Siddhant Adlakha

Dev Patel’s diehard sincerity clashes with unwieldy religious imagery in an India-set revenge saga whose tepid action scenes fail to make up for its muddled politics.

It does little to separate itself, thematically or stylistically, from a now repetitive form of “third culture” storytelling.

Despite thoughtful visual artistry, and a great dramatic performance from Adam Sandler, Johan Renck’s Spaceman ends up too scattered, and too literal, to make its tale of a lonely astronaut feel remotely important.

It comes imbued with the same twinkle in its eye, the same sense of mischief and Dadaist sensibility, that made Devo so alluring in the first place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Make no mistake: Culkin is the movie’s heart and soul as the eccentric, unpredictable wanderer Benji, but “A Real Pain” is — at the risk of it being too early in the filmmaker’s career to coin this term — Eisenbergian through and through.

Both Panigrahi and Kusruti deliver immensely lived-in performances that write sonnets through silent stares, as a mother and daughter who aren’t accustomed to truly connecting, or communicating beyond customary debriefs.

At 174 minutes long, with nested flashbacks overflowing with exposition, the movie has lengthy stretches that can feel like a chore. However, each extraneous segment eventually converges in some of the most exhilarating and cathartic on-screen violence Indian cinema has to offer.

Eventually, the two opposing modes of visual storytelling at its core (one distinctly intimate, the other distant and observational) come into explosive contact like matter and antimatter, as the idea of art metaphorically gazing back at its viewer takes distinctly literal form.

To Kill a Tiger depicts a shining, poignant example of the difference individuals can make in altering the social fabric.

Bayona’s approach to the “triumph of the human spirit” arc — often a broad, four-quadrant, feel-good cinematic flattening of real events — is both scrutinous and rigorous. It turns the concept inside out, presenting the ordeal of 571’s survivors as a murky scenario that we’ve been granted secret, intimate access to.

Nothing comes of anything either man says. It’s all noise — all passionless anger going in circles, captured by a camera that seems averse to lingering on the tremendous talents of Hopkins and Goode, who try their best to rescue Freud’s Last Session from itself.

The Color Purple strands a passionate cast in a passionless movie musical that’s eager to skip to the end.

Ranbir Kapoor is deeply committed to his brash and ugly protagonist, but in spite of the movie’s explosive action, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga seems more preoccupied with provoking outrage than with telling a coherent story.

Leave the World Behind has a worthwhile cast, but its paranoid thrills quickly fizzle out en route to a baffling final scene.

A boring, weightless revenge experiment that quickly goes awry, Silent Night features none of the charm or visual panache that made John Woo one of Hong Kong and Hollywood’s foremost action stylists.

A super-charged genre throwback that obscures its meaning but has an alluring visual texture, Divinity is completely unique in its conception of sci-fi dystopia, for better and for worse.

Kaur creates a vital portrait of the intersection between the spiritual and industrial in the world’s most religious nation, grounded in the poignant interpersonal drama between friends, families and communities. In moving fashion, she captures how the effects of climate change ripple far beyond the shore, into the homes of those who depend on the sea not for their living, but for their cultural identities.

Rather than copying the core premise of the short story, Bonello’s French- and English-language adaptation uses James’ dense, descriptive prose to weave detailed textures and sensations in each of his timelines.

It takes a remarkably self-assured filmmaker to turn such a lurid tale of abuse into something so wildly entrancing and entertaining, but Todd Haynes’ mix of tenderness and camp is a perfect fit for May December.

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.

It’s a laugh riot, with the potential to go down as one of the decade’s smartest and funniest comedies.

It Lives Inside feels desperate to project specific cultural experiences, but it has neither the tact nor the aesthetic flair to weave a competent horror movie around them.

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