Sat, September 5 2026

The Gentlemen season 2 finds Guy Ritchie leaning harder into his enduring theme: men who mistake owning something with being someone. This season, Eddie (Theo James) leans into this even harder than ever. Among other things, he spends this run muscling into Italian mafia territory, even as he is chasing a seat in the House of Lords. And at the same time, the Netflix series, which is a spinoff of 2019’s action comedy movie of the same name, drops the zany energy that made season 1 so much fun. It’s a riskier season than the first. It is also colder and darker and, for my money, it is a better one, even when its reach outpaces its grip.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Theo James is back as the Duke of Halstead in Guy Ritchie's entertaining crime thriller as Edward Horniman tries to reclaim his legacy.

Created by Guy Ritchie, Netflix’s crime drama The Gentlemen is back for a darker and more serious second season. Eddie Horniman (Theo James) and Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) have even more ambitious plans for their illegal drug business that face several obstacles. With several returning and new characters popping up in the gangster thriller, the Netflix series takes an unexpected twist at the halfway mark of Season 2, leaving audiences gasping with every twist and betrayal depicted in eight episodes. Written by Ritchie and Matthew Read, The Gentlemen Season 2 is more about purpose as Eddie and Susie try to break out from the expectations set upon them by others. Bold and ambitious, the second season does not repeat any formulas of previous Ritchie productions.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Co-directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the period comedy plays off Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh's odd couple energy.

The filmmakers behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, bring a Cold War comedy that is far more entertaining than it looks on paper. Ryan Reynolds plays an American pilot who crash lands in enemy territory, aka the former USSR, during a covert mission, while Kenneth Branagh plays his new Russian friend, a former KGB agent, who is his only way out. With great Top Gun (1986) references and gasp-inducing action sequences, the streaming entertainer ideally deserved a big-screen outing.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

A downed American pilot and a former KGB officer discover that they have been told lies about each other’s countries all their lives, in this film set in the height of the US-Soviet Cold War years.

Ryan Reynolds repurposes his Deadpool routine in Mayday, the new Apple TV action-comedy film, in which he plays a downed American pilot during the height of the Cold War. With the blockbuster Deadpool and Wolverine (2024) having proven that his fast-talking, quip-based acting style works only in short doses and when it’s offset by an on-screen foil, Reynolds is made to team up in Mayday with Kenneth Branagh, who plays a stoic former agent of the KGB (Soviet intelligence and internal security agency), having a crisis of conscience. Together, they make a bid for freedom in a stylishly made, briskly paced and surprisingly sensitive entertainer that has no business being this good.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Before the release of Mirzapur: The Movie, a number of questions popped up in my mind. The most important among them being: how does one view a popular, pulsating world and its indelible, iconic characters through a new lens, having journeyed with them over three blockbuster seasons? Mirzapur: The Movie — based, of course, on the streaming winner which broke out as soon as it dropped its Season 1 in November 2018 and has since become a pop-culture phenomenon — ushers you in with a feel which is familiar yet fresh, taking us into the origins of this gritty, violent world and the beginnings of its memorable players. This is a film that has been created purely in the service of its fans. For a large part, it fulfils that promise, but one also feels that the bite and bhaukaal has gone missing in this tempered-down big-screen outing.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Mirzapur: The Movie brings back nostalgia and high-stakes drama to the big screen. It's a film that you will enjoy despite knowing its story, primarily because of its fabulous cast and a gripping screenplay.

When Mirzapur: The Movie was announced, I have to admit I was sceptical. The film, an extension of the hugely popular web series Mirzapur, was supposed to take audiences back in time, somewhere in the middle of the first season. Loyal audiences of the series have, over the years, already progressed a lot into the Mirzapur universe. Some key characters are now long dead in the series, and the trajectories of Munna, Guddu, Golu, and Kaleen Bhaiyaa have also taken very different turns. Was it necessary to make a movie and go back to the origin story again, I wondered. Happy to report that my doubts and scepticism were pleasantly put to rest as I watched Mirzapur the movie. The film takes you back in time, somewhere in the middle of the first season and introduces new characters and adds a fresh twist to the story. The result is a deeply engaging story of power and greed, but also of validation and fighting for love.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

A world, audiences already love, gets the scale of a theatrical film without losing what made the series work in the first place.

