acting, and a script that is taking itself way more seriously than it has any right to, there’s no enjoyment to be taken from this shameless attempt to capitalize on a lucrative IP.

Fréwaka may not achieve everything it sets out to, but it’s still a moving horror story packed with thought and intention — and a much-needed reminder of the lyrical beauty of the Irish language.

It does slightly fall off in its final act, becoming aimless and stretched, and ending around 30 minutes after it should. But its first two acts are deeply enthralling, and Vicky Krieps' lead performance is an Odyssean tour de force.