Siddhant Adlakha

Lamb is a wonderfully strange film about parenthood.

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.

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

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.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is measured and mature, which makes it less of a crowd-pleaser than the first two movies, but it allows Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek to bask in their incredible romantic chemistry.

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.

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

It’s a film that fits perfectly within the confines of a romantic comedy even while it swaps out every familiar element and explores brand-new dimensions in the process.

With a layered performance by Regina Hall as the university’s first Black dean of students, the film plays with familiar tropes and images from American horror, but re-fashions them into an unexpected, subdued story with a chilling emotional payoff.

Writer-director Riley Stearns transforms depression and disappointment into a hilarious confrontation of death and a peculiar tale of self-image in an uncanny film with a precisely bizarre lead performance.

Led by moving performances from Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, the film takes a roundabout approach to its drama, resulting in a realistic portrait of a relationship in stasis.

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.

Eventually, the two opposing modes of visual storytelling at its core (one distinctly intimate, the other distant and observational) come into explosive contact like matter and antimatter, as the idea of art metaphorically gazing back at its viewer takes distinctly literal form.

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.

A harrowing tale rooted in real events, Women Talking takes a stage-like approach to its debate between victimized women in a commune, but imbues it with cinematic flourishes. It’s also one of the rare ensemble movies where every single performance makes it worth watching.

Like its doomed romantic pair — Marion Cotillard’s radiant stage actress and Adam Driver’s macabre comedian — Annette pours dreams, perversions, and self-fulfilling misery into its titular puppet-child, a beautiful creation that sings heavenly tunes in the darkest of moments.

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.

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.

Kenneth Branagh’s third Poirot film is his best and strangest yet.

It may not always succeed, but it arrives with an energy worthy of the TV comedy legends.

More than just a retrospective of himself (and his relationship with his sprightly grandmother), Minari feels like Chung gazing into the past to recognize and empathize with the kind of hardships and sacrifices his immigrant parents had to endure. In the process, he creates a riveting drama about hope, family, and the difficulties of change.

Thoughtfully conceived and brilliantly acted, it’s one of the most bleakly funny films to come out this year.

Harmony Korine’s infrared assassin movie Aggro Dr1ft is a video-game-inspired experiment that’ll have you in a trance.

Deftly filmed and edited, Run is undoubtedly effective on the small screen, but few other films this year have built and held tension this expertly, so as to be immediately worthy of a room full of people reacting in unison.

A timely, powerful piece about the slow road to progress, and the nuances of fighting broken systems from within.

Poor Things is sex-comedy Frankenstein by way of Jules Verne, and one of the most imaginative comedies in years.

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

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.

With a stunningly raw performance from Danielle Deadwyler, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till lives in the body of a traditional biopic — about Mamie Till-Mobley in the aftermath of her son Emmett’s lynching — but it turns real events into regretful, wistful memories, with a camera that refuses to look away from a mother’s pain.

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.

A great first feature from Cathy Yan, Dead Pigs paints a vivid backdrop of globalization, wealth inequality, and the anxieties of a dual Eastern and Western existence. With these complexities in mind, it forces its idiosyncratic characters into personal and financial battles which often feel unwinnable.

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.

Whatever lies in store for the future of Mission: Impossible, McQuarrie’s third outing as director proves that he still has an ingenious bag of tricks to pull from, having departed from the gloom and doom of Fallout to create an explosive yet self-reflexive action saga that leaves you wanting more.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a moody, slow-burn horror drama about loneliness online.

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.

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

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.

While its gnarly payoffs eventually peter out, X is filled with fun and intense setups that harken back to classic slasher fare.

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.

Tightly wound on almost every front, His House packs an enormous emotional punch even once its scares grow stale.

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

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.

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.

Driven by its performances, and smuggling revolutionary politics into “award season” prestige, Judas and the Black Messiah makes for a powerful (if at times dramatically rickety) retelling of a violent chapter of US history.

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.

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.

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.

With a stunningly honest performance from the director’s son — Jojo Rabbit star Roman Griffin Davis — Silent Night balances the eccentricities of a Christmas get-together with nihilistic acceptance of certain doom, making for a film that’s both bleak and dryly funny.

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

With a simple but effective script and some fun visual experiments, it's an entertaining conspiracy thriller set in (and very much about) the post-pandemic world.

A lush, richly conceived cannibal road-trip romance, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All lives in the intimate space between love and self-hatred, with characters who connect over their shared hunger for human flesh.

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.

Rare are the moments where the frame features no human-made structures or clearings, but the animals are presented so wondrously and tenderly that anything remotely human begins to feel unnatural.

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

Violet’s editing and texture effectively convey what the character is feeling, and while its noncommittal camera choices occasionally prevent the viewer from feeling it alongside her, Munn’s performance, and the film’s eventual narrative trajectory, are incisive enough to get around its visual shortcomings.

Red Rocket isn’t the kind of work that condemns or implores—not explicitly, at least—but Rex lays everything on the table, from Saber’s basest desire to his most complicated self-delusions, while Baker (who also serves as the film’s editor) refuses to let punchlines have the final word.

