Mon, October 26 2026

Sonakshi Sinha-Zaheer Iqbal film has the kind of plot which can either fly or collapse. I’m here to tell you that this film never even achieves lift-off.

There’s this woman in 2026 who finds a flip-top phone which connects her to a man in 2016. Disbelief — is this some kind of bad joke — turns into shock. How is this even possible? On either side of the decade stand the happily-married Kiran (Sonakshi Sinha) and the jobless stalker Samar (Zaheer Iqbal) who fall into a circuitous loop of breaking-and-joining, till there arrives a tipping point. This is the kind of plot which can either fly or collapse, depending on the skill of the writers. I’m here to tell you that this film, which borrows its title from a film whose stalker hero saga became a super-hit in the 90s, never even achieves lift-off.

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Sat, October 24 2026

A science-fiction thriller about obsessive love that struggles to transform an intriguing premise into a compelling cinematic experience.

Obsessive love, with its unsettling mix of desire, delusion, and possessiveness, has long provided fertile ground for cinema. The idea of a man consumed by an all-encompassing fixation on a woman, and the havoc such an obsession wreaks on her life, can make for a compelling psychological thriller. But obsession, however disturbing or intense, cannot by itself sustain a two-hour film. Without a credible storyline, a tightly constructed screenplay and characters who behave in ways that make psychological sense, even the most intriguing premise risks becoming an exercise in narrative excess. Karan Rawal’s Tu Hai Meri Kiran, now in cinemas, borrows its title from the song of the same name in Yash Chopra’s Darr (1993), the blockbuster that turned a deranged stalker’s obsessive pursuit of a woman into one of Hindi cinema’s most memorable explorations of pathological love. Rawal’s film attempts to give this familiar theme an inventive twist by introducing a science-fiction element: a mysterious telephone connection between two people living a decade apart. Unfortunately, what promises to be an absorbing psychological thriller never quite manages to get off the ground.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Kiran and Samar connect across a decade through a mysterious flip phone. Their unusual bond turns disturbing as Samar's affection becomes obsessive.

If Shah Rukh Khan’s Darr taught us anything, it’s that a man who refuses to take no for an answer is a BIG red flag. Tu Hai Meri Kiran takes that obsession, throws in a time-travelling phone and stretches it across a decade. Sounds interesting, right? It is, until the film gets so busy juggling time, love and obsession that it forgets to make sense. Starring Sonakshi Sinha and Zaheer Iqbal, the film connects two strangers from 2016 and 2026 through an old flip phone. Samar (Zaheer) and Kiran (Sonakshi) strike up an unusual connection, and you expect them to solve a mystery, change their destinies or perhaps prevent something terrible from happening. Instead, things take a detour when Samar decides that talking to Kiran isn’t enough. He wants her.. and he wants her at any cost.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Fashioned as a coming-of-age saga of a young woman and a nation’s belief in itself, the film falls short.

A girl who never fits in her skin. A cricketer who comes into his own, leading his country to a colossal win. This parallel play between two characters is channelled through Doosra’s docu-fiction format: the choice is interesting, but the results are mixed. Tara (Plabita Borthakur) lives in a Rajasthan village with her conservative father (Ankur Vikal) and obedient mother (Samidha Guru), and an older brother (Navin Ratwa). Like all traditional families, Tara is expected to fetch and carry for the men — get me water, orders her father, and she has to leave her books, even as the bada bhai lounges — with her mother toeing the patriarchal line, because that’s what women have done for centuries. The film begins in the 90s, with a snapshot ride of the decade — the declaration of liberalisation, the empty RBI coffers, the banking on our gold reserves, the rath-yatra and the rise of the ruling party, amongst other important markers — along with developments in the Indian cricket team, with its highs and lows.

