Siddhant Adlakha

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.

While often more intellectually stimulating than emotionally engaging, Santosh lays bare the dark heart of communal divisions in modern India.

The first chapter in Kevin Costner's epic western series is a meandering, regressive snooze.

Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his days of nasty absurdism, with three vicious, amusing stories about love and obsession. The recurring ensemble, led by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons, delivers a showcase of versatility in which they meet the director on his peculiar wavelength, leading to nearly 3 hours of unsettling fun.

Parthenope is a film that rumbles with the hum of nostalgia, recapturing the feeling of youthful, summer freedom while refusing to shy away from the uncertainties of young adulthood. But it’s no mere coming-of-age story; rather, it’s a film about coming-to-oneself.

Megalopolis is so chock-full of ideas that Coppola’s melding of time periods eventually buckles under its own weight in a controlled demolition that initially confounds, but eventually shatters the screen in thrilling fashion. The film ends up not only being a cautionary tale about the end of empires, but one that likens the Hollywood system to empire as well (or a tyrannical extension of it).

It isn’t interested in finding a bright side to war; such an outcome would feel too complacent. Instead, it points its microphone unflinchingly at the darkest parts of the human soul, while forcing the viewer to hold the camera and search for the brutality within its images and empty spaces. It makes the audience, and their recognition, a necessary ingredient to portraying the bigger picture.

Titley consistently anchors her unfolding chronicle to the kind of backstage emotional truths often hidden from the audience, and in the process, she crafts something halfway between sensationalist exposé and intimate confessional — a remedy to reality TV based on its own format — co-authored by her subjects

Anyone watching the film is likely to learn something, though whether its lessons will stick, or claw their way beneath one’s skin, is less likely.

Spy x Family Code: White is far more chuckle-worthy than laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s an innocent, adolescent charm to even its jokes that miss the mark.

A film that volleys back and forth in time, Luca Guadagnino's Challengers builds the relationships between its leading tennis trio in exciting and exacting ways. Enhanced by layered physical performances from Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor, the result is one of the sexiest and most electric dramas of 2024.

Olivia Colman is a diamond in the rough, but even she can’t rescue a movie this flat and uninteresting.

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.

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.