Siddhant Adlakha

Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel deliver two brilliant, diametrically opposed performances in Steven Soderbergh’s gentle art world caper.

As ugly as it is amusing, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy takes the kind of tonal swings you rarely see from a Hollywood studio.

Led by immaculate performances, it’s one of the most delightfully nerve-wracking rabbit holes you’re likely to tumble down this year.

Bob Odenkirk’s presence helps create a sense of gravitas even when the film is straightforward, adding soulful dimensions to a fairly simple character in whose hands guns and explosives are as much tools of violence as they are instruments of a righteousness long lost to moral compromise.

That such a hefty topic can be used to create such breathless, eye-watering comedy without tipping into self-indulgence — and without robbing the film of its most meaningful drama — is practically a miracle.

In depicting both Pagnol and Chomet’s search for authentic truths within their stylized works, it’s a perfect marriage of subject and form.

Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process.

Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an exceptional historical fiction, doesn’t so much transport you to the past as it brings you to the edge of the translucent curtain that often obfuscates history from view.

At its core is the kind of cinema that has long sustained the medium at large: the family drama. But it’s presented here with invigorating flourishes that encircle the story within specific moments in time, while also granting it a stirring dramatic transcendence. The scope of its ambition is met, at every turn, by deft control over what is witnessed, and how.

Part guerrilla prank saga, part heartwarming friendship story, and part riff on Back to the Future, the result is an incredibly fine-tuned mishmash of styles and ideas that keeps evolving in surprising ways.

Mason Reeves delivers one of the most stunning child performances in recent memory, while Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan lean into their familiar acting hallmarks but find uncomfortable new layers as a mother and father bound by their own upbringings. The result is visceral, gentle, and ultimately, shattering.

I Want Your Sex may not ultimately have much to say, but its livewire comic scenarios yield the kind of raucous, sexually charged entertainment seldom seen in Hollywood of late.

It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.

An intoxicating historical musical about faith, led by career-best work from Amanda Seyfried.

The camera’s non-interventionist nature becomes vital. The visual approach embodies the Beinin family’s loss of control, and the growing uncertainty around them and what they believe.

Bollywood gangster saga Dhurandhar walks a fine line between raucous entertainment and hateful propaganda. With more blood and guts than a slaughterhouse, it’s one of the most viciously enthralling films this year, following a fictitious undercover operative influencing real historical events, like Forrest Gump with a Kalashnikov.

Quentin Tarantino’s decades-in-the-making ultimate release of Kill Bill has been worth the wait. Across four hours and change, it retains all the exuberant action highlights that made the duology an instant classic while allowing the saga’s emotional pieces to fall more neatly into place.

Elena Oxman’s Outerlands is a film of great cinematic sleight of hand.

Copti and cinematographer Tim Kuhn shoot each interaction with an up-close, handheld intimacy that not only magnifies the subtle, powerful performances of the cast (many of them first-time actors), but welcomes the viewer into each scene, as though it were a complicated family reunion.

The film’s irascible but deeply principled subject — thirty-something divorcee Sara Shahverdi — gives the film its energy, though its lulls aren’t quite as purposeful. However, despite feeling drawn-out, the doc features occasional bursts of visual panache that help emphasize its underlying story.

Rife with great performances and disturbing imagery, The Carpenter’s Son transcends its trappings as a mere horror take on Christ and verges on challenging.

It eventually takes on radiant form, with emotional complexities born out of characters walking around the truth, if only because euphemisms are the only language they have.

Hassona is both fashionable and immensely talented (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the more we see of her over the movie’s 110 minutes, the more devastating it becomes that we will never meet her, or never truly get to know her.

Although simple in appearance, Father Mother Sister Brother beats with the wisdom of an artist in his early twilight.

Cooper’s latest is clearly the output of someone who has been through personal anguish, and like Alex Novak, he attempts to use his pain as the basis for not just something healing but something hilarious, albeit something deeply imperfect, too.

It’s filled with powerful ideas about the many ways that violence—of the body, of the state and of the soul—manifests in men, and the generational ripple effects therein, even if it doesn’t cohere enough to be consistently engaging.

Loktev’s immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together.

It’s a film that seldom comes out and tells you exactly what’s happening, but its drama is so lucid that before any real tragedy unfolds (or is even hinted at), you feel it in your bones.

It’s a film of great tragedy, but one so rooted in beating humanity that you can’t help but be left furious, in addition to teary-eyed.

