Siddhant Adlakha

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.

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.

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.

Moonfall makes its big ideas feel small and unimportant.

The fourth (and hopefully final, for the sake of its cast) Jackass is a nostalgic laugh riot.

Set at the explosive intersection of technology, politics, and indigenous persecution, the film is gorgeously and sometimes ingeniously conceived, painting an intimate first-hand portrait of joy, pain, and community, before bursting with rip-roaring intensity as it captures a high-stakes struggle for survival unfolding in the moment.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

With melancholy performances and an eye for natural beauty, Kogonada’s second feature film draws from masters of the past to create a glowing and moving future.

It has so many things it wants to say about the state of modern America, but it finds no suitable or impactful way to say them.

Every interaction is rip-roaringly funny — even the more disquieting ones — resulting in a film where you can’t help but laugh at the riveting absurdity.

The Worst Person in the World is a concentrated emotional dose of living through the last half-decade of uncertainty.

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 about so many different things that it ends up about none of them, Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos is visually inert, and features an emotionally stifled performance from Nicole Kidman as the lively Lucille Ball. Javier Bardem brings energy to Desi Arnaz, but it isn’t enough to pick the disjointed pieces up off the floor.

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a dazzling complementary piece to the original.

Licorice Pizza is the moment between the leap and the impact—the feeling of weightlessness even as you plummet.

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.

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.

The film’s focus remains largely on the crowd — not the forces that pull and push at it, contort its shape, and determine its movement through space and history, but rather, the crowd as mere spectacle, divorced from all the things that paved its path to the Capitol.

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.

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.

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.

A poignant and moving coming-of-age story, and an example of the way cinema can make real both memories, without losing their bitter honesty, and dreams, without compromising on their glowing promise.

The French Dispatch is both an ode to print journalism and one of Wes Anderson’s most richly detailed films.

Driven by four challenging, nuanced and completely distinct performances, Mass is an emotional razor-wire.

This combination of lively image and mournful narration imbues the camera’s fly-on-the-wall perspective with a sense of melancholy. As life unfolds with verve and passion, the spectral narrator, L, exists at a remove, as if she were both present amidst the frolic, and distant from it, her heartbreak leaving her unable to get involved.

With four great performances in tow, it unfurls a harrowing tale of pain turned outward and inward all at once, by turning cinematic myths into melancholy memories, and repressed emotions into tender rhythms.

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.

Lamb is a wonderfully strange film about parenthood.

Benedetta is led by a wildly fun performance from Virginie Efira as a real-life 17th century lesbian nun. Equal parts funny, sensual and incendiary, it’s a committed work from director Paul Verhoeven — a master of tonal balance — even if its exploration of the war between body and spirit occasionally falls short.

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.

Strange, frequently haunting, occasionally hilarious and ultimately masterful, Titane is a journey whose head-spinning complications are a vital part of its emotional impact.

A gorgeous black-and-white film that harkens back to several cinematic eras, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth twists an old tale just enough to keep it fresh, but relies on tremendous lead performances by Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand to make the familiar feel exciting.

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.

An unfortunately timely film, Flee uses animation primarily to sharpen the dangerous edges of its refugee story, and to capture the devastating physical and emotional toll of never-ending war. But in brief moments, the film acts as a spiritual balm, offering hints and possibilities of a world where Nawabi might one day be able to fully share himself with other people.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ahmed exudes a never-before-seen vulnerability, both physically and emotionally.

Demonic promises a fun and fascinating premise, but its scattered pieces barely coalesce.

Nia DaCosta’s slow-burn sequel makes Candyman feel vital, both building on and course-correcting the movies in the series that came before it.

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.

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.

The Protégé is so bad that it feels like it has to be on purpose.

As much CODA is a film about a hearing person’s relationship to deafness and Deaf culture, it’s just as much about deaf characters’ relationships to a hearing world, whose norms most hearing people take for granted, and whose obstacles can impact everything from labor to self-worth.

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.

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.

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.

It’s bold, dazzling, introspective, and occasionally disturbing, which makes it a fitting capper to not only the new film series, but to the Evangelion story as a whole.

Pig subverts the expectations of the average revenge-thriller and accentuates the deep emotional scars that often underscore these stories. It features a measured, meticulous performance from Nicolas Cage.

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.

The Mark Wahlberg–starrer reveals just how stuck Hollywood sci-fi is in 1999, when The Matrix cemented ideas of digital consciousness in the Western mainstream (with a bent of pan-Asian spirituality).

In the Heights moves smoothly between cinematic realism and the magic of the stage, in a defiant musical about what it means to belong, and what it means to be remembered. It is one of the most moving and joyful films this year.

A sequel that hopes to court Saw fans and mainstream audiences alike, Spiral: From the Book of Saw is likely to alienate them both. It’s a hollow imitation of the series, unable to meet its most basic visual and narrative expectations. It’s also a bad film in general, which tries to tell a socially relevant story that it can’t seem to handle.

Despite the powerful child performance at its center, David Oyelowo’s The Water Man struggles to focus on more than one narrative or visual idea at a time.

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.

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.

The Father is a devastating masterwork by first-time director Florian Zeller.

Despite the efforts of Idris Elba and the cast, Concrete Cowboy never explores its characters or premise in much depth.

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.

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.

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.

Intense and atmospheric, Keith Thomas’ The Vigil invigorates demonic horror by centering on Jewish traditions, especially those concerning death. Part haunted house, part tech thriller, and entirely grounded by Dave Davis’ harrowing performance, the film never loses sight of questions of cultural identity, and the ways it intersects with personal and collective trauma.

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.

Malcolm & Marie is a well-acted but frustrating exploration of art and bad romance.

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.

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.

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.

In spite of its heavy subject matter, it’s also one of the most electrifying and downright fun historical dramas to come out of Hollywood in years.

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.

Whether strictly factual or broadly truthful in a poetic sense, its approach to queer history as coded, long-buried document is its most exacting facet. But as a story of science, hidden desire, and sparks re-igniting the soul, it’s a languid affair.

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

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.

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

As a piece of political filmmaking, Lovers Rock is deft and nuanced, a celebration of joy and community built in response to oppression.

The psychological thriller-horror film Antebellum mishandles its sensitive & painful subject matter on multiple levels.

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.