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Sat, October 24 2026

भारत में क्रिकेट सिर्फ एक खेल नहीं है, बल्कि वो जोश, जुनून, और जज्बा है जो हर जाति-धर्म, ऊंच-नीच से परे, हर तबके के दिल में एक सा धड़कता है। फील्ड पर एक पल में हार को जीत में बदल देने वाला यह करामाती खेल तमाम युवाओं की आंखों में सपने बोता है। क्रिकेट के इसी असर की बानगी है फिल्म ‘दूसरा’। फिल्म में क्रिकेट के मैदान पर मिली एक ऐतिहासिक जीत को घुटन भरी जिंदगी जी रही एक लड़की की आजादी से दिलचस्प अंदाज में जोड़ा गया है, लेकिन लड़की की कहानी पर कहीं न कहीं क्रिकेट का करिश्मा भारी पड़ जाता है। प्‍लॉट साल 1991 से 2002 तक दरम्यान का है। यहां दो कहानियां एक साथ चलती हैं। एक तरफ प्रिंस ऑफ कोलकाता सौरव गांगुली भारतीय क्रिकेट की पुरानी छवि तोड़कर कामयाबी की नई इबारतें लिख रहे थे, तो दूसरी ओर राजस्थान के एक रूढ़िवादी परिवार की बगावती बच्ची तारा (प्लाबिता बोरठाकुर) सौरव दादा की हर जीत में अपनी कामयाबी देख रही थी।

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Fri, October 23 2026

The docudrama forcibly seeks parallels between the life of a small-town girl in the 1990s and the rise of Indian cricket under captain Sourav Ganguly

A small-town girl, Tara (Plabita Borthakur), grows up in a patriarchal and regressive household in 1990s Rajasthan. She wants to break free; she is different from the rest. Like millions of Indians, she finds inspiration in the clutter-breaking career of a cricketer. So we see Tara’s coming-of-age journey intercut with the story of Sourav Ganguly transforming a meek Indian cricket team into a combative force. Doosra, directed by Abhinay Deo, is a docudrama that plays out like a fragile film-school idea inflated into a feature-length production. At its best, it feels like one of those patriotic World Cup commercials with farfetched allegories and corny copywriting. The entire cricket-as-a-metaphor-for-life analogy is well past its sell-by date.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Writer-director Na Hong-jin, whose films combining horror and thrills have had both commercial and critical success, overplays his hand in Hope.

At 160 minutes, this film is double the length it should have been. At one and a half monsters, it had just the right number, before becoming greedy. Writer-director Na Hong-jin, whose films combining horror and thrills have had both commercial and critical success, overplays his hand here. So much so that even charismatic actor couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander have to make do with crumbs, hidden under make-up and prosthetics. Hope begins very promisingly, as Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min), police chief of the town on which the film is named, is called by his cousin Sung ki (Zo In-sung) to investigate the sudden appearance of a dead and badly mutilated bull in the middle of a lane, amidst fields. Sung Ki has gathered his “boys”, that is other men with a lot of time and dubiously procured guns on their hands like him, anticipating that what they are looking at is a monster that will need hunting.

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Fri, October 23 2026

Starring Hoyeon and Hwang Jung-Min, Na’s latest creature flick arrives a decade after The Wailing, a mix of preposterous delights

A decade after South Korean auteur Na Hong-jin took the world by storm with horror hit The Wailing, he returns with a demented monster movie. Hope premiered in Cannes Competition earlier this year, an audacious, eyebrow-raising outlier choice. Expectations are naturally immense. At its best, Hope is a thrilling demonstration of dynamite action filmmaking. But it’s also scraggly, unwieldy and prone to flat characterisation. Your experience will vary dramatically on certain expectations. As a big-scale apocalyptic outing, Hope is ambitious, frustrating, misjudged and yet genuinely surprising. That it can flit between so many things is in itself a total departure from the dead-eyed generic drudgery that hogs popular Hollywood blockbusters.

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Mon, October 26 2026

This may be as good as it gets for Clayface, before it is simply yet more putty to be moulded and fit into DC’s world.

In its rebooted form, the DC Universe has been doing some interesting things – tinkering with the format of Superman to give it a different tone, giving a kickass Supergirl who holds her own, and now making the first standalone feature film on a minor character from the Batman comics, Clayface. It’s a surprisingly winsome outing, with the origin story of the antihero staying close to the dingy, shabby, forgotten parts of Gotham City, and from all that, creating a character you are rooting for till the end. The script was originally written by Mike Flanagan – who is having a moment with his Carrie TV series – with Hossein Amini (Drive) stepping in later. If their decision to keep it simple, with no grand superhero-like flourishes, serves the film well, the credit also goes to Tom Rhys Harries in the titular role of Matt Hagen/Clayface, whose sharp, rugged face is handsomely craggly and feels disarmingly innocent. He switches modes as required of his character, but an essential earnestness remains about him of a boy who has risen from the worst part of town to Oscar’s glitzy heights.

