Last Man in Tower
Drama (Hindi)
Masterji is a retired schoolteacher whose refusal to go along with those around him places him in direct conflict with his own community. His act of quiet resistance ripples outward, throwing into relief the choices and compromises of neighbors – (more…)
Guild Reviews by Film
Gandhari
Action, Drama, Thriller (Hindi)
When a mother loses her eyesight and her daughter in a kidnapping, she takes matters into her own hands to hunt down those responsible.
Cast:
Taapsee Pannu, Ishwak Singh, Mita Vashisht, Swastika Mukherjee, Chhaya Kadam, Jatin Sarna, Prashant Narayanan, Chandan Roy, Vishwanath Chatterjee, Priti Shroff
Director:
Devashish Makhija
Writer:
Kanika Dhillon
Sat, September 12 2026
A land that worships the divine feminine yet treats its women poorly. This is a