Siddhant Adlakha

Riz Ahmed makes for a vigorous lead in Aneil Karia’s contemporary British-Indian Hamlet, which loses its emotional clarity beneath an intriguing exterior. Its use of silence and intimacy grants it a fascinating texture, but the film never challenges or re-invigorates Shakespeare’s greatest work, ensuring that it ends up somewhere in the middle of a lengthy pile of adaptations.

Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel deliver two brilliant, diametrically opposed performances in Steven Soderbergh’s gentle art world caper.

As ugly as it is amusing, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy takes the kind of tonal swings you rarely see from a Hollywood studio.

Led by immaculate performances, it’s one of the most delightfully nerve-wracking rabbit holes you’re likely to tumble down this year.

Gosh, is it ever a letdown to have a filmmaker all but pop up on screen to remind us what his movie is not-so-secretly about, before failing to live up to not only his own political objectives, but some of the most basic visual tenets of narrative filmmaking. Down with the bourgeoisie? Absolutely. But must the revolution be so sloppy?

Bob Odenkirk’s presence helps create a sense of gravitas even when the film is straightforward, adding soulful dimensions to a fairly simple character in whose hands guns and explosives are as much tools of violence as they are instruments of a righteousness long lost to moral compromise.

A tale of miserable spouses plotting each other’s demise, it doesn’t always work, but its action comedy stylings are enough to keep it entertaining even when it swerves into ugly excess or extraneous subplots.

The sequel to Bollywood’s biggest hit is bigger, longer, and just as vicious in its on-screen butchery, but has far less artistry and visceral allure. The continued spy-revenge saga runs a mind-numbing four hours, during which it sheds all semblance of human drama in favor of naked political propaganda that reveals the emperor has no clothes.

Pretty Lethal is a wonderfully original idea, but its execution falls flat.

That such a hefty topic can be used to create such breathless, eye-watering comedy without tipping into self-indulgence — and without robbing the film of its most meaningful drama — is practically a miracle.

The twists of its premise soon end up souring it conceptually, resulting in rapidly-diminishing returns, with derivative formal flourishes that largely recall other, better films. It is, by the time its credits roll, completely exhausting.

In depicting both Pagnol and Chomet’s search for authentic truths within their stylized works, it’s a perfect marriage of subject and form.

Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process.

Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an exceptional historical fiction, doesn’t so much transport you to the past as it brings you to the edge of the translucent curtain that often obfuscates history from view.

At its core is the kind of cinema that has long sustained the medium at large: the family drama. But it’s presented here with invigorating flourishes that encircle the story within specific moments in time, while also granting it a stirring dramatic transcendence. The scope of its ambition is met, at every turn, by deft control over what is witnessed, and how.

Part guerrilla prank saga, part heartwarming friendship story, and part riff on Back to the Future, the result is an incredibly fine-tuned mishmash of styles and ideas that keeps evolving in surprising ways.

Mason Reeves delivers one of the most stunning child performances in recent memory, while Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan lean into their familiar acting hallmarks but find uncomfortable new layers as a mother and father bound by their own upbringings. The result is visceral, gentle, and ultimately, shattering.

Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.

While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.

I Want Your Sex may not ultimately have much to say, but its livewire comic scenarios yield the kind of raucous, sexually charged entertainment seldom seen in Hollywood of late.

Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.

A headache-inducing screenlife film that straps Chris Pratt to a chair and holds its audience hostage too, Mercy squanders its potential as a sci-fi thriller about the dangers of entwining justice and artificial intelligence. The result plays less like the tongue-in-cheek mystery-thriller director Timur Bekmambetov seems to be aiming for, and more like an advertisement to tech investors, making the movie chilling in unintended ways.

It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.

Its strengths also ensure that no matter how rote “We Bury the Dead” becomes, it remains at least watchable for most of its runtime, even as it ignores its most fascinating ideas in favor of safe, familiar ones.

An intoxicating historical musical about faith, led by career-best work from Amanda Seyfried.