Once you watch Mirzapur The Movie on the big screen, you realise this was always meant to be a theatrical experience. We have enjoyed Mirzapur on OTT, but watching these characters and this world unfold on a big screen gives the story a completely different impact. It transports you right back into their world. It also makes you realise that writing is where the real magic lies. Puneet Krishna’s writing and Gurmeet Singh’s direction are once again a winning combination. They take the same characters, put them in familiar situations and yet manage to make this feel like another chapter in their lives. The film fits somewhere in the timeline of what we have already seen in the series and works almost like another, very big episode of Mirzapur.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Venu Gopal Reddy’s Telugu film works better as a buddy comedy than a love story, and could have benefited from sharper writing

In the final portions of Romanchakam, written and directed by Venu Gopal Reddy, the comedy of errors is in full swing. The narrative wants us to root for the lead pair, Anvesh (Sumanth Prabhas) and Mythili (Ananthika Sanilkumar). However, what lands better is the commotion created by Anvesh’s friends as they try to salvage the situation. Despite being consistently silly and overly talkative, their bond feels more convincing than the romance at the centre of the story. For a love story to work, the female protagonist needs to be well written. Perhaps in an attempt to keep the narrative breezy and humorous, the writing holds back from establishing who Mythili is. We know little about her background, aspirations or what stands in the way of her getting what she wants. A passing scene hints at differences between her and her parents, but the idea is not explored further. There are also sporadic references to suicide, but these remain vague and are never treated with much sincerity. At one point, an incident involving a suicide attempt is even played for humour. This imbalance between comedy and emotional depth makes it difficult to fully invest in the love story.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Directed by Devashish Makhija and written and produced by Kanika Dhillon, Gandhari — the story of a traumatised mother looking for her kidnapped daughter — struggles with elementary mechanics of storytelling.

The opening 10 minutes of Devashish Makhija’s Gandhari is perhaps the clearest indication of the film’s intentions — and its intellect. Written and produced by Kanika Dhillon, it opens with the kidnapping of a five-year-old travelling with her parents on a train. When her mother, Bani (Taapsee Pannu), realises her daughter is missing, she tears through a crowded platform after the kidnapper, only to be knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. And because Gandhari apparently has no interest in leaving suffering at merely one notch, we soon learn that the injury has also temporarily robbed Bani of her eyesight. From there, the film’s idea of character development appears to be little more than a contest in accumulated misery. A traumatised and blind mother, leaning on a walking stick and waiting outside a police station, hoping they will help find her daughter: it is an image so nakedly engineered to elicit pity and helplessness that it barely registers as characterisation. In the next scene, the film piles on another layer of dread: as the parents grow increasingly desperate, a passerby tells them that if kidnapped children are not found within 48 hours, they are unlikely to be found at all. This is, in fact, Gandhari’s preferred mode of persuasion: pile misfortune onto a character, arrange it into a sufficiently potent image, and assume the audience will fall in line.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Taapsee Pannu-starrer is about a child sex trafficking ring (strike one for unoriginality), run by devilish characters (strike two for ditto), upended by, who else but the ultimate saviour, the mother.

The moment you see a happy family in a train compartment, with a little girl and her big doll, you know something wicked this way comes. The girl vanishes, and her increasingly distraught parents, Bani (Taapsee Pannu) and Gokul (Ishwak Singh) find no help from the local police in Joypurra (fictional, of course), somewhere in Bengal. This is the kind of small town we see in streaming shows, as constructed as their plots, sequence after sequence filled with loud background music trying to stand in for tension because nothing on screen cuts it, either because we’ve been inundated with similar stuff, or we simply can’t buy any of it. Or both.

Continue reading …

Fri, September 4 2026

Wed, September 2 2026

Unrest begins at home in Ambiecka Pandit's small-town crime film that doubles as a bleak social drama

A young woman is visiting her in-laws for the first time. She’s eager to impress them. She cooks, cleans, runs the house. She’s hurt by their jibes but tries not to show it. Her husband is mild-mannered but thin-skinned; she has to apologise for pulling his leg. Their lovemaking is awkward. She puts her interests on hold, but it isn’t enough. Slowly, she comes to a boil. She’s played by Nimisha Sajayan. The film is The Great Indian Kitchen. Or is it Babita Singh Reporting? It’s a little strange to watch Sajayan, one of the best actors in India today, undergo similar trials and humiliations to ones she endured five years ago, in her most celebrated role. Ambiecka Pandit’s Hindi film is a world removed from Jeo Baby’s Malayalam drama. But Sajayan’s Babita is a close cousin to her unnamed wife in that film, a silent sufferer until all the silence is wrung out of her.

