Siddhant Adlakha

Gehraiyaan seldom earns its melodramatic turns. However, the buildup to them proves to be dynamic enough, emotionally charged enough, and above all, honest enough in its approach to infidelity and flawed human relationships that the film remains worthwhile.

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.

It takes Death on the Nile far longer than it should to reach its most impactful moments, but actor-director Kenneth Branagh cares deeply enough about Detective Poirot to make it work.

Moonfall makes its big ideas feel small and unimportant.

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

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 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.

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

Led by moving performances from Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, the film takes a roundabout approach to its drama, resulting in a realistic portrait of a relationship in stasis.

Writer-director Riley Stearns transforms depression and disappointment into a hilarious confrontation of death and a peculiar tale of self-image in an uncanny film with a precisely bizarre lead performance.

With a layered performance by Regina Hall as the university’s first Black dean of students, the film plays with familiar tropes and images from American horror, but re-fashions them into an unexpected, subdued story with a chilling emotional payoff.

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 has so many things it wants to say about the state of modern America, but it finds no suitable or impactful way to say them.

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.

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

It’s fun, not in a way a computer or a boardroom might interpret fun—pixels taking the shape of something familiar, regurgitated across the screen—but rather, in an unabashed way, where it winks at the audience without apologizing for its gimmick, without being insincere or self-deprecating, and without sacrificing what makes popcorn horror movies such a reliable collective ritual.

A film about so many different things that it ends up about none of them, Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos is visually inert, and features an emotionally stifled performance from Nicole Kidman as the lively Lucille Ball. Javier Bardem brings energy to Desi Arnaz, but it isn’t enough to pick the disjointed pieces up off the floor.

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

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

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.

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.

The film’s focus remains largely on the crowd — not the forces that pull and push at it, contort its shape, and determine its movement through space and history, but rather, the crowd as mere spectacle, divorced from all the things that paved its path to the Capitol.

Last Night in Soho’s biggest strengths and weaknesses come from the same place: its attempts to replicate much better psychological horror from decades past. However, despite everything that doesn’t work, its musical energy keeps it fun.

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 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.

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.

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

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