The camera’s non-interventionist nature becomes vital. The visual approach embodies the Beinin family’s loss of control, and the growing uncertainty around them and what they believe.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman’s performances are a treat in Song Sung Blue. They sing and perform their hearts out, but none of it ends up in service to a coherent vision, let alone one that says something meaningful or profound.

Bollywood gangster saga Dhurandhar walks a fine line between raucous entertainment and hateful propaganda. With more blood and guts than a slaughterhouse, it’s one of the most viciously enthralling films this year, following a fictitious undercover operative influencing real historical events, like Forrest Gump with a Kalashnikov.

Quentin Tarantino’s decades-in-the-making ultimate release of Kill Bill has been worth the wait. Across four hours and change, it retains all the exuberant action highlights that made the duology an instant classic while allowing the saga’s emotional pieces to fall more neatly into place.

Elena Oxman’s Outerlands is a film of great cinematic sleight of hand.

It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but a drag.

Copti and cinematographer Tim Kuhn shoot each interaction with an up-close, handheld intimacy that not only magnifies the subtle, powerful performances of the cast (many of them first-time actors), but welcomes the viewer into each scene, as though it were a complicated family reunion.

The film’s irascible but deeply principled subject — thirty-something divorcee Sara Shahverdi — gives the film its energy, though its lulls aren’t quite as purposeful. However, despite feeling drawn-out, the doc features occasional bursts of visual panache that help emphasize its underlying story.

Rife with great performances and disturbing imagery, The Carpenter’s Son transcends its trappings as a mere horror take on Christ and verges on challenging.

It eventually takes on radiant form, with emotional complexities born out of characters walking around the truth, if only because euphemisms are the only language they have.

Hassona is both fashionable and immensely talented (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the more we see of her over the movie’s 110 minutes, the more devastating it becomes that we will never meet her, or never truly get to know her.

The first and final scenes of any film are vital, and contained within these bookends you can find the entire story of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Unfortunately, nearly everything in between is standard biopic filler and reinforces filmmaker Scott Cooper’s unique position in the Hollywood landscape: he’s a tremendous director of actors and quite unremarkable at most other parts of the job.

Unfortunately, the piece ends up laid low by a climax that peters out by taking itself too seriously, but the film’s totality is still made worthwhile by its central performances.

Although simple in appearance, Father Mother Sister Brother beats with the wisdom of an artist in his early twilight.

Cooper’s latest is clearly the output of someone who has been through personal anguish, and like Alex Novak, he attempts to use his pain as the basis for not just something healing but something hilarious, albeit something deeply imperfect, too.

It’s filled with powerful ideas about the many ways that violence—of the body, of the state and of the soul—manifests in men, and the generational ripple effects therein, even if it doesn’t cohere enough to be consistently engaging.

Loktev’s immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together.

It’s a film that seldom comes out and tells you exactly what’s happening, but its drama is so lucid that before any real tragedy unfolds (or is even hinted at), you feel it in your bones.

It’s a film of great tragedy, but one so rooted in beating humanity that you can’t help but be left furious, in addition to teary-eyed.

From its gentle introduction to its jarring final scene—a lifelike anticlimax that makes sense spiritually more than logistically—My Father’s Shadow acts as both a retrospective and a soulful reconstruction, breathing life into the past while distinguishing the personal and pragmatic details that inform the complexity of a person—even one who exists entirely in memory.

Few films this year have been as soulful or as quietly defiant.

It’s ultimately a very strange movie, and a far cry from what anyone expects from even the most idiosyncratic biopics. But it’s hard not to wonder if Franz is ahead of its time, much like Kafka was—which Holland depicts by tethering his consciousness to our fragile present, and constructing, in the process, a bridge to the past.

Justin Tipping’s flimsy football horror movie Him is papered over with colorful lighting but underscored by bland ideas. Despite Marlon Wayans’ bravura performance, it makes very little visceral impact while en route to one of the most confounding third acts of any horror movie this year.