From its gentle introduction to its jarring final scene—a lifelike anticlimax that makes sense spiritually more than logistically—My Father’s Shadow acts as both a retrospective and a soulful reconstruction, breathing life into the past while distinguishing the personal and pragmatic details that inform the complexity of a person—even one who exists entirely in memory.

Few films this year have been as soulful or as quietly defiant.

It’s ultimately a very strange movie, and a far cry from what anyone expects from even the most idiosyncratic biopics. But it’s hard not to wonder if Franz is ahead of its time, much like Kafka was—which Holland depicts by tethering his consciousness to our fragile present, and constructing, in the process, a bridge to the past.

The unfolding action is never farcical enough to make the film satirical or outright funny, but it’s also never imbued with enough historical gravity to truly matter.

Megadoc is a mood piece and a process piece, shot up close with lo-fi video equipment, but it’s never allowed to probe deeply enough.

Will Tracy’s screenplay adapts the basic premise and parameters of Jang’s original, but director Yorgos Lanthimos puts his unique tonal spin on the material, turning in one of the most sardonic Hollywood comedy-dramas in recent memory.

Ne Zha 2 starts out tedious and juvenile, but after its first hour it pivots to enormous and spectacular fist-pumping action and tear-jerking intimacy.

Beyond all the legal and even medical specifics resides a sense of communal understanding, and — at the risk of sounding mawkish — a deep and abiding love for one’s fellow human beings, which Feder taps into with aplomb.

Torn between action and comedy, irony and sentiment, and rah-rah jingoism and genuine self-reflection, Heads of State is a surprisingly entertaining romp.

Its aesthetic approach seldom lives up to its gestures toward camp as a guiding principle or its weighty themes (except, perhaps, in its surprisingly raucous final act). However, its flimsy aesthetic foundations are supported by remarkably well-formed characters.

Even without its numerous rug-pulls, which occur early enough that the movie soon takes on an entirely different tone, Twinless is a masterful example of shifting cinematic POV.

From a distance, Materialists seems like a straightforward love-triangle rom com, but Celine Song transforms it into a meaningful, introspective drama about self-worth.

The result is a hauntingly timeless depiction of power and its mechanisms, filtered down to an intimate tale of journalistic integrity.

Although it eventually loses staying power, Lynne Ramsay’s ferocious relationship drama Die, My Love quickly seeps beneath your skin, practically holding you hostage in its initial half.

Whether the love it features on screen is simple or complex, and whether it’s romantic, platonic or maternal, the film lands on tremendously moving moments that stir the soul by scrutinizing the dueling cruelty and tenderness found within its characters.

Highest 2 Lowest features an enormously theatrical Denzel Washington and the kind of wild tonal swings only Spike Lee can manage.

By focusing on characters who can seldom put words to their experiences—whether the ravages of war and trauma, the jealousies of adolescence, or the desire to simply no longer exist—Sound of Falling marvelously tells a century’s worth of women’s stories by weaving together the psychological, the physical, and even the spiritual, resulting in a dramatic tour de force of mind, body, and soul.

Like Kana, it’s gloomy, purposeless and hard to love — but that only makes the film, and its lead, feel more pulsating alive.

What the characters can or cannot do in response, and the catharsis they’re prevented from attaining, are both key parts of their story, and of life in the West Bank at large — a reality Nabulsi conveys in stark, realistic hues, despite her first-feature growing pains.

As Sinners accelerates toward its climax, none of it feels wasted. Its action is explosive, and while Coogler’s vicious momentum can be visually disorienting at times, the adrenaline and the way he tethers each character to a distinctly spiritual question ensure that the movie’s strengths far outweigh its flaws.

The best Disney live-action remake in a decade (not that that’s a particularly high bar to clear), Snow White adapts the broad strokes of the 1937 original, while fleshing out its themes of kindness. Rachel Zegler crafts a remarkable, melodic version of the classic princess who leads with her heart, even if her CGI co-stars are difficult on the eyes.

With its dramatic themes spread across two wildly different halves, it makes for a unique, propulsive thrill ride whose baffling existence is key to its enjoyment.

In The Accountant 2, Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal return for a sentimental, politically charged, and surprisingly funny action sequel about brothers trying their best to connect.

It’s a junk-food thriller fried to near-perfection, balancing the tensions of kidnapping, conspiracy and murder with those of a nerve-wracking first date. It’s crisp and delicious.

