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Siddhant Adlakha
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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It Lives Inside (2023) |
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. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 20, 2023
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The Human Surge 3 (2023) |
Not only pushes the cinematic envelope, but allows it to push back in equal measure, incorporating the flaws of its digital technology into its narrative, creating an avant-garde vision of a queer utopia without borders. There’s nothing quite like it. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Sep 20, 2023
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Pain Hustlers (2023) |
A dramatically conflicted film that lacks energy and momentum, Pain Hustlers is a rote fictionalization of a real investigation into America’s opioid crisis. The characters it concocts feel like the products of too many rewrites. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 18, 2023
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Next Goal Wins (2023) |
It lacks the zany energy to be truly farcical, as well as the sincerity that might help its drama land. Instead, it ends up in an awkward middle ground, achieving little in the process. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 16, 2023
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Wildcat (2023) |
Despite Maya Hawke throwing herself headfirst into the part, her father’s attempts to capture O’Connor’s mind, body, and soul end up feeling incomplete. - indieWire
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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The Royal Hotel (2023) |
Despite Green's deft tonal control and masterful genre transformations, its victory rings hollow at a moment when artistic precision matters most. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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Jawan (2023) |
Atlee captures Khan as he ought to be, elevating him to a godlike figure in human form, turning each aspect of his performance right up to its limit, as far as visual language will allow without breaking the entire film. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Sep 14, 2023
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Poolman (2023) |
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.
- indieWire
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| Posted Sep 14, 2023
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The Holdovers (2023) |
Paul Giamatti has never been better, playing a caricatured grump with dynamic and vulnerable layers. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 12, 2023
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Dear Jassi (2023) |
Dear Jassi is a film in which Dhandwar simultaneously reins in his visual flourishes, while maintaining careful control of his meticulous formalism. The result is one of the most exhilarating and gut-wrenching movies of the year. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 12, 2023
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Dumb Money (2023) |
iI's bolstered by entertaining performances that, at least sometimes, make up for its numerous shortcomings elsewhere and ensure that it's never boring, even when it tends to be slight. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 12, 2023
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One Life (2023) |
After a while, it settles into a mechanical rhythm. However, even when the movie’s aesthetic and narrative connective tissue dissolves, a vital thread continues to connect its two timelines together: its lead performances. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 11, 2023
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A Haunting in Venice (2023) |
An off-kilter horror-comedy told with breakneck momentum... Continues the series’ strange evolution as a tribute to the iconic Belgian sleuth; Branagh cares more about Poirot than any living person, and it shows. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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The Boy and the Heron (2023) |
Gazes into the past through an imaginative and wondrous lens. Whether or not it’s truly Miyazaki’s final work, it’s the fondest possible farewell. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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El Conde (2023) |
It is a satirical premise with the potential to be incisive, but lacks the necessary bite. Larraín refuses to let his narrative ideas play out in ways that are amusing or cathartic. - Truthdig
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
Anatomy of a Fall examines the way information reveals character, and vice versa, during an unfolding murder trial. Triet lures us in with mementos and pieces of music, including perhaps the most amusing and absurd use of a 50 Cent song in recent memory. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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Origin (2023) |
DuVernay makes touch, and intimacy, subversive—not just as physical acts in and of themselves, but because of what they represent. Her focus is on the humanization of the dehumanized, and on bearing witness to the love they’re so often denied. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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Evil Does Not Exist (2023) |
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. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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The Killer (2023) |
It's incredibly frustrating to watch it meander around numerous bends, finding only the tiniest handful of exciting or bleakly funny scenes. - Polygon
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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Hit Man (2023) |
It's nothing short of a perfect crowd-pleaser, with another star-making turn from Powell, who's as ridiculous and silly in the movie as he is charming and debonair. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023) |
An entertaining, thoroughly engaging courtroom drama that bides its time. It’s a modern update that, at first, seems to strip away some of the play's core identity. But its conscience is far less easy to parse than that of preceding versions. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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Maestro (2023) |
Maestro is an enormous stylistic departure from Cooper's debut, the 2018 remake of A Star is Born. However, what they have in common (apart from depicting the love lives of artists) is that they’re both good films that come ever so close to being great. - Mashable
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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Aggro Dr1ft (2023) |
A trance-like hallucination about demons, assassins and death, shot entirely with thermal cameras, and taking most of its aesthetic cues from Grand Theft Auto. You’ll either switch it off or have a blast. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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Poor Things (2023) |
A delightfully unsettling work of absurdism inspired by “Frankenstein,” Poor Things condenses adolescence into a raucous 140-minute package, through an absurd tale of a re-animated woman on a quest of sexual, emotional, and intellectual self-discovery. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) |
It’s a short film, but its portrayal of inspiration, self-evident in both its artistry and homage, is simply enormous. - Polygon
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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City of Wind (2023) |
With the burden of expectations slowly cast off from his shoulders, [Ze] begins exploring what living life truly feels like, whether drinking and dancing, or simply hanging out with a fellow loner, and the result is cinematically invigorating. - indieWire
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| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Ferrari (2023) |
Ferrari may not work as a story through and through, but as a film about the lingering presence of death and one man's futile attempts to keep it at bay, it's occasionally enrapturing. - Mashable
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| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story (2023) |
Whatever dramatic potential the movie has — mostly courtesy of its performances — ends up being stamped out by filmmaking instincts best described as anti-cinematic. Racing has rarely looked this boring. - Mashable
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| Posted Aug 25, 2023
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Family Portrait (2023) |
A deeply unsettling directorial debut, “Family Portrait” foregrounds lingering discomfort against a comfortable backdrop, and enhances its unspoken anxieties by poking and prodding at its protagonist. - Truthdig
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| Posted Aug 19, 2023
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Oldboy (2003) |
There’s something viscerally uncomfortable about seeing what torment does to [Oh Dae-su] and what he becomes in the process. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Aug 16, 2023
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The Pod Generation (2023) |
Part sci-fi satire, part futuristic dramedy, and almost entirely sterile, it 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 sleek technological designs... - IGN Movies
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| Posted Aug 11, 2023
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Heart of Stone (2023) |
One of the most banal action movies from a Hollywood studio this year. - Mashable
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| Posted Aug 11, 2023
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Love in Taipei (2023) |
It’s hardly the kind of story that could support an entire series... However, as a self-contained outing, it provides enough moments of levity to feel warm and satisfying within familiar rom-com confines, against a backdrop Hollywood has seldom seen.