Continue reading …

Mon, August 31 2026

Director Ambiecka Pandit mounts a small-town murder mystery which functions far more effectively as a breakdown of hypocrisy than as an unconventional procedural.

At a time when the diary of police procedurals is cluttered with gravity-defying cops and preachy social commentaries masquerading as investigative dramas, Babita Singh reports with a quiet yet telling subversion. The biting social critique tells us how our society tolerates a woman’s professional ambition only on the condition of absolute domestic continuity. Her career must remain invisible to the men of the house; it cannot cost them their hot meals or their sense of absolute supremacy. It captures how this cycle is policed not just by men, but by the matriarchs of the family, the mothers and sisters-in-law. Of course, there is a murder investigation as well, but it works as a narrative camouflage. The mystery lies in decoding the pervasive patriarchy.

Continue reading …

Mon, August 31 2026

Mon, August 31 2026

Nayanthara and Kavin are great when it’s all fun and games in director Vishnu Edavan's 'Hi,' but they’re not able to navigate the film through the more serious portions

There’s a forgotten brand of humour that works really well for the most part in Vishnu Edavan’s Hi. Reminding one of the loud, but likeable comedies from the ’90s made by directors like Ezhil and Sundar C, the intentional old-schoolness of Hi has a way of surprising you with its silliness. It doesn’t even attempt to play it safe or try the logical approach. If there’s a joke to be milked, the film will do anything, even if means hitting someone on the head with a pole. It’s desperate and immatur, but oftentimes also feels oddly sincere.

Continue reading …

Mon, August 31 2026

The journey of Hi is made even more beautiful by the easy charm exuded by Nayanthara and Kavin, who ensure the romance doesn’t overshadow the comedy, and the comedy doesn’t overpower the romance

Desire. Almost every relationship is based on a desire of some sort. It can be a desire for companionship, touch, love, family, respect, and of course, lust. But at the base of it all is a desire to feel desired. Wanting someone to want you for who you are is a high that many go through life without ever feeling. It is in pursuit of this uns that people give their all. Vishnu Edavan’s Hi is about one such guy, Mayilsamy (A wonderfully understated Kavin), who has everything but love of the romantic kind. He meets a down-in-the-dumps woman, Devayani (A superb Nayanthara), who has nothing but the belief that love is destined for the more fortunate ones. No prizes for guessing where the movie goes from here, and the best part? Vishnu isn’t interested in making you play the guessing game, and just wants you to sit back and enjoy a simple, cheery romcom that hits you right at the feels.

Continue reading …

Sun, August 30 2026

Director Vishnu Edavan's Hi, starring Nayanthara and Kavin, is a harmless romantic comedy that has some delightful stretches. The film aims for low-stakes and achieves them too.

Rom-coms have a timeless charm. They make you smile, tug at your heartstrings and, at their best, leave you walking out of the theatre with a little more hope than you walked in with. But very few films manage to get that emotional balance right these days. Last week, the Malayalam film Bethlehem Kudumba Unit did it effortlessly. This week, Tamil film Hi attempts to recreate that magic with a story rooted in romance, family and second chances. But does it work? Let’s find out.

Continue reading …

Mon, August 31 2026

What might happen when a woman filmmaker gets the opportunity to make a film about violence and sex? What might happen when she gets access to all the familiar toys of the male-star vehicle: the punch dialogues, the star, the swagger, the slow-motion sequences, the sex, the violence… What might she bring to this cinema that we don’t generally get? As it turns out… quite a lot. First, she refuses to see the protagonist, Raya, as a ‘hero’. Quite the opposite, in fact. The film isn’t interested in hero-villain demarcations, right-wrong judgments. Raya (Yash) himself says as much at one point. When you are in pain, morality stops seeming important. The film, in fact, has a lot to say about the nature of pain, about what happens when you live with it for so long that you begin to fall in love with it, when it begins to feel more like home than any real home ever could, ever did. There’s a fantastic song in the Tamil version, ‘Vittupogaadha Yen Vali’, that speaks of this dichotomy. “Vittupoiduma en vali, poi vidaadhe en vali…”

Continue reading …

Sun, August 30 2026

Three years after being announced, Toxic has reached theatres with its gangster world intact, but its women viewed largely through Raya. The central disappointment is that the promised female gaze never meaningfully shapes the film's perspective.

