Siddhant Adlakha

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.

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.

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).

The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a glorified episode of the series, but that’s hardly a bad thing.

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.

Hatching is a scattered body-horror romp with the best child performance this year.

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

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

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

Its few hints of flair may not cement it as a genre classic, but they’re enough to make it momentarily fun.

The film seldom wavers from its singular idea and feeling; tonally, it’s a stroll across a plateau by design, but it teeters constantly over that plateau’s edge.

The film depends too greatly on its sense of academia to unearth its story, and it struggles to fully engage with the explosive topic at hand for its first hour. However, in the final stretch of its 85-minute runtime, this approach proves foundational for chilling revelations and quiet, cinematically self-evident questions about the way we remember history.

Gehraiyaan seldom earns its melodramatic turns. However, the buildup to them proves to be dynamic enough, emotionally charged enough, and above all, honest enough in its approach to infidelity and flawed human relationships that the film remains worthwhile.

On paper, the result is one of the more meaningful departures from convention that Disney has seen in recent years. In execution, though, it falls ever so slightly short, though not for lack of originality.

While this movie may feel like a Simpsons-esque case of a series failing to recapture lost grandeur, the result is still mile-a-minute fun if you can keep past expectations out of sight and out of mind. Or… you could just watch the first film again.

Gunn is much better suited to the material than either David Ayer or the trailer house that re-cut the previous film, though while the end result is gorier, funnier and occasionally more heartfelt, it doesn’t quite coalesce into something totally fun, or totally meaningful.

Mulligan’s raw portrayal of a woman trapped by invisible walls is certainly powerful — she keeps the film afloat even when it falters — and the way Fennell gives human form to those walls imbues the film with a simmering rage. However, these handful of strengths are hardly enough to render its other failings moot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The film itself is mostly fine, with breathtaking visuals broken up by a less captivating story that often drags its feet (despite several great performances). But its place within Western traditions—both real and imagined—is strange, unsavory, and fascinating.

All five stories in V/H/S/94 feature a cult-like element, but only one of them feels like a true work of madness.

An otherwise plain film about an unlikely friendship between a returned soldier and a mechanic, Causeway is worth watching for Jennifer Lawrence’s best performance in years.

The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments.

Corner Office is a just-okay office satire saved by Jon Hamm playing the anti-Jon Hamm.

Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.

While both its lampooning of U.S. militarism and its central character drama lack follow-through, the film contains bright comedic sparks in its keen observations about American media.

John David Washington falls short of the story’s emotional demands, but he brings a desperate physicality as a man on the run, which makes the film just about worth watching.

Riz Ahmed makes for a vigorous lead in Aneil Karia’s contemporary British-Indian Hamlet, which loses its emotional clarity beneath an intriguing exterior. Its use of silence and intimacy grants it a fascinating texture, but the film never challenges or re-invigorates Shakespeare’s greatest work, ensuring that it ends up somewhere in the middle of a lengthy pile of adaptations.

While it’s hard not to be moved by footage of Robert Downey’s final days, the film is more informative than emotional. It contains hints of an intimate story, but mostly flattens a strange and exotic career into a series of light observations.

Spy x Family Code: White is far more chuckle-worthy than laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s an innocent, adolescent charm to even its jokes that miss the mark.

Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.

Leave the World Behind has a worthwhile cast, but its paranoid thrills quickly fizzle out en route to a baffling final scene.

It can’t decide whether it wants to tell the real-life story of respected mob boss Frank Costello and his comrade-turned-scheming-enemy Vito Genovese, or if it wants to skewer the entire genre of films they helped inspire. However, with Robert De Niro in both leading roles, there’s always something interesting to watch, even if it’s buried by mountains of repetitive dialogue.

A tale of miserable spouses plotting each other’s demise, it doesn’t always work, but its action comedy stylings are enough to keep it entertaining even when it swerves into ugly excess or extraneous subplots.

Real-life tragic romance Spoiler Alert is kneecapped by the plainness of its storytelling, and only marginally saved by its performances.

More distancing than disgusting, Crimes of the Future strings together great body horror ideas but does little with them.

A movie that’ll just about keep young viewers’ attention, Smurfs is part Rihanna jukebox musical, and part flimsy attempt to give the little blue critters an identity that’ll stick.

Any romantic notions the film might have are swiftly undone when it starts to explain the disappointing method behind its sleight of hand — until this explanation becomes the magic trick itself.

The story soon gets away from Kandhari, leading to a film that enraptures and delights in its first hour but gets so locked in to a singular approach by its second that it’s practically consumed by its own style, rendering it unable to keep pace with the bold ideas at play.

The Lost City is a decent action-comedy that coasts on the presence of its stars.

A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.

Anyone watching the film is likely to learn something, though whether its lessons will stick, or claw their way beneath one’s skin, is less likely.

A film with sights and sounds you’ve never seen or heard, it’s an intriguing watch with catchy, energetic numbers, even if it doesn’t always land emotionally.

The film is full of potent human drama (largely coming from Gourav’s performance), but as an examination of the world’s intersection with modern India, it usually lands on the wrong side of inauthentic.

