Siddhant Adlakha

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.

Thoughtfully conceived and brilliantly acted, it’s one of the most bleakly funny films to come out this year.

Harmony Korine’s infrared assassin movie Aggro Dr1ft is a video-game-inspired experiment that’ll have you in a trance.

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.

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

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

Elena Oxman’s Outerlands is a film of great cinematic sleight of hand.

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 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.

The Shrouds may seem impenetrable at first, but it grows in the mind and heart like a cancer. Let it linger long enough, and it also starts to feel like Cronenberg's most complete, self-assured, and dramatically accomplished work in years.

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.

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.

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.

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

While its flaws are rooted in what it avoids, its marriage of topic and form yields a blast of positivity in a way that perfectly suits its withholding subject, granting his interviews the kind of depth and creativity embodied by his music. While it avoids all thorny entanglements, it looks good and feels great, like any LEGO movie should.

In depicting both Pagnol and Chomet’s search for authentic truths within their stylized works, it’s a perfect marriage of subject and form.

With scenes of natural disaster grounded in a human point of view, Lee Isaac Chung's spiritual sequel transcends its visual shortcomings, and proves to be a wildly fun and effective summer blockbuster worth watching on the biggest and loudest screen.

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

It’s a junk-food thriller fried to near-perfection, balancing the tensions of kidnapping, conspiracy and murder with those of a nerve-wracking first date. It’s crisp and delicious.

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

An obvious codependency metaphor becomes a body-horror blast in Michael Shanks’ Together.

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.

In The Accountant 2, Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal return for a sentimental, politically charged, and surprisingly funny action sequel about brothers trying their best to connect.

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.

Ne Zha 2 starts out tedious and juvenile, but after its first hour it pivots to enormous and spectacular fist-pumping action and tear-jerking intimacy.

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.

Rife with great performances and disturbing imagery, The Carpenter’s Son transcends its trappings as a mere horror take on Christ and verges on challenging.

With a stunningly honest performance from the director’s son — Jojo Rabbit star Roman Griffin Davis — Silent Night balances the eccentricities of a Christmas get-together with nihilistic acceptance of certain doom, making for a film that’s both bleak and dryly funny.