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic stage play Hedda Gabler, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda seeks to reinterpret and modernize the late 19th-century material. However, in the process, it loosens the nuts and bolts of Ibsen’s dramaturgical machine, causing it to ricket until it falls apart.

The unfolding action is never farcical enough to make the film satirical or outright funny, but it’s also never imbued with enough historical gravity to truly matter.

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.

Will Tracy’s screenplay adapts the basic premise and parameters of Jang’s original, but director Yorgos Lanthimos puts his unique tonal spin on the material, turning in one of the most sardonic Hollywood comedy-dramas in recent memory.

The star-studded After the Hunt has a lot on its mind about human complexities, but largely expresses these notions in didactic form and through dramatic conflict that all but resolves itself halfway through the movie’s languid 2 hours and 18 minutes.

The result is a tale made up of numerous endpoints and thematic conclusions, whose dots don’t feel meaningfully connected, and whose situational oddities rarely yield excitement or intrigue.

Ne Zha 2 starts out tedious and juvenile, but after its first hour it pivots to enormous and spectacular fist-pumping action and tear-jerking intimacy.

A movie that’ll just about keep young viewers’ attention, Smurfs is part Rihanna jukebox musical, and part flimsy attempt to give the little blue critters an identity that’ll stick.

Beyond all the legal and even medical specifics resides a sense of communal understanding, and — at the risk of sounding mawkish — a deep and abiding love for one’s fellow human beings, which Feder taps into with aplomb.

Malformed comedy and character beats keep the movie feeling like a rough first draft.

Torn between action and comedy, irony and sentiment, and rah-rah jingoism and genuine self-reflection, Heads of State is a surprisingly entertaining romp.

Its aesthetic approach seldom lives up to its gestures toward camp as a guiding principle or its weighty themes (except, perhaps, in its surprisingly raucous final act). However, its flimsy aesthetic foundations are supported by remarkably well-formed characters.

Even without its numerous rug-pulls, which occur early enough that the movie soon takes on an entirely different tone, Twinless is a masterful example of shifting cinematic POV.

From a distance, Materialists seems like a straightforward love-triangle rom com, but Celine Song transforms it into a meaningful, introspective drama about self-worth.

It’s morally upstanding but dramatically dull, without any of the allure or excitement that made Armstrong’s Succession series such a smashing success.

The result is a hauntingly timeless depiction of power and its mechanisms, filtered down to an intimate tale of journalistic integrity.

Although it eventually loses staying power, Lynne Ramsay’s ferocious relationship drama Die, My Love quickly seeps beneath your skin, practically holding you hostage in its initial half.

Whether the love it features on screen is simple or complex, and whether it’s romantic, platonic or maternal, the film lands on tremendously moving moments that stir the soul by scrutinizing the dueling cruelty and tenderness found within its characters.

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

With Eddington, Ari Aster tries his hand at political satire and turns in his first bad movie.

By focusing on characters who can seldom put words to their experiences—whether the ravages of war and trauma, the jealousies of adolescence, or the desire to simply no longer exist—Sound of Falling marvelously tells a century’s worth of women’s stories by weaving together the psychological, the physical, and even the spiritual, resulting in a dramatic tour de force of mind, body, and soul.

Like Kana, it’s gloomy, purposeless and hard to love — but that only makes the film, and its lead, feel more pulsating alive.

What the characters can or cannot do in response, and the catharsis they’re prevented from attaining, are both key parts of their story, and of life in the West Bank at large — a reality Nabulsi conveys in stark, realistic hues, despite her first-feature growing pains.

As Sinners accelerates toward its climax, none of it feels wasted. Its action is explosive, and while Coogler’s vicious momentum can be visually disorienting at times, the adrenaline and the way he tethers each character to a distinctly spiritual question ensure that the movie’s strengths far outweigh its flaws.

Writer-director Elijah Bynum fills the screen with some impressive imagery, but it’s all in service of an ugliness that Magazine Dreams cops out on depicting.