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Fri, October 23 2026

Clayface works best as a tragic character study, a tale of human suffering wrapped in visceral body horror. It stands out as one of DC’s most promising cinematic outings since Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019).

Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a promising young actor on the brink of stardom, sees his world shatter when a ruthless mob boss brutally disfigures his face. Unable to accept his world crumbling beneath his feet, Hagen vows to reclaim everything he has lost, warning his tormentors: “I will be back, and I am coming for everything.” For a movie star whose face is his identity and currency, losing it is nothing short of a living nightmare. Matt begs Dr. Corr (Naomi Ackie) to restore his features, urging her to resort to any unapproved medical means necessary. The procedure gives him back his face, but at a terrifying cost: an uncontrollable shape-shifting ability that he initially struggles to control. His body stretches, melts, bubbles, and contorts, allowing him to assume any shape, size, or identity he desires or even one that crosses his mind. The transformation wreaks havoc on his psyche and unleashes chaos upon his adversaries.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Ayushmann Khurrana sinks into the skin of a man who is the very antithesis of a big-screen secret agent.

A well-trained Pakistani spy sent on a mission to destabilise India post-Operation Sindoor suffers a grievous head injury. He loses his memory. His bosses in Rawalpindi go into a tizzy, his accomplices in India are caught in a bind and the film about an amnesiac secret agent’s erratic exploits flies off on a merry but uneven tangent. What’s not to like in this harmless cockeyed concoction, one might ask. A lot because the arrow that Udta Teer refers has a rather blunt head that knows not where it is headed? There is a great deal in Udta Teer that keeps spiralling out of control as the film makes its way through an exercise that harks back in spirit, but certainly not in substance, to the Hollywood spy parodies that Mel Brooks and Mike Myers powered many decades ago with considerable commercial success.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Hilarious Dhurandhar Uno-reverse loses steam as it toes the line to become another pat-on-the-back nationalist flick

Excess of anything will only lead to a spoof of it. After Dhurandhar opened a Pandora’s box of sharp spies infiltrating and extracting revenge from the “padosi mulk”, the misfits too followed suit. In the same vein of Happy Patel: Khatarnaak Jasoos and the recent Vibe, we get another spy-comedy Udta Teer, a Uno-reverse of Dhurandhar. It’s an amusing concept: a proficient Pakistani spy living as a mole in an Indian agency loses his memory after an accident and starts thinking of himself as a patriotic Indian agent. What follows is a funny, absurd situation filled with confusions, crosses and double-crosses. It’s hilarious till it isn’t. Sadly, novelty has a short shelf life.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Udta Teer, starring Ayushmann Khurrana and Sara Ali Khan, attempts to turn Indo-Pakistani espionage into a farcical comedy.

The enduring conflicts between India and Pakistan have spawned countless narratives, alternately celebrated, romanticised and vilified on either side of the border, depending on the prevailing political climate. These stories are often fuelled by hostility and nationalist fervour, yet paradoxically accommodate moments of affection, shared sentiment and enduring human connection. For unimaginative screenwriters, few subjects offer such an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of dramatic possibilities as the fraught relationship between these neighbouring nations. Divided by history, politics and ideology, India and Pakistan nevertheless remain bound by a shared cultural inheritance, their destinies intertwined in ways that transcend the animosities separating them.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Although the film is backed by competent performances, there is a certain plasticity to Pehla Pyaar Doosri Baar

Both OTT and social media discourse were years away when Pyaar Ka Punchnama came out in 2011. Before people could understand the difference between feminine and feminism, the “Every guy’s pain” monologue had gone “viral” on messaging apps. Newbie Kartik Aaryan got overnight popularity but everybody later wanted to know who that “Liquid” (played by Divyenndu) guy was. Pyaar Ka Punchnama popularised the Delhi corporate slave lingo and gave people characters they could relate their frustrations with. Everybody in the film spoke in a rant-y way, concreting people’s (read guys) desires and disdains. It was a relatable buddy comedy before we caught on its overwhelmingly misogynistic lens.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Fri, October 23 2026