Three years after Yash and Geetu Mohandas announced Toxic, the film is finally in theatres. And after all the waiting, the anticipation and the speculation, one question remains stubbornly unanswered: where is the female gaze Geetu promised? In a throwback interview, Geetu described Toxic as a “gangster film”. She said, “It’s a gangster genre with a female gaze. How about that?” When the teaser dropped in July, that was the question everyone asked. Now, after three hours of Toxic, a more pointed one takes its place: does the film ever really see its women at all? Rewind to 2023. When Yash and Geetu Mohandas announced their collaboration, eyebrows went up. Here was a star coming off the monumental success of the KGF franchise, joining forces with a filmmaker known for her distinct, uncompromising voice. Would these two very different cinematic worlds click, or would the pairing end up a spectacular miss? There seemed to be little room for anything in between.

Continue reading …

Fri, August 28 2026

The film moves at breakneck speed, leaving you no room to breathe

“Violence is my mother tongue, the universal language.” Indeed, this dialogue delivered by Kannada ‘rockstar’ Yash with the panache it deserves says it all. ‘Toxic’, as the name suggests, is about repressed emotions, which in their own convoluted way define toxic masculinity. Before we arrive at this emotion-charged and relevant conclusion, there is a set violence piece in this gangster drama every 10 minutes. The film moves at breakneck speed, leaving you no room to breathe — and often not in a good way. Just when you recover from the onslaught of the piling body count, yet another dance of death unfurls. Who is killing whom is not as important; half the time you don’t know either, as the symphony of violence unspools right through the film.

Continue reading …

Mon, August 31 2026

The Last Salute celebrates the MiG-21's immense power while honouring the pilots who flew it

The heady roar of the legendary supersonic fighter jet that served the Indian Air Force (IAF) for 62 years is muffled by nostalgia-dripping voices, an emotionally redolent background score, and a mind seeking to absorb loads of information. The “kick” inherent in the MiG-21 story is, however, given full rein in this engaging Netflix documentary conceived and executed as a companion piece to the hit web series Operation Safed Sagar. “Kick” is the word that several retired and serving pilots interviewed on camera use in describing what they felt when they sat in the cockpit of the now-retired-from-active-service MiG-21 and revved up the engine for take-off. The documentary transmits much of that to the audience.

Continue reading …

Mon, August 31 2026

From the creator of ‘Operation Safed Sagar,’ this neat little documentary features the final hurrah of the Indian Air Force’s prized possession, the MiG-21 fighter jet

There’s something innately sincere about The Last Salute, a documentary about the 62-year-old marriage between the MiG-21 and the Indian Air Force (IAF). It revolves around the retirement of the iconic Soviet fighter jet in 2025, leading up to its farewell ceremony while telling its story through the lens of the chosen few who were qualified to fly them. “A Love letter to MiG-21” is part of the title, so it’s more of a personal ode than a formal chronicling; its reputation as “a flying coffin” is hastily dismissed and neatly glided over. It’s just like watching one partner say goodbye to another after a long and eventful relationship, choosing to remember them fondly despite all the flaws and illnesses. Given that it’s from the creator of the recent Kargil series, Operation Safed Sagar, perhaps this apolitical and isolated wistfulness isn’t surprising.

Continue reading …

Mon, August 31 2026

Mon, August 31 2026

It repositions a cultural rockstar as a wannabe punk – dealing with life’s punches, which eventually contributed to his tough-but-fair demeanour.