The filmmaking works in and of itself, but that Lakewood feels so emotionally in tune with its lead actress is a feat all on its own.

Make no mistake: Culkin is the movie’s heart and soul as the eccentric, unpredictable wanderer Benji, but “A Real Pain” is — at the risk of it being too early in the filmmaker’s career to coin this term — Eisenbergian through and through.

Where The Covenant most shines is in the riveting intensity of both its performances and its action.

It’s fun, not in a way a computer or a boardroom might interpret fun—pixels taking the shape of something familiar, regurgitated across the screen—but rather, in an unabashed way, where it winks at the audience without apologizing for its gimmick, without being insincere or self-deprecating, and without sacrificing what makes popcorn horror movies such a reliable collective ritual.

A film that feels immersed in fog, and one that reserves even sunlight for vital moments, Holler is a gorgeously-textured exploration of the way ruthless corporatism trickles down through each layer of a country, and a system, until it falls on the shoulders of a young girl and obscures her future.

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.

Except for her accent and hair style, Stewart practically plays herself, creating a living document not only of recent British history, but of contemporary stardom, and the intimate emotional fallout of a gaze that most people only know from a distance.

Despite its confused and overstuffed worldbuilding, “Elemental” has enough charming moments to get by, even if its meaning lies less in its ill-conceived immigrant saga, and more in the personal drama that lives a few layers beneath it.

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.

Happily is incredibly fun from start to finish. If nothing else, its nagging flaws feel less like errors, and more like untapped potential. Grabinski is clearly onto something, and it’s only a matter of time before he truly finds it.

Strange World may fumble its environmentalist themes, but its story of fathers and sons is fairly touching.

You know exactly what brand of “weird” to expect from Nicolas Cage and Sion Sono, but what you might not expect is how much the film feels like a death dream about movies.

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.

It’s grimly funny, and hilariously sad.

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.

Torn between the avant-garde and the traditional, Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground is an intentionally fragmented documentary that’s less about facts, and more about the feeling of being alive in a specific time and place. While more accessible to those in the know, it’s still hypnotic enough to be inviting.

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.

Spiderhead is loaded with original sci-fi ideas, and while it may not stick the landing, it makes for an intriguing experience.

Malignant is rarely scary, but its outlandish bits likely didn’t happen by accident — not when it culminates in scenes so ludicrously over the top that they invite both fist-pumping cheers and wheeze-inducing laughter.

More Jackass is never a bad thing, so Jackass Forever follow-up Jackass 4.5 is fun despite being a scattered collection of interviews and deleted scenes. Like its predecessors, it’s bonus content for a Jackass movie delivered at feature length, which makes it catnip for long-time fans.

80 for Brady is a surprisingly sweet and sentimental comedy led by four stellar performances — especially by Lily Tomlin, who’s never been more radiant.

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.

While it may not always pay off the tension it builds, the film’s story — about a woman seeking closure after her husband’s suicide — makes the lingering unknowability of romance feel just as unsettling as any supernatural force.

Before Infinity Pool loses its way toward the end, it proves to be an enticing work of depravity that explores money and privilege through horrifying, violent excess.

Its efforts at social commentary mostly fall flat, but its thrilling moments and Gyllenhaal’s intense performance largely make up for that.

Painstakingly hand-painted frame by frame, the film is visually dazzling, veering between styles and time periods to create a living, breathing continuum of Indian art. It’s mesmerizing — but given its haphazard narrative, the film’s delights begin and end at its aesthetics.

At 174 minutes long, with nested flashbacks overflowing with exposition, the movie has lengthy stretches that can feel like a chore. However, each extraneous segment eventually converges in some of the most exhilarating and cathartic on-screen violence Indian cinema has to offer.

Lin-Manuel Miranda tries to turn Jonathan Larson’s one-man show into a traditional musical, but ends up getting stuck halfway in between. However, Andrew Garfield delivers a tremendous, running-on-fumes performance as the real-life Broadway mainstay, whose impending 30th birthday pushes him to his creative and emotional brink.

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

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.

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.

Based on the scrappy Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead, Michel Hazanavicius’ Final Cut is a more polished version — for better and for worse — but it’s just as fun and self-reflexive, while also leaning into its remake status for a few added laughs.

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

It takes Death on the Nile far longer than it should to reach its most impactful moments, but actor-director Kenneth Branagh cares deeply enough about Detective Poirot to make it work.

Downton Abbey: A New Era starts out as a wistful return to the familiar before shedding its skin and letting the series’ nauseating ugliness come frothing to the surface. It goes from funny and charming to jaw-droppingly grim at the drop of a hat — a wild tonal whiplash that’s absolutely worth a watch. It’s a concentrated dose of Downton Abbey.

Last Night in Soho’s biggest strengths and weaknesses come from the same place: its attempts to replicate much better psychological horror from decades past. However, despite everything that doesn’t work, its musical energy keeps it fun.

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.

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.

A super-charged genre throwback that obscures its meaning but has an alluring visual texture, Divinity is completely unique in its conception of sci-fi dystopia, for better and for worse.

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.

Richard Linklater’s animated Apollo fantasy is scattered, but sweet.

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