Its story of three couples working at the same British agency turns all the right screws with impeccable timing, forcing its characters to examine the flaws in their relationships as its tale of state secrets gradually unravels.

Set during a single, legendary evening, Richard Linklater’s Broadway biopic unveils the life and anxieties of songwriter Lorenz Hart through rapid-fire conversations, led by an incredible Ethan Hawke.

A deeply depressing comedic experience (thanks at least in part to accidental political timing), Bong’s remix of Edward Ashton’s novel presents a Trump-like villain and no worthy heroes, resulting in a farcical sci-fi adventure whose symbolism makes up for its misshapen character drama.

By entwining reality with dramatization to such an inseparable degree, An Unfinished Film runs the emotional gamut, with a pulsing naturalism that few films about the recent pandemic (or any real disasters) have ever managed to achieve.

An obvious codependency metaphor becomes a body-horror blast in Michael Shanks’ Together.

As a portrait of struggles in the seat of power, the film presses all the right emotional buttons.

The film isn’t just richly textured, but rigorous in its unveiling of both history and modernity.

Isaiah Saxon’s adventure fairytale ends up unique and beautiful, much like the adorable animatronic foundling of its title.

Ford v Ferrari's James Mangold takes his hands off the steering wheel for A Complete Unknown, resulting in a Bob Dylan biopic that takes unpredictable turns. Rather than connecting the dots between how the world influenced him (and how he influenced it in turn), the film frames his enormous musical sea changes as personal drama for his peers. It’s formally straightforward, but its focus on the characters in Dylan’s life – rather than the musician himself, played by Timothée Chalamet – turn him into an enigma, for better or worse.

Nosferatu is Robert Eggers' finest work, given how it both boldly stands on its own as a gothic vampire drama and astutely taps into the original texts — F.W. Murnau's silent classic and Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.

Its meditative, hyper-fixated approach to process — as seen through the eyes of seasoned lepidopterists — proves so hypnotic that any appeals or augments the movie makes are deeply felt before they’re intellectually understood.

With a cast that takes wildly different approaches to characters we already know from film and TV, and a camera that never slows down, Saturday Night is chaotic in wildly enjoyable ways. The lead-up to the historic premiere of SNL plays like an extended 90-minute climax.

While its flaws are rooted in what it avoids, its marriage of topic and form yields a blast of positivity in a way that perfectly suits its withholding subject, granting his interviews the kind of depth and creativity embodied by his music. While it avoids all thorny entanglements, it looks good and feels great, like any LEGO movie should.

The result is a claustrophobic introspection into guilt and remorse, which hardly sounds like fitting material for a grandiose movie musical. But Oppenheimer’s focused approach to human drama makes it sing.

Although the film, which is based on real events, often tries to cover too much ground, it continually circles back to the idea that people must see themselves reflected in art, not just out of want, but out of deep desire stemming from need, in order to live with dignity.

Youth (Homecoming) stands on its own, as a genuinely sorrowful film about how deeply the churn of industry has worked its way into people’s bones, as though they’ve become one with the machines they operate.

While there’s a more streamlined and thus more effective version of “The Cut” in there somewhere, what remains on screen is plenty harrowing as it is, and allows Bloom to finally cement himself as a truly great performer — not for the lengths he’s willing to go, but for the spellbinding end result.

A deeply human film with no human characters, The Wild Robot is a tear-jerking and unpredictable animated adventure.

It’s grimly funny, and hilariously sad.

Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature, embodied by two people with a complicated past and, most likely, no real future.

It doesn't always work; it loses its way midway through, as though in desperate search of purpose. But when it finds that purpose, it makes a powerful emotional impression: Visually splendid, emotionally arresting, and features some of the finest filmmaking of Guadagnino's already-accomplished career.

Tim Burton allows the cast of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to have fun, even if they're all off in separate movies that barely overlap. Its story is intentionally robbed of dramatic weight, but this makes way for the goofy, imaginative practical effects of Burton's early days, resulting in a small-scale legacy sequel that doesn't take itself too seriously (because it doesn’t need to).

A sense of tangible intellect looms just beneath its surface — not only Rob’s supposed genius, but the movie’s own identity as political cinema. But it never quite unearths this, even though “Rob Peace” establishes Ejiofor as a director with a knack for dramatic storytelling, in a way his previous film could not.