It’s a strange-looking, odd-feeling film that gestures toward mystery and larger conspiracy, but it seldom pulls on these threads. Instead, it ends up an anodyne political drama that says little of note.

It can’t decide whether it wants to tell the real-life story of respected mob boss Frank Costello and his comrade-turned-scheming-enemy Vito Genovese, or if it wants to skewer the entire genre of films they helped inspire. However, with Robert De Niro in both leading roles, there’s always something interesting to watch, even if it’s buried by mountains of repetitive dialogue.

The best Disney live-action remake in a decade (not that that’s a particularly high bar to clear), Snow White adapts the broad strokes of the 1937 original, while fleshing out its themes of kindness. Rachel Zegler crafts a remarkable, melodic version of the classic princess who leads with her heart, even if her CGI co-stars are difficult on the eyes.

With its dramatic themes spread across two wildly different halves, it makes for a unique, propulsive thrill ride whose baffling existence is key to its enjoyment.

Death of a Unicorn features fun fantasy ideas, but suffers from repetitive execution.

In The Accountant 2, Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal return for a sentimental, politically charged, and surprisingly funny action sequel about brothers trying their best to connect.

It’s a junk-food thriller fried to near-perfection, balancing the tensions of kidnapping, conspiracy and murder with those of a nerve-wracking first date. It’s crisp and delicious.

Its story of three couples working at the same British agency turns all the right screws with impeccable timing, forcing its characters to examine the flaws in their relationships as its tale of state secrets gradually unravels.

Set during a single, legendary evening, Richard Linklater’s Broadway biopic unveils the life and anxieties of songwriter Lorenz Hart through rapid-fire conversations, led by an incredible Ethan Hawke.

A deeply depressing comedic experience (thanks at least in part to accidental political timing), Bong’s remix of Edward Ashton’s novel presents a Trump-like villain and no worthy heroes, resulting in a farcical sci-fi adventure whose symbolism makes up for its misshapen character drama.

By entwining reality with dramatization to such an inseparable degree, An Unfinished Film runs the emotional gamut, with a pulsing naturalism that few films about the recent pandemic (or any real disasters) have ever managed to achieve.

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

Benedict Cumberbatch gives it his all in The Thing with Feathers, but the horror movie lives up to neither his performance, nor its own heavy-handed metaphor of a bullying crow-creature representing grief.

The film’s barely-hidden secrets float just beneath the surface of a pool with no ripples — without meaningful texture to complicate or disguise its themes, or turn their unveiling into an emotionally-driven experience.

As a portrait of struggles in the seat of power, the film presses all the right emotional buttons.

The film isn’t just richly textured, but rigorous in its unveiling of both history and modernity.

While both its lampooning of U.S. militarism and its central character drama lack follow-through, the film contains bright comedic sparks in its keen observations about American media.

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.

Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature, embodied by two people with a complicated past and, most likely, no real future.

The worst thing about Joker: Folie à Deux is its unfulfilled potential. It begins with the promise of a novel approach to the Joker and Harley Quinn, placing them in a world where the opposite of cruelty is musical romance. Unfortunately, the DC sequel gets bogged down by a lengthy courtroom saga, which not only keeps the dazzling Lady Gaga away from the spotlight, but centers the movie entirely around its own predecessor, without doing or saying anything new.

It doesn't always work; it loses its way midway through, as though in desperate search of purpose. But when it finds that purpose, it makes a powerful emotional impression: Visually splendid, emotionally arresting, and features some of the finest filmmaking of Guadagnino's already-accomplished career.

The premise may be intriguing, but the repetitive approach and nearly identical lead characters renders the Ocean's duo without their signature chemistry and strands them in a distractingly underpopulated criminal underworld.

Tim Burton allows the cast of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to have fun, even if they're all off in separate movies that barely overlap. Its story is intentionally robbed of dramatic weight, but this makes way for the goofy, imaginative practical effects of Burton's early days, resulting in a small-scale legacy sequel that doesn't take itself too seriously (because it doesn’t need to).

