Siddhant Adlakha

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

The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a glorified episode of the series, but that’s hardly a bad thing.

The story soon gets away from Kandhari, leading to a film that enraptures and delights in its first hour but gets so locked in to a singular approach by its second that it’s practically consumed by its own style, rendering it unable to keep pace with the bold ideas at play.

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

Hatching is a scattered body-horror romp with the best child performance this year.

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

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

A lush, richly conceived cannibal road-trip romance, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All lives in the intimate space between love and self-hatred, with characters who connect over their shared hunger for human flesh.

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.

With a human artist at the center of the film — one with wit and alluring charm, and whose reflections on death and creativity are intriguing, and even harrowing — to eschew meaning in the name of a nominal experiment is artistic malpractice.

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

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.

An artless retelling of major events, She Said chronicles the investigation into Harvey Weinstein in mechanical fashion, flattening its tale of victimhood, paranoia, and perseverance into a journalism movie checklist.

Few Hollywood genre films are as honest about capturing the underlying reasons relationships implode; even fewer are as adept at turning that implosion into razor-wire corporate drama.

While its chaotic new cast serves a clear purpose, Inside Out 2 is more metaphor than meaning. It explains plenty about the confusing emotions associated with puberty, often in intelligent ways, but it rarely lets them be felt or experienced, the way its predecessor did.

A self-reflexive love letter to Hollywood stunt work, The Fall Guy is the perfect vehicle for Ryan Gosling’s comedic timing – not to mention, his romantic charm alongside an equally dialed-in Emily Blunt.

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.

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

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.

What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.

The Radleys is a vampire horror comedy that can’t quite figure out its tone, so more often than not, it ends up in a lukewarm middle ground.

Megadoc is a mood piece and a process piece, shot up close with lo-fi video equipment, but it’s never allowed to probe deeply enough.

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.

A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.

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.

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.

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.

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.