- JoySauce.com
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| Posted Aug 10, 2023
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Passages (2023) |
Its extrapolation of the painful, complicated chaos of romance from beneath the ordinary... is extraordinary.
- Mashable
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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Shortcomings (2023) |
As an adaptation, it’s an example of fidelity to a tee, and to a fault, bringing little by way of visual inventiveness of its own... A film so slavishly adherent to Tomine’s nearly 20-year-old story that it ends up with little to say about here and now. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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While We Watched (2022) |
“While We Watched” does more than depict media complicity in a country’s plummet into fascist violence. It re-creates the sensation of this descent, while painting a vivid portrait of someone with the nerve to question it. - Truthdig
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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The First Slam Dunk (2022) |
The First Slam Dunk allows its sporting sections to unfold with panache... turning, zipping and charging between bodies in ways that capture, at once, the enormousness and intimacy of a team sport in close contact. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Jul 28, 2023
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Oppenheimer (2023) |
A biopic in constant free fall, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s most abstract yet most exacting work, with themes of guilt writ-large through apocalyptic IMAX nightmares that grow both more enormous and more intimate as time ticks on. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Jul 19, 2023
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Barbie (2023) |
Gerwig’s artistic voice feels stifled here, and repackaged as an empowerment product to be sold on shelves, but with the necessary accessories—the truth and nuance of her previous work—sold separately. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Jul 19, 2023
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A Woman Escapes (2022) |
The film is as much a lament for old friends as it is for old mediums and technologies, laying them lovingly to rest, but it also embodies the steady absorption of the human psyche into the cinematic. - Truthdig
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| Posted Jul 15, 2023
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They Cloned Tyrone (2023) |
As an intellectual exercise, They Cloned Tyrone is at least mildly frustrating. But as a comedy with meaningful emotional underpinnings, it's a wild ride that seldom slows down, and demands to be experienced with a crowd. - Mashable
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| Posted Jul 15, 2023
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Run Rabbit Run (2023) |
Led by powerful performances, but wastes its “creepy kid” premise by playing its cards too close to the chest. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Jul 06, 2023
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023) |
We knew it would happen sooner or later, but this is the closest Cruise has come to making a movie where he fights the biblical God. - IGN Movies
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| Posted Jul 05, 2023
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Joy Ride (2023) |
[Joy Ride's] conceptual boldness often finds itself at odds with haphazard filmmaking. The movie’s messy assemblage of half-baked, interchangeable improv both stunts its humor and obscures the genuine tale of identity at its core. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Jul 05, 2023
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Smoking Tigers (2023) |
A tale that’s as gentle as it is harrowing, and one that debuting writer-director So Young Shelly Yo tells with quiet, poetic grace. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Jul 03, 2023
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Stan Lee (2023) |
A work of rote and gaudy self-promotion that fails to be effective or interesting even on its own terms. - Truthdig
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| Posted Jun 23, 2023
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Past Lives (2023) |
A radiant work of delicate artistry, unfolding at the nexus of personal and cultural experience, and unfurling the secret worlds that exist within each mind, body and soul, yielding a shattering tale of nostalgic self-reflection and the passage of time. - JoySauce.com
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| Posted Jun 09, 2023
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The Taste of Things (2023) |
A glowing vision not only of food as a love language, but of food as romance itself, containing memories of love, as Trần Anh Hùng conceives of a 19th century countryside kitchen as a space of infinite possibility. - Truthdig
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| Posted Jun 07, 2023
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May December (2023) |
A tale of melodramatic proportions that’s as deviously funny as it is intensely riveting, thanks to a trio of lead performances that all carefully brush up against total emotional breakdowns. - Truthdig
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| Posted Jun 07, 2023
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Fallen Leaves (2023) |
A deft handshake between irony and sincerity, a tonal nexus seldomly expressed with such clear-eyed emotional precision, though one that Kaurismäki has spent decades perfecting. - Truthdig
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| Posted Jun 07, 2023
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