A sense of tangible intellect looms just beneath its surface — not only Rob’s supposed genius, but the movie’s own identity as political cinema. But it never quite unearths this, even though “Rob Peace” establishes Ejiofor as a director with a knack for dramatic storytelling, in a way his previous film could not.

By the time its end credits roll, Vulcanizadora proves surprisingly moving in its depiction of mid-life crises and of two men who feel so betrayed by the world (and by their own actions) that they see no escape from their malaise. To turn that feeling into coherent drama is hard enough.

It has no soul or style, and creates no sense of chemistry between lead actors Omar Sy and Nathalie Emmanuel. They try their best to fill the movie's dead air with charm and anguish. Unfortunately, their best isn't enough.

At nearly four hours in length, it surpasses even its gargantuan predecessor “Youth (Spring),” but it also uses that film as a platform for deeper exploration.

Its martial arts spectacle is scattered across a sprawling refugees-and-triads saga that, while adequately laying foundation for the aforementioned fisticuffs, is seldom coherent or engaging on its own.

Despite the caliber of its cast, “The Fabulous Four” never shakes the feeling that its on-screen talent is being severely misused.

With scenes of natural disaster grounded in a human point of view, Lee Isaac Chung's spiritual sequel transcends its visual shortcomings, and proves to be a wildly fun and effective summer blockbuster worth watching on the biggest and loudest screen.

Visually lush and emotionally affecting, Janet Planet marks playwright Annie Baker’s bold transition to the big screen.

Less of a movie and more of a series of non sequiturs, Despicable Me 4 is a Minions showcase interrupted by Gru and his family.

An unhinged work that captures the escalating madness of untangling entire social webs through the lens of a single person or event, Babysitter charges through the ruins of mainstream cinema’s post-#MeToo moment.

It’s likely the best Manhattan mayhem film since Cloverfield, and it’s also a downright excellent Hollywood blockbuster, if an entirely unexpected one.

Mia Goth shines as usual, and Ti West's third slasher entry feels more visually polished than its predecessors, but it's also more dramatically sterile, thanks to a story that quickly falls apart and mounting references that add up to very little (if anything at all).

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.

Outside of watching modern Trump characteristics being absorbed from the worst influences around him, it rarely has the insight you’d hope for from a biopic centered on one of the defining political figures of the 21st century.

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.

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.

It’s a short film, but its portrayal of inspiration, self-evident in both its artistry and homage, is simply enormous.

Alexander Payne finds deft balance with The Holdovers, in which every glance and verbal exchange may as well be set up for something equally hilarious and touching.

Wildcat is too tame in its portrayal of suffering to let its Catholic undertones sing or take powerful cinematic form, resulting in a work where paradoxes are half-baked dilemmas that seem too conveniently solved, and life itself is something that happens far off-screen.

It’s only 100 minutes long, but upward of 99 of those minutes are likely to be spent in silent boredom, if not irritated disbelief at being subjected to such guileless, artless nonsense.

Kenneth Branagh’s third Poirot film is his best and strangest yet.

A passionate, well-intentioned deviation in style, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t quite hit the mark with its meditations on nature. However, in its best moments, it’s another entrancing dramatic piece from the Japanese maestro, whose strengths lie less in observing natural environments, and more in observing people’s nature.

Harmony Korine’s infrared assassin movie Aggro Dr1ft is a video-game-inspired experiment that’ll have you in a trance.

Poor Things is sex-comedy Frankenstein by way of Jules Verne, and one of the most imaginative comedies in years.

Part sci-fi satire, part futuristic dramedy, and almost entirely sterile, The Pod Generation seeks to make lofty comments about our world, and the politics of women’s and workers’ autonomy. However, it scarcely has anything to offer beyond the sleek technological designs it tries and fails to critique.

A full-tilt biopic unlike any before it, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is as stunning as it is terrifying.

Whatever lies in store for the future of Mission: Impossible, McQuarrie’s third outing as director proves that he still has an ingenious bag of tricks to pull from, having departed from the gloom and doom of Fallout to create an explosive yet self-reflexive action saga that leaves you wanting more.