By the time its end credits roll, Vulcanizadora proves surprisingly moving in its depiction of mid-life crises and of two men who feel so betrayed by the world (and by their own actions) that they see no escape from their malaise. To turn that feeling into coherent drama is hard enough.

At nearly four hours in length, it surpasses even its gargantuan predecessor “Youth (Spring),” but it also uses that film as a platform for deeper exploration.

With scenes of natural disaster grounded in a human point of view, Lee Isaac Chung's spiritual sequel transcends its visual shortcomings, and proves to be a wildly fun and effective summer blockbuster worth watching on the biggest and loudest screen.

Visually lush and emotionally affecting, Janet Planet marks playwright Annie Baker’s bold transition to the big screen.

An unhinged work that captures the escalating madness of untangling entire social webs through the lens of a single person or event, Babysitter charges through the ruins of mainstream cinema’s post-#MeToo moment.

It’s likely the best Manhattan mayhem film since Cloverfield, and it’s also a downright excellent Hollywood blockbuster, if an entirely unexpected one.

While its chaotic new cast serves a clear purpose, Inside Out 2 is more metaphor than meaning. It explains plenty about the confusing emotions associated with puberty, often in intelligent ways, but it rarely lets them be felt or experienced, the way its predecessor did.

Outside of watching modern Trump characteristics being absorbed from the worst influences around him, it rarely has the insight you’d hope for from a biopic centered on one of the defining political figures of the 21st century.

The Shrouds may seem impenetrable at first, but it grows in the mind and heart like a cancer. Let it linger long enough, and it also starts to feel like Cronenberg's most complete, self-assured, and dramatically accomplished work in years.

While often more intellectually stimulating than emotionally engaging, Santosh lays bare the dark heart of communal divisions in modern India.

Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his days of nasty absurdism, with three vicious, amusing stories about love and obsession. The recurring ensemble, led by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons, delivers a showcase of versatility in which they meet the director on his peculiar wavelength, leading to nearly 3 hours of unsettling fun.

Parthenope is a film that rumbles with the hum of nostalgia, recapturing the feeling of youthful, summer freedom while refusing to shy away from the uncertainties of young adulthood. But it’s no mere coming-of-age story; rather, it’s a film about coming-to-oneself.

Megalopolis is so chock-full of ideas that Coppola’s melding of time periods eventually buckles under its own weight in a controlled demolition that initially confounds, but eventually shatters the screen in thrilling fashion. The film ends up not only being a cautionary tale about the end of empires, but one that likens the Hollywood system to empire as well (or a tyrannical extension of it).

It isn’t interested in finding a bright side to war; such an outcome would feel too complacent. Instead, it points its microphone unflinchingly at the darkest parts of the human soul, while forcing the viewer to hold the camera and search for the brutality within its images and empty spaces. It makes the audience, and their recognition, a necessary ingredient to portraying the bigger picture.

Titley consistently anchors her unfolding chronicle to the kind of backstage emotional truths often hidden from the audience, and in the process, she crafts something halfway between sensationalist exposé and intimate confessional — a remedy to reality TV based on its own format — co-authored by her subjects

A film that volleys back and forth in time, Luca Guadagnino's Challengers builds the relationships between its leading tennis trio in exciting and exacting ways. Enhanced by layered physical performances from Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor, the result is one of the sexiest and most electric dramas of 2024.

A self-reflexive love letter to Hollywood stunt work, The Fall Guy is the perfect vehicle for Ryan Gosling’s comedic timing – not to mention, his romantic charm alongside an equally dialed-in Emily Blunt.

It comes imbued with the same twinkle in its eye, the same sense of mischief and Dadaist sensibility, that made Devo so alluring in the first place.

As much as it’s a movie about one man’s struggle, it’s a family drama too, and the way his paralysis shifts their dynamic over the years is enrapturing to watch.

As much as its focus is technological, it’s an emotional exploration too – a wry and thoughtful magnification of what life feels like when you lose and re-discover your purpose, or you learn to see yourself through someone else’s eyes.

With a playful camera that rushes through space and embodies a ghostly spirit, Steven Soderbergh’s resourceful haunted house thriller is a midnight genre romp.

With whip-smart filmmaking that weaves together the physical and digital worlds, Ibelin is powerful cinema that uses its stylistic experimentation for distinctly humanist means, breathing life into a person’s story when it seemed like there were few dimensions left to explore.