Tue, October 27 2026

Forget K-dramas and K-pop. The real deal is here. Directed by Na Hong-jin, Hope is reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made, and it shows. Unlike many Hollywood films that rely heavily on CGI, Hope combines computer-generated imagery with real action to deliver some astounding chase sequences. The film makes a compelling case for how to spend big bucks on an action thriller, with is fingers pointing towards Hollywood- this is how you do it.

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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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Tue, October 27 2026

Directed by writer-turned-director Akash Kaushik, Udta Teer wants to be a Dhurandhar when it comes to patriotism but a comedy when it comes to everything else. The result is a film caught between two incompatible impulses. One moment, it is a straight-faced spy thriller invoking desh bhakti with songs like Jai Hind gaaye; the next, it breaks into comedy, as if it cannot bear to take itself seriously for too long. While some of the humour lands, the patriotism is largely performative, playing to the gallery without making much of an impact.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Aakash A. Kaushik's ‘Udta Teer’, starring Ayushmann Khurrana, takes the temperature of Indo-Pak relations down several notches, but can't sustain the charm

Of the many musical gags in Udta Teer, one made me surprisingly wistful. Agent Vikrant (Ayushmann Khurrana) watching the video for A.R. Rahman’s ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’ and becoming emotional is intended as parodic patriotism. But it reminded me of when this version of ‘Vande Mataram’ came out in 1997 and was received as a dynamic reworking, not an imposition. It’s also hard not to think of ‘Gurus of Peace’, a Rahman-Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan track on the same album, especially when Udta Teer reminds us, with a cover of ‘Dum Mast Qalandar’ playing over a shootout, how Pakistan’s music is still a presence in our films but not Pakistani artists.

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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

Jayant Rohatgi's film tells the story of Hetal Dave, India’s first professional female sumo wrestler

Sumo Didi opens at the Taiwan Open Sumo Live, where Hetal Dave (Shriyam Bhagnani) makes history as the first Indian woman to compete in the tournament. It then rewinds nine months to Kolkata, where Hetal—who will become India’s first professional female sumo wrestler—is struggling after years of being judged for her body. She’s humiliated at school for her weight issues, and her mother, Sudha (Anubha Fatehpuriya), worries that she won’t find a husband. Encouraged by her father, Rajendra Dave (Nitesh Pandey), Hetal learns judo and enters competitions. But she is also acutely aware of the judgments she encounters, and begins to doubt herself. Her friend Akshat (Chaitanya Sharma), a physiotherapist, helps her see the difference between the person she is and the person the world expects her to be. He asks her to consider who she really is: someone who conforms to the way the world sees her, or an individual who can look beyond stereotypes.

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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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Mon, October 26 2026

The film’s simple but lovely conceit —involving angels and demons — is let down by the makers’ need to double down on ‘Aadu’-style juvenile comedy

In director Prince Joy’s Titans, there’s an earnest effort to make us rethink the way we imagine mystical concepts that feel larger than us. In a clip from the teaser that went viral, we see the character played by Jayasurya ask another person if the character played by Vinayakan can be trusted. “Does he look like someone who smokes or does drugs?” is the rhetorical question, as the camera cuts to a close-up of Vinayakan smiling innocently. It’s an easy laugh that plays on our stereotypes of what a smoker or an alcoholic looks like, made funnier by the real-life incidents that contributed to Vinayakan’s infamy.

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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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Mon, October 26 2026

In Orijinal , the time travel trope becomes an excuse for the portrayal of a man introspecting his life choices and then using the accidental gift of time travel to make amends, not always in the right way

When the makers of Orijinal named the film so, with the play of alphabets signifying protagonist Rijin’s name, they were probably acutely aware of the lack of originality of the time travel concept on which the film is built. This awareness is also acknowledged in hat tips to classic films of the genre such as Back to the Future in the dialogues as well as through a character wearing a yellow jacket inspired from the popular German series Dark. Director Ramees attempts to make up for this lack of novelty by using the whole film to raise pertinent questions on originality, especially in cinema. The time travel trope becomes an excuse for the portrayal of a man introspecting his life choices and then using the accidental gift of time travel to make amends, not always in the right way. It mostly plays around the inherent wish in many humans to correct their past.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Manoj Bajpayee is the film's highlight, putting his low-life superiors in their place, elevating himself to the status of a hero who is on the take, but who will never be taken over.

Another of those iss raat ki subah nahin sagas, featuring bent cops, greedy politicians, gun-toting hoods, and sundry others chasing a common target, the best thing about Gajab Raat is its lead actor. Manoj Bajpayee, unerringly playing a very efficient but very corrupt cop whose conscience is not completely dead, kept me watching even when the pace slackened. A film whose level of interest depends entirely on how pacy it is has no business losing track of time, but given that it goes over two hours, what else could we have expected. After losing no time in getting everything kickstarted, with a grievously injured girl (Aditi Sandhya Sharma) slides out of a moving car in the middle of Connaught Place, followed by a rapid if reluctant response from an investigating officer (Manoj Bajpayee) and his team, a whole host of shady characters target the victim who is left fighting for her life.

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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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Mon, October 26 2026

Can it even be a Luv Ranjan film without a girl being the bad guy? Or will we need to wait for the teesri baar for that to happen?

Three flatmates sitting around lumpy couches, slinging slang, while looking for the love of their lives : remember the 2011 Pyaar Ka Punchnama trio, which refreshed these tropes with a distinctly desi vibe?. Cut to 2026. The threesome slumming it on the outskirts of Delhi, more gender inclusive by dropping a guy for a gal, has switched it up for a swisher look, both in terms of office-and-home decor. What hasn’t changed, even if the director of that one has a producer’s credit on this one, is the search for The One: a school reunion is used as an excuse to hook up with those who remained stubbornly out of reach. Will he, won’t she? That eternal question, as well as bad mouthing frenemies, will never get old, whichever decade it may be, so if that’s the endeavour of the youngies at the centre of this Gen Z-coded rom com, so be it: my interest lay in whether this bunch of new faces will be able to pull it off.

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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

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

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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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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