To some extent, each shot is a little more neatly composed. But they’re all strung together with the barest visual and narrative connective tissue, resulting in a baffling film that feels strange not only for a modern blockbuster, but for a Transformers movie as well.

It’s one of Scorsese’s most brutal films, yet one of his most thoughtful and self-reflexive, as he crafts a subversive murder “mystery” that leaves no lingering questions save for one.

Despite its confused and overstuffed worldbuilding, “Elemental” has enough charming moments to get by, even if its meaning lies less in its ill-conceived immigrant saga, and more in the personal drama that lives a few layers beneath it.

It builds, in the process, to a stunning and genuinely moving crescendo.

The film’s eye-popping, blood-soaked vistas are a marvelous sight, as are a number of its era-specific details, and its handful of striking moments of queer samurai imagery. However, for the most part, Kitano’s tale of ambition and beheadings — many, many beheadings — loses nearly all momentum in its second half, before settling into a rote, repetitive rhythm.

About Dry Grasses is among the most brilliantly off-putting works to be featured at Cannes in recent years, with so rotten a core that every hint of virtue or even normalcy in the camera’s peripheral vision becomes a tragedy unto itself, simply by way of being ignored.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fails to recapture Spielberg’s magic. With uninspired action and conflicting themes and character motivations, it’s proof that some things should just be allowed to end.

Hypnotic, starring Ben Affleck, is a sci-fi thriller by Robert Rodriguez with few hints of sci-fi, thrills, or Robert Rodriguez.

On paper, the result is one of the more meaningful departures from convention that Disney has seen in recent years. In execution, though, it falls ever so slightly short, though not for lack of originality.

Where The Covenant most shines is in the riveting intensity of both its performances and its action.

Tyranny of tone and language aren’t the movie’s only problems. Its story is similarly half-baked, with allusions galore to overcoming demons and finding inner strength that are only ever lip-service, rather than being dramatically or even comedically expressed.

Whenever it dares to display hints of dreamlike abstraction, Carmen quickly returns to its rote formless-ness, as a heatless desert romance about a pair of non-characters on the run. Neither mysterious nor boisterous, it’s one of the most head-scratching musicals in years.

It’s the kind of movie worth recommending for its ambition alone, merely to witness the audacious result of anxious self-loathing writ large across the silver screen, without an ounce of restraint. That it’s also a remarkably well-crafted horror-comedy is a cherry on top.

Despite a stellar performance from Willem Dafoe as a contemplative art thief, Inside lacks the smarts and visual panache to make good use of its single location.

After five great seasons, Luther’s feature film adaptation proves to be a major let down, robbing the title character and his loyal fans of the little delights that made the series work.

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.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is measured and mature, which makes it less of a crowd-pleaser than the first two movies, but it allows Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek to bask in their incredible romantic chemistry.

Before Infinity Pool loses its way toward the end, it proves to be an enticing work of depravity that explores money and privilege through horrifying, violent excess.

It’s a film that fits perfectly within the confines of a romantic comedy even while it swaps out every familiar element and explores brand-new dimensions in the process.

80 for Brady is a surprisingly sweet and sentimental comedy led by four stellar performances — especially by Lily Tomlin, who’s never been more radiant.

Cate Blanchett’s forceful performance as a world-famous composer makes TÁR a richly detailed exposé of ego.

Its few hints of flair may not cement it as a genre classic, but they’re enough to make it momentarily fun.

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody is yet another music biopic that feels like a checklist of events rather than riveting drama.

A harrowing tale rooted in real events, Women Talking takes a stage-like approach to its debate between victimized women in a commune, but imbues it with cinematic flourishes. It’s also one of the rare ensemble movies where every single performance makes it worth watching.

Real-life tragic romance Spoiler Alert is kneecapped by the plainness of its storytelling, and only marginally saved by its performances.

