Siddhant Adlakha

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.

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

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.

Jordan Peele’s Nope is a bleak, hilarious sci-fi-horror romp, and one of the most entertaining summer movies in years.

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.

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

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

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 playful camera that rushes through space and embodies a ghostly spirit, Steven Soderbergh’s resourceful haunted house thriller is a midnight genre romp.

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.

Sam Mendes assembles a creative dream-team for Empire of Light, but ends up with one of the most soulless prestige pictures in years.

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

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 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.

As much as it’s a movie about one man’s struggle, it’s a family drama too, and the way his paralysis shifts their dynamic over the years is enrapturing to watch.

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.

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.

From its anachronistic homages to its tensionless filmmaking, Pearl — Ti West’s prequel to X — doesn’t have nearly as much to say as its predecessor. Mia Goth gives it her all as a villainess who dreams of stardom, but the film can’t decide what to do with her.

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.

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

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.