“It’s going to be a bildungsroman…” Tony (Dominic Sessa) announces at the dinner table “… a coming-of-age novel.” He’s talking about a novel he has pitched at a prestigious scholarship interview. His father (Rich Sommers) is excited, his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) is more circumspect. He’s almost certain he will be chosen for the scholarship, after which he will embark on his journey to be what he already believes is a crucial part of his identity. “I’m a writer,” our 19-year-old protagonist says while introducing himself at a bar in an earlier scene. As we all know now, the debut novel (Kitchen Confidential) would only arrive 25 years later. Before Anthony Bourdain became a renowned chef and a worldwide phenomenon – he was just a kid. An arrogant, entitled, insufferable young man, who thought the world owed him a stage to showcase his brilliance. He was also an incessant and effortless liar. In Matt Johnson’s film, we meet Bourdain when he’s – as the title suggests – Tony, and follow him over an eventful summer. His mother calls him Anthony, which the rebel can’t stand. Hence, he goes out of his way to ask people to not call him that.

Continue reading …

Sun, August 30 2026

In Matt Johnson's ‘Tony’, a young Anthony Bourdain is pulled towards discipline and craft on one side, and recklessness and transgression on the other

Before Anthony Bourdain became the chef, author and TV host who taught an audience to eat, travel and look at the world with curiosity, he was Tony, a 19-year-old who didn’t quite know what to do with himself. “I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain wrote of himself in Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 memoir. It is an unusually unsparing assessment, and very much the man we meet in director Matt Johnson’s coming-of-age film about the young Bourdain. Johnson and his co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe take their ideas and inspiration from early chapters of the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, particularly Bourdain’s experiences in Provincetown, while taking cinematic liberties to shape it into a comic drama. Tony is less interested in recreating a life than in capturing a formative moment.

Continue reading …

Sun, August 30 2026

Director Vignesh Srikanth's Once More, starring Arjun Das, Aditi Shankar and Sona Olickal, is a romantic drama that works in parts. The film tries to explore closure, second chances and finding love again, but occasionally falls back on familiar cliches.

If you are a believer in destiny, life is all about second chances. Once More takes that idea and builds a romantic drama around a man who has almost forgotten what happiness feels like. Raghuvaran is stuck in a depressive state, barely pushing through each day, when Anjali, a woman who is quite literally walking sunshine, enters his life. She refuses to let him remain in his shell and slowly gives him another shot at happiness.

Continue reading …

Fri, August 28 2026

Director Vignesh Srikanth’s romance drama finds charm in its quieter moments, but its emotional core wobbles in the latter half

Guy sees girl. Guy follows girl. Guy stalks girl. Eventually, girl falls for him. This is a template Tamil cinema has used several times over the last few years; some heroes have actually made entire careers doing just this. It is due to this overall situation that Once More’s first sequence grabs your attention. Raghu (Arjun Das) is seated at the Velachery bus stop — his bike has broken down, and he has to find some other means of transport to get home. With cab drivers unwilling to take up the ride, Raghu is wondering what to do. Enter a bright red car, with his college junior, Anjali (Aditi Shankar), offering him a lift.

Continue reading …

Fri, August 28 2026

Shuffling between the naive optimism of a Vineeth Sreenivasan film and an ultra messy Gautham Menon romance, this is a neatly narrated and ably performed ‘whodunnit’ about a man, the person who killed him and the one that brought him back alive.

To call Once More an intense love story would be to reduce it to just one aspect that make this film wonderfully frustrating. Instead, I’d prefer to look at this story of a man named Raghuvaran (Arjun Das) as something of a cruel whodunnit. I call it that because the Raghu we first meet can barely be called a person who is well and alive. He’s a corpse, that’s just about capable of walking and talking. When we see him in constant conversation with both a priest as well as a psychiatrist, we see him grappling with spirituality and/or science to bring him alive. Instead of saying ‘Raghu is…’, the film trains you to say ‘Raghu was…’

Continue reading …

Fri, August 28 2026

Teju is a rich businessman’s daughter, living independently on her terms and driving a cab for her livelihood. Her liberated lifestyle is a cause of concern for nagging neighbours. They use every trick in the book to kick her out of the apartment. All hell breaks loose when she has a new roommate in Sindhu, a corporate employee looking to escape her uncle’s rigid norms at home. While both the lead actors fit their parts in terms of appearance and styling, their performances are just okay and nothing great to write home about. Gnaneswari Kandregula is a decent casting choice to play the rebellious Teju. Thanuja Puttaswamy brings a good contrast with her role as a meek yet ambitious girl.

Continue reading …