The film depends too greatly on its sense of academia to unearth its story, and it struggles to fully engage with the explosive topic at hand for its first hour. However, in the final stretch of its 85-minute runtime, this approach proves foundational for chilling revelations and quiet, cinematically self-evident questions about the way we remember history.

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.

Strange World may fumble its environmentalist themes, but its story of fathers and sons is fairly touching.

Sam Mendes assembles a creative dream-team for Empire of Light, but ends up with one of the most soulless prestige pictures in years.

The frame moves slowly, if at all, but it always brims with physical and emotional energy; in “Joyland,” there’s always something in the ether, whether embodied by dazzling displays of light as characters move across stages and club floors, or by breathtaking silences as they begin to figure each other out, and figure out themselves.

It’s a rare misfire from director Sebastián Lelio, whose approach to his tale of a 19th century English nurse (Florence Pugh) investigating an Irish miracle is far too plain to be mysterious or stirring.

Bardo speaks the language of dreams, but it also speaks the language of explaining those dreams in the most boring and literal ways.

An otherwise plain film about an unlikely friendship between a returned soldier and a mechanic, Causeway is worth watching for Jennifer Lawrence’s best performance in years.

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.

The movie is such a rich, emotionally detailed text that not sticking the landing is only a minor mark against it.

While it’s hard not to be moved by footage of Robert Downey’s final days, the film is more informative than emotional. It contains hints of an intimate story, but mostly flattens a strange and exotic career into a series of light observations.

With a stunningly raw performance from Danielle Deadwyler, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till lives in the body of a traditional biopic — about Mamie Till-Mobley in the aftermath of her son Emmett’s lynching — but it turns real events into regretful, wistful memories, with a camera that refuses to look away from a mother’s pain.

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.

A dreamlike fictional biopic about Marilyn Monroe, Blonde features a stunning, volatile performance from Ana de Armas, whose daring vulnerability is matched by director Andrew Dominik’s equally daring formal approach, which keeps Marilyn in constant conversation with her iconic photographs, with the camera, and with the public at large.

From its anachronistic homages to its tensionless filmmaking, Pearl — Ti West’s prequel to X — doesn’t have nearly as much to say as its predecessor. Mia Goth gives it her all as a villainess who dreams of stardom, but the film can’t decide what to do with her.

Sylvester Stallone doesn’t seem thrilled to be playing a superhero in Samaritan, a hodgepodge of non-ideas borrowed from better movies.

Neither polished enough to be engaging drama, nor campy or exploitative enough to be effective horror, They/Them is a plodding, tensionless, and ultimately cowardly movie. Even if it had something worthwhile to say, it would have no idea how to say it.

James Morosini’s shockingly funny I Love My Dad builds on the actor-director’s real-life tale of being catfished by his distant father. The story is told from the point of view of his dad, a character played with hilarious desperation by comedian Patton Oswalt, resulting in a bizarre act of cinematic empathy that’s as moving as it is intense.

DC League of Super-Pets may have thoughtful filmmaking on its side, but what it doesn’t have is a voice cast that can lend life and personality to its characters.

Jordan Peele’s Nope is a bleak, hilarious sci-fi-horror romp, and one of the most entertaining summer movies in years.

Where The Crawdads Sing is only mildly interesting if you look up the accusations against its author.

An impression of much better action films, spy thriller The Gray Man (directed by Joe & Anthony Russo) wastes its all-star cast by giving them little to work with beyond quips. While it eventually becomes watchable, it spends most of its runtime being visually and emotionally indecipherable.

Clocking in at nearly two hours, Peter Strickland’s sound-and-food odyssey Flux Gourmet is only ever alluring when its made-up artform (“sonic catering”) is front and center during surreal vignettes. Otherwise, it falls back on rote observations and explanations about what compels its characters to create — a far less engaging experience than actually witnessing that creation.

Minions: The Rise of Gru is more Minion compilation than Gru prequel. It wastes its fun ideas and comedic setups in favor of disconnected slapstick gags, which may delight the diaper-wearing crowd, but will end up a chore to anyone forced to comprehend its inert dramatic scenes and ’70s pop culture references.

