Not every scene fully hits its marks, but Mogul Mowgli is never content to be a standard indie drama.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 11, 2021

The audience is thrown into Zed's world (or rather, worlds), and it's Ahmed's astounding performance that provides the through line. It's OK to be lost, because Zed is.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 9, 2021

This is an intimate story, sometimes uncomfortably so, but it's also an expansive one, about whether our societies allow people to live outside prescribed boxes and whether it accepts them when they do.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 5, 2021

A complex look at identity -- particularly as the son of immigrants... [Riz Ahmed] is at the top of his game.

| Sep 3, 2021

Acting may be a collaborative art form, but Mr. Ahmed also flies solo with considerable grace.

| Sep 3, 2021

A poignantly propulsive and furiously constructed story by director Bassam Tariq about inherited pain of the flesh and the soul.

| Sep 3, 2021

Wrapped around the transforming Riz Ahmed like a cocoon, Mogul Mowgli comes to vibrant, poignant life.

| Sep 3, 2021

While watching Mogul Mowgli, I was reminded of a rich tradition of diasporic South Asian films that experimented with form and conventions...

| Sep 3, 2021

Riz Ahmed's gripping performance in Sound of Metal was a bellwether. He's a consummate, sensitive actor.

| Sep 2, 2021

Tariq stitches domestic drama, satire and magical realism into a tissue of moods and meanings, held together by the shattering credibility of Ahmed's performance.

| Sep 2, 2021

Ahmed, who co-wrote the movie with director Bassam Tariq, struggles to provide emotional balance to his symbolically freighted role, but even he can't enhance such thin material.

| Sep 1, 2021

It's a movie about the way that existential distress afflicts the mind and the body alike.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 1, 2021

A drama that rings with truth, about a musician's ambition, a son's relationship with his father and how the immigrant experience shapes following generations.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 1, 2021

"Mogul Mowgli" is enrapturing, revelatory, and at all times, a nightmarish accounting of the bonds that make us, but can easily break us as well.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 31, 2021

"Mogul Mowgli"...crackles with a stylistic and visual energy...This is a film that announces a major new talent.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 31, 2021

[Riz Ahmed] plays a similar role in the Oscar-nominated "Sound of Metal" - but "Mogul Mowgli" is a wildly different beast, thanks to both its raw aesthetic approach, and its surreal, occasionally hilarious magnification of diaspora anxieties.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 31, 2021

The film's poignancy derives from its profound understanding of its main character's identity crisis.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 29, 2021

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed's performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 20, 2020

Ahmed is at his best in Zed's darkest hour, as he struggles to hold it together in a hospital cubicle. It's blistering stuff.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 5, 2020

There are some impressively grandiose set pieces, most notably a concert scene which sees Zed on stage, contorting and snarling, and delivering an MC set that, even allowing for Ahmed's career as an established rapper is striking and memorable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 2, 2020