Siddhant Adlakha

Isaiah Saxon’s adventure fairytale ends up unique and beautiful, much like the adorable animatronic foundling of its title.

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.

Nothing in the movie seems to matter, from its internal lore to the extraneous sequel setups that appear out of nowhere to the characters’ own ethoses. Audiences have not cared much about Sony’s non-Spider-Man Spider-world movies. That’s no surprise when the filmmakers seem to be this indifferent as well.

Ford v Ferrari's James Mangold takes his hands off the steering wheel for A Complete Unknown, resulting in a Bob Dylan biopic that takes unpredictable turns. Rather than connecting the dots between how the world influenced him (and how he influenced it in turn), the film frames his enormous musical sea changes as personal drama for his peers. It’s formally straightforward, but its focus on the characters in Dylan’s life – rather than the musician himself, played by Timothée Chalamet – turn him into an enigma, for better or worse.

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.

Directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil offer ideas of subversion that feel both long-outdated in concept and completely dull in execution, to the point that merely describing the film feels irresponsible, lest its premise accidentally lure curious viewers to the cinema.

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.

Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.

A film of remarkable performance and subject matter, laid low by unremarkable filmmaking.

A one-angle drama spanning centuries, Robert Zemeckis' comic adaptation Here is experimental in appearance, but highly conventional in approach.

Its meditative, hyper-fixated approach to process — as seen through the eyes of seasoned lepidopterists — proves so hypnotic that any appeals or augments the movie makes are deeply felt before they’re intellectually understood.

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.

Blitz's piercing sound design can't make up for its bloodless depiction of World War II, its scattered sense of place, and its saccharine approach to overcoming racial hostility. Saoirse Ronan is captivating in the role of a single white mother to a defiant Black son trying to make his way back home, but the movie can't seem to balance her talents with its own timeline.

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.

Everything that unfolds in The Crooked Man does so with exceptional dullness, including various psychic visions experienced by the characters, which feel more obligatory than inspired.

The film draws its various techniques from far better and more accomplished documentaries, resulting in a multifaceted, mixed-bag approach that never clicks, thanks in large part to how the movie chooses to reveal information.

With a cast that takes wildly different approaches to characters we already know from film and TV, and a camera that never slows down, Saturday Night is chaotic in wildly enjoyable ways. The lead-up to the historic premiere of SNL plays like an extended 90-minute climax.

The movie is largely entertaining, despite being pulled constantly in two directions: as a predecessor to an iconic work and as a distinct beast, with its own gripes against patriarchal norms.

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.

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.

Although the film, which is based on real events, often tries to cover too much ground, it continually circles back to the idea that people must see themselves reflected in art, not just out of want, but out of deep desire stemming from need, in order to live with dignity.

The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments.

Youth (Homecoming) stands on its own, as a genuinely sorrowful film about how deeply the churn of industry has worked its way into people’s bones, as though they’ve become one with the machines they operate.

Its all-star cast performs admirably, in a film that takes its time to get going, reveals and confronts little once it does, and uses none of its story swerves to build on its dramatic themes, or its one-note humor.

While there’s a more streamlined and thus more effective version of “The Cut” in there somewhere, what remains on screen is plenty harrowing as it is, and allows Bloom to finally cement himself as a truly great performer — not for the lengths he’s willing to go, but for the spellbinding end result.

Any romantic notions the film might have are swiftly undone when it starts to explain the disappointing method behind its sleight of hand — until this explanation becomes the magic trick itself.

A deeply human film with no human characters, The Wild Robot is a tear-jerking and unpredictable animated adventure.

It’s grimly funny, and hilariously sad.