Despite its great performances, Next Exit is a mess of a movie that fails to take advantage of its own supernatural premise.

Corner Office is a just-okay office satire saved by Jon Hamm playing the anti-Jon Hamm.

Spiderhead is loaded with original sci-fi ideas, and while it may not stick the landing, it makes for an intriguing experience.

With little tension or humor to speak of, there’s nothing keeping Jurassic World: Dominion afloat, beyond the naïve hope that recognizing the familiar will be enough for some viewers. Maybe it will be, but it’s proof positive that we’re in one of the dullest, most artless periods of Hollywood blockbusters yet — “Top Gun: Maverick” notwithstanding — and we could be stuck here for some time.

More distancing than disgusting, Crimes of the Future strings together great body horror ideas but does little with them.

More sensory experience than straightforward recounting, the documentary by Brett Morgen (“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”) is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor.

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.

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

More Jackass is never a bad thing, so Jackass Forever follow-up Jackass 4.5 is fun despite being a scattered collection of interviews and deleted scenes. Like its predecessors, it’s bonus content for a Jackass movie delivered at feature length, which makes it catnip for long-time fans.

A low-energy comedy remade from a French farce, The Valet tries (and fails) to inject an absurd story of stardom and fake romance with added commentary and sentiment. Eugenio Derbez and Samara Weaving lead a more than capable cast, but they can’t overcome the film’s sluggish length and disconnected story.

Based on the scrappy Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead, Michel Hazanavicius’ Final Cut is a more polished version — for better and for worse — but it’s just as fun and self-reflexive, while also leaning into its remake status for a few added laughs.

Operation Mincemeat turns an absurd chapter in World War II history into a dour homework assignment.

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

Downton Abbey: A New Era starts out as a wistful return to the familiar before shedding its skin and letting the series’ nauseating ugliness come frothing to the surface. It goes from funny and charming to jaw-droppingly grim at the drop of a hat — a wild tonal whiplash that’s absolutely worth a watch. It’s a concentrated dose of Downton Abbey.

Men, from Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland, is a folk-horror movie about gendered trauma that quickly falls apart. It skillfully builds tension in its first half — with the help of brilliant lead performances — only to have that tension dissipate when its inventive metaphors become consumed by traditional staging and literal explanations.

Hulu’s Crush is a queer coming-of-age movie in which very little happens, and whose characters barely exist outside of their joking lines of dialogue. Its young actors are a delight, but even as a story of teenage crushes, it rarely captures what it feels like to be young and in love.

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

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a moody, slow-burn horror drama about loneliness online.

A deeply misguided act of worship, it starts out as a hilariously bizarre showreel of strange visual effects, before devolving into a distant, disconnected retelling of the highlights of Dion’s life.

It looks drab and feels like it was made by people who want to leave its magical premise behind, even though the series refuses to have anything resembling grown-up politics or perspectives.

It’s visual soup where nothing pops or stands out. Almost nothing anyone does or says feels rooted in recognizable character traits, and despite Marsden’s most sincere efforts, he finds himself once again unable to meet Sonic’s eye-line (a production kerfuffle that would be funny, were it not also another reminder of VFX crunch).

S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the “fiction” — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once.

The Lost City is a decent action-comedy that coasts on the presence of its stars.

While its gnarly payoffs eventually peter out, X is filled with fun and intense setups that harken back to classic slasher fare.

Richard Linklater’s animated Apollo fantasy is scattered, but sweet.

A story of magical transformation as a metaphor for personal and cultural change, Turning Red (from Bao director Domee Shi) is Pixar’s funniest and most imaginative film in years. It captures the wild energy of adolescence, uses pop stars as a timeless window into puberty, and tells a tale of friendship and family in the most delightfully kid-friendly way.

A work of shattering empathy, Drive My Car makes you stare long and hard at people’s withholding exteriors as it carefully chips away at them, revealing how they patiently bear their burdens, working without rest.