Siddhant Adlakha

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.

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.

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.

Cate Blanchett’s forceful performance as a world-famous composer makes TÁR a richly detailed exposé of ego.

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.

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

A work of shattering empathy, Drive My Car makes you stare long and hard at people’s withholding exteriors as it carefully chips away at them, revealing how they patiently bear their burdens, working without rest.

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.

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

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

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.

A full-tilt biopic unlike any before it, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is as stunning as it is terrifying.

It’s one of Scorsese’s most brutal films, yet one of his most thoughtful and self-reflexive, as he crafts a subversive murder “mystery” that leaves no lingering questions save for one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

About Dry Grasses is among the most brilliantly off-putting works to be featured at Cannes in recent years, with so rotten a core that every hint of virtue or even normalcy in the camera’s peripheral vision becomes a tragedy unto itself, simply by way of being ignored.

To Kill a Tiger depicts a shining, poignant example of the difference individuals can make in altering the social fabric.

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

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

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 movie is such a rich, emotionally detailed text that not sticking the landing is only a minor mark against it.

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.

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.

The Color Purple strands a passionate cast in a passionless movie musical that’s eager to skip to the end.

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.

It takes a remarkably self-assured filmmaker to turn such a lurid tale of abuse into something so wildly entrancing and entertaining, but Todd Haynes’ mix of tenderness and camp is a perfect fit for May December.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s a short film, but its portrayal of inspiration, self-evident in both its artistry and homage, is simply enormous.

While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.

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.

Kaur creates a vital portrait of the intersection between the spiritual and industrial in the world’s most religious nation, grounded in the poignant interpersonal drama between friends, families and communities. In moving fashion, she captures how the effects of climate change ripple far beyond the shore, into the homes of those who depend on the sea not for their living, but for their cultural identities.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A story of magical transformation as a metaphor for personal and cultural change, Turning Red (from Bao director Domee Shi) is Pixar’s funniest and most imaginative film in years. It captures the wild energy of adolescence, uses pop stars as a timeless window into puberty, and tells a tale of friendship and family in the most delightfully kid-friendly way.

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 passionate, well-intentioned deviation in style, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t quite hit the mark with its meditations on nature. However, in its best moments, it’s another entrancing dramatic piece from the Japanese maestro, whose strengths lie less in observing natural environments, and more in observing people’s nature.

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 sensory experience than straightforward recounting, the documentary by Brett Morgen (“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”) is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor.

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

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

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.

S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the “fiction” — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once.

The frame moves slowly, if at all, but it always brims with physical and emotional energy; in “Joyland,” there’s always something in the ether, whether embodied by dazzling displays of light as characters move across stages and club floors, or by breathtaking silences as they begin to figure each other out, and figure out themselves.

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.

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.

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.

Alexander Payne finds deft balance with The Holdovers, in which every glance and verbal exchange may as well be set up for something equally hilarious and touching.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It builds, in the process, to a stunning and genuinely moving crescendo.

Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.

A low-energy comedy remade from a French farce, The Valet tries (and fails) to inject an absurd story of stardom and fake romance with added commentary and sentiment. Eugenio Derbez and Samara Weaving lead a more than capable cast, but they can’t overcome the film’s sluggish length and disconnected story.

Rather than copying the core premise of the short story, Bonello’s French- and English-language adaptation uses James’ dense, descriptive prose to weave detailed textures and sensations in each of his timelines.

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.

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

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.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman’s performances are a treat in Song Sung Blue. They sing and perform their hearts out, but none of it ends up in service to a coherent vision, let alone one that says something meaningful or profound.

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.

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

Both Panigrahi and Kusruti deliver immensely lived-in performances that write sonnets through silent stares, as a mother and daughter who aren’t accustomed to truly connecting, or communicating beyond customary debriefs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.