Siddhant Adlakha

It’s a downright magnificent film that puts most modern studio comedies to shame. There isn’t a single joke that doesn’t land with gut-busting precision (even the most ludicrous, over-the-top gags are deeply character-centric), and when the filmmakers want to slow things down and make you take stock of key relationships, Ahn and de Ray know precisely how to paint with light in order to make moments feel like memories.

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

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.

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.

It’s a nonstop blast with the kind of low-to-the-ground vehicular and horseback action that’ll have you falling off the front of your seat.

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

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

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.

James Morosini’s shockingly funny I Love My Dad builds on the actor-director’s real-life tale of being catfished by his distant father. The story is told from the point of view of his dad, a character played with hilarious desperation by comedian Patton Oswalt, resulting in a bizarre act of cinematic empathy that’s as moving as it is intense.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Michael B. Jordan imbues this spinoff/threequel with a cinematic zest the series has never seen before, expanding the visual language of the Hollywood boxing movie in remarkable ways.

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.

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

Athena is arguably a style-over-substance movie, given how little time and attention it devotes to the personal drama underlying its politics. But in Gavras’ hands, the style is also the substance, with a restrained classicism giving way to baroque staging as each long take accelerates. Scenes build in ways that feel both narratively inevitable and visually prophetic.

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.

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.