The dated romcom revolves around three North Indian flatmates who set out to woo their high-school crushes at a glossy reunion

It’s tempting to blindly like any Hindi film that dares to not be a violent actioner, a superstar-driven mass entertainer, a propaganda historical, a political thriller, a biopic or a mythological drama. Romcoms are suddenly as rare and desirable as spines; love stories — even the bad ones — are novel again. But romcoms like Pehla Pyaar Doosri Baar remind you why they went extinct. The newcomers-who-are-not-ready-but-star-in-a-designer-North-Indian-comedy template is a throwback to the early 2010s, when Luv Ranjan’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama set the ball rolling and triggered a wave of genre fatigue. Ranjan co-writes and produces here, which partly explains why the movie behaves like an ex who refuses to move on.

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Mon, October 26 2026

The restless and uncertain Netflix thriller stars Manoj Bajpayee as a crooked Delhi cop who wades through a mysterious case over the course of one night

Gajab Raat is a film about one eventful night in New Delhi, the capital of what many say is the world’s biggest democracy. A corrupt cop, SI Ajay Nirvit (Manoj Bajpayee), is wondering how to fill his coffers when a high-profile case falls into his lap: a young and grievously injured woman (Aditi Sandhya Sharma) flings herself out of a moving car in front of Connaught Place’s PVR Plaza. Before Nirvit even reaches the spot, images shot by late-night moviegoers go viral in a very Bollywood-depicting-social-media way (flying tweets filling the screen). By the time the ambulance arrives, he is dealing with a fearsome social activist (Shraddha Das); he has gotten calls from higher-ups; no politician wants “women’s safety” to be an issue again. By the time the victim enters surgery in a curiously empty hospital, the important people who want her dead crash the party: a shady CBI officer (Akshay Oberoi) sweet-talks Nirvit, who’s still desperate to leverage his sudden spurt of power. Another CBI officer offsets the previous one. A handover of the case is discussed for ulterior motives. Nirvit becomes a shady broker of sorts, but he keeps wondering: Why is this comatose girl ruffling so many feathers?

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Sat, October 24 2026

Manoj Bajpayee has the fluctuating mood graph of his character down path whether hustling away his quick-witted energy in good faith or greed. It's a tricky terrain but few understand balance like this man.

Conscience awakens, corruption collapses and justice is served over the course of a night in Ritesh Shah’s Gajab Raat. Co-written by him and Producer Neeraj Pandey, Shah’s directorial debut captures flawed characters and grim realities through social structures and sardonic eyes leaving Manoj Bajpayee to hold the fort. There’s no cinematic style or technical wizardry to be found in Shah’s storytelling. Dialogues are his strong suit and he uses peppery exchanges to fire up drama on OTT screen. Inspired by the Neeraj Pandey school of corridor strolls, the screenplay engages in prolonged scenes of walking and talking on phone and in person at hotels and hospitals.

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Sat, October 24 2026

With an electric ensemble and a gripping plot, director Ritesh Shah turns a routine police investigation into a breathless arena of institutional warfare

A corrupt yet efficient cop is a lethal paradox but a rare breed in Hindi cinema. Most films give us clean heroes or cartoonish villains in uniform, even though our police stations have plenty of specimens like Ajay Nivrit (Manoj Bajpayee). Few Indian filmmakers understand the inner workings of our law enforcement agencies as well as Neeraj Pandey. He operates in a fertile space where raw reality meets gripping fiction. In Gajab Raat, the writer-producer collaborates with director Ritesh Shah to look beyond cinematic stereotypes and show the power of an investigating officer if he decides to follow procedure. Originally titled Ghooskhor Pandat, which sparked controversy, the makers shifted the title to the generic Gajab Raat, pulling the character out of a specific identity to address broader institutional corruption. A chameleon, Ajay, regardless of surname, is a quintessential Delhi cop who could have spent his formative years in Darbhanga, Kochi, or Pathankot. He doesn’t compromise on law; he negotiates to mould it according to his interests. Together with his immediate boss, SHO Rana (Rajiv Gupta), he manipulates the system to nurture his farmhouse dreams. One night, even before the dust settles after a raid in a cheap hotel, the dynamic moves from a lucrative extortion plan to a dark, high-stakes national security crisis.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Kaushal Oza’s film stars Hridansh Parekh, Gulshan Devaiah and Rasika Dugal.