Writer-director Elijah Bynum fills the screen with some impressive imagery, but it’s all in service of an ugliness that Magazine Dreams cops out on depicting.

Unfortunately, the piece ends up laid low by a climax that peters out by taking itself too seriously, but the film’s totality is still made worthwhile by its central performances.

Clocking in at nearly two hours, Peter Strickland’s sound-and-food odyssey Flux Gourmet is only ever alluring when its made-up artform (“sonic catering”) is front and center during surreal vignettes. Otherwise, it falls back on rote observations and explanations about what compels its characters to create — a far less engaging experience than actually witnessing that creation.

The movie is largely entertaining, despite being pulled constantly in two directions: as a predecessor to an iconic work and as a distinct beast, with its own gripes against patriarchal norms.

DC League of Super-Pets may have thoughtful filmmaking on its side, but what it doesn’t have is a voice cast that can lend life and personality to its characters.

Try as it might, its story of a good man caught in a bad situation is bogged down by empty reveals, and by a plot that tries to fool you without first earning your investment.

Wildcat is too tame in its portrayal of suffering to let its Catholic undertones sing or take powerful cinematic form, resulting in a work where paradoxes are half-baked dilemmas that seem too conveniently solved, and life itself is something that happens far off-screen.

It’s a fun watch, to be sure; as a home invasion movie of sorts, it has a number of thrilling moments, and lead actors Freida Pinto and Logan Marshall-Green each do a stellar job with what they’re given. However, the final product also exudes trepidation about its most intriguing aesthetic and narrative elements — ideas which may have only enhanced its genre sensibilities, had the filmmakers further pursued them.

The film’s eye-popping, blood-soaked vistas are a marvelous sight, as are a number of its era-specific details, and its handful of striking moments of queer samurai imagery. However, for the most part, Kitano’s tale of ambition and beheadings — many, many beheadings — loses nearly all momentum in its second half, before settling into a rote, repetitive rhythm.

What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.

Moonfall makes its big ideas feel small and unimportant.

Its all-star cast performs admirably, in a film that takes its time to get going, reveals and confronts little once it does, and uses none of its story swerves to build on its dramatic themes, or its one-note humor.

Its strengths also ensure that no matter how rote “We Bury the Dead” becomes, it remains at least watchable for most of its runtime, even as it ignores its most fascinating ideas in favor of safe, familiar ones.

It’s a rare misfire from director Sebastián Lelio, whose approach to his tale of a 19th century English nurse (Florence Pugh) investigating an Irish miracle is far too plain to be mysterious or stirring.

A deeply misguided act of worship, it starts out as a hilariously bizarre showreel of strange visual effects, before devolving into a distant, disconnected retelling of the highlights of Dion’s life.

A film of remarkable performance and subject matter, laid low by unremarkable filmmaking.

Where The Crawdads Sing is only mildly interesting if you look up the accusations against its author.

The worst thing about Joker: Folie à Deux is its unfulfilled potential. It begins with the promise of a novel approach to the Joker and Harley Quinn, placing them in a world where the opposite of cruelty is musical romance. Unfortunately, the DC sequel gets bogged down by a lengthy courtroom saga, which not only keeps the dazzling Lady Gaga away from the spotlight, but centers the movie entirely around its own predecessor, without doing or saying anything new.

The film draws its various techniques from far better and more accomplished documentaries, resulting in a multifaceted, mixed-bag approach that never clicks, thanks in large part to how the movie chooses to reveal information.

Ranbir Kapoor is deeply committed to his brash and ugly protagonist, but in spite of the movie’s explosive action, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga seems more preoccupied with provoking outrage than with telling a coherent story.

he fatal flaw of “It’s Not Me” is that it looks backward rather than forward, embodying films that have already been made, rather than those yet to be dreamed.

Despite thoughtful visual artistry, and a great dramatic performance from Adam Sandler, Johan Renck’s Spaceman ends up too scattered, and too literal, to make its tale of a lonely astronaut feel remotely important.

The sequel to Bollywood’s biggest hit is bigger, longer, and just as vicious in its on-screen butchery, but has far less artistry and visceral allure. The continued spy-revenge saga runs a mind-numbing four hours, during which it sheds all semblance of human drama in favor of naked political propaganda that reveals the emperor has no clothes.

An artless retelling of major events, She Said chronicles the investigation into Harvey Weinstein in mechanical fashion, flattening its tale of victimhood, paranoia, and perseverance into a journalism movie checklist.

Sweet Girl is front-loaded with fun action, and it has a great performance by Jason Momoa as a widower seeking vengeance against a pharma CEO. But its story slowly loses steam, before being replaced by an entirely different movie with much sillier political messaging.

The movie often brushes past what might have been its most intriguing moments in favor of an unobtrusive hagiography. It approaches dramatic rigor and visual intrigue in only the briefest of scenes, often far too late into its runtime.

Its martial arts spectacle is scattered across a sprawling refugees-and-triads saga that, while adequately laying foundation for the aforementioned fisticuffs, is seldom coherent or engaging on its own.