Thomas Miranda (Hridansh Parekh) has two pressing concerns: where do babies come from, and how can he get a baby brother? When he was six, he wanted a zoo; now at seven, he is convinced that he needs a sibling. His attempt to find answers lead him to a priest, his kindly neighbour Mrs Braganza (Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal) and conversations with his two friends: Nigel, who has an insatiable appetite, and Murthy, a science enthusiast. Thomas’s parents Desmond (Gulshan Devaiah) and Jessie (Rasika Dugal) run a bakery, but business is slow. Jessie teaches piano, but dwindling interest among children in learning music threatens her livelihood. Desmond and Jessie’s disagreements are shaped by everyday pressures, though Thomas, naturally, sees things in much simpler terms.

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Sat, October 24 2026

A gentle slice-of-life tale about growing up and holding on to wonder.

When he witnesses his parents fighting over the everyday struggles of middle-class life—expenses, responsibilities and survival, seven-year-old Thomas Miranda (Hridansh Parekh) realises that life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Yet, in his innocent logic, he believes that a little brother could bring the family closer and make them happier. But with their finances crumbling, his parents – piano teacher Jesse (Rasika Dugal) and baker Desmond (Gulshan Devaiah) are too preoccupied with keeping their household afloat to think about expanding their family or rekindling their romance. At the heart of director Kaushal Oza’s tender tale is a child who wants to believe in miracles but must eventually confront reality. Set in the sleepy neighbourhood of Fontainhas in 1990s Goa, the film unfolds like a gentle childhood lullaby, evoking a time when life moved at a slower pace and childhood was unburdened by the noise of the world.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Little Thomas follows a seven-year-old trying to reunite his feuding parents and gain a baby brother. Its charming performances and 1990s Goa setting cannot fully overcome an underdeveloped screenplay.

There is a scene in Little Thomas where Gulshan Devaiah’s character tries to place a figurine of a couple on top of a multi-tiered cake. The cake comes crashing down. He eventually realises that the figurine was too heavy. And there, in a nutshell, lies the problem with Kaushal Oza’s film. The story topples under the weight of its own cuteness, forgetting that an adorable child can only take you so far. You need a good story and a tight screenplay to keep the audience invested, too.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Director Kirtan Nadagouda's 418, backed by KGF and Salaar fame Prashanth Neel, is a horror thriller with a message about mental health. With a predictable storyline, the film relies heavily on jump scares and sound design to unsettle the audience.

Indian cinema has often diluted the horror genre by blending it with comedy, making genuinely frightening films a rarity. And even among those that attempt pure horror, finding one that delivers consistent scares is no easy task. 418, backed by KGF and Salaar filmmaker Prashanth Neel, made headlines after the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) reportedly found it too scary. After several delays, the film has finally arrived in theatres. Does it live up to the hype? Let’s find out.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Four cash-strapped friends turn to car theft as Inspector Sumati Bhalerao closes in. Their chase loses momentum amid an overextended screenplay and crowded subplots.

Four friends, empty pockets and a talent for turning every good day into a disaster. Chaar Yaar looks like a cool, young crime caper about hustling your way to the top. There are stolen cars, dangerous gangsters, messy friendships and a cop on their trail. The boys have the jugaad, the attitude and the ambition. They believe their story is an RGV-style drama, but what they don’t have is a screenplay that knows when to stop.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Fri, October 23 2026

The busy 8-episode series revolves around four talkative friends and their template-riddled descent into the Mumbai underworld

Somewhere between passive-viewing content and algorithmic entertainment, there is a field. Shows like Chaar Yaar (“Four Friends”) will meet you there. It is not bad. It is not good. It is arguably something worse: middling and overlong. The 8-episode crime drama takes a stacked cast full of watchable performers and flattens them into a distracted underworld tale that keeps chasing its own tail. Watching the series is strange because most scenes look fine at an individual level: the acting, writing, staging, banter. But they don’t make sense as an aggregative experience, pulling us in multiple directions like a shopkeeper trying to exhaust his stock on a lazy customer.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Jayasurya and Vinayakan's fantasy entertainer, Titans, has its moments of humour and impressive technical craft, but an undercooked screenplay keeps it from realising its potential

Jayasurya playing a loser is fun. We have seen him ace that part in the Aadu franchise. Antony Yakuza in Titans is cut from almost the same cloth as Shaji Pappan, just more cutthroat. Antony is a small-time thug in Peter’s (Baby Jean) gang, boasting that he was once the right-hand man of Peter’s late father. But now Antony has become a liability to the gang, constantly sneered at and mocked, and rightly so. In his introduction scene, as two gangs are caught in a Mexican standoff, Antony is seen in the last row with a tiny pistol, which he ends up misfiring. The sneering continues.

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Fri, October 23 2026

One of the film’s few positives is that some of the fantasy elements are seamlessly weaved into the story of a man aspiring to be a big-time gangster, that they almost seem believable

Quite a few unusual writing choices can be seen in Prince Joy’s Titans, especially with how it treats its protagonist Antony Yakuza (Jayasurya), a small-time outlaw. Although the hangover of Jayasurya’s Shaji Pappan character from Aadu is very much visible in Antony, he is perhaps one of the most unheroic lead characters in a movie of this kind. In every situation, he is expected to either fail or do the wrong thing and he keeps up with that expectation much of the time. The other interesting approach is in how writer James Sebastian portrays the done-to-death fight between good and evil, going behind the mechanics of how both sides operate, with Lucifer getting a glitzy corporate office and the other side in a location that is a stark contrast. Much of this might have looked great at a conceptual level, but it does not translate that well onto the screen.

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Fri, October 23 2026

कर पाओगी…? हर उस लड़की से, जिसने कुछ नया, कुछ अनोखा, कुछ बड़ा करने का सोचा तो उसके परिवार का, समाज का, दुनिया का, हमारा, आपका पहला सवाल यही तो होता है-कर पाओगी…? हेतल दवे से भी यही पूछा गया था। हेतल दवे को तो जानते हैं न आप? नहीं…! अच्छा, सुमो कुश्ती तो आपको पता ही होगी। वही जापानी कुश्ती जिसमें बहुत मोटे-मोटे पहलवान आपस में भिड़ते हैं। भारत में तो यह लोकप्रिय ही नहीं है। लेकिन यह जान कर आप हैरान हो सकते हैं कि भारत की पहली और इकलौती महिला सुमो प्लेयर का नाम है हेतल दवे जिन्होंने बरसों पहले इस खेल में भारत का नाम चमकाया था। यह फिल्म ‘सुमो दीदी’ (Sumo Didi) उन्हीं हेतल दवे की कहानी दिखाती है। हेतल को उसके मोटापे के चलते बहुत कुछ सहना, सुनना पड़ता है। खुद उसके अपने परिवार के लोग भी उसे जताते-सुनाते रहते हैं। हेतल जूडो खेलती है। एक दिन जापान से आए एक नामी सुमो खिलाड़ी से मिलने के बाद वह भी सुमो प्लेयर बनने का ठान लेती है। पिता उसके साथ हैं लेकिन मां नहीं। आखिर मां कहती हैं-एक साल ले लो, कामयाब नहीं हुईं तो उसके बाद शादी। हेतल जुट जाती है, लड़ती है, भिड़ती है, पहले दूसरों से, फिर खुद से और आखिर…!

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Fri, October 23 2026

The biopic of India’s first female sumo wrestler Hetal Dave features a solid lead performance that elevates a predictable template.

No matter how safe and formulaic many biopics choose to be, sometimes it’s the subject alone that does the heavy-lifting. This is quite literal in Sumo Didi, a Hindi film inspired by the life of Hetal Dave, India’s first female professional sumo wrestler. The underdog checklist already exists: an unmarried girl mocked for her weight; a middle-class background; a notoriously patriarchal society; a supportive father; an apathetic federation; a passion as rare and mismatched as a bobsleigh racing team from Jamaica in Cool Runnings; and a sport that weaponises the body-shaming stigmas that infect most cultures. When life itself offers a winning theme — with all social and narrative bases covered — then all ‘fiction’ has to do is show up. The trick is to trust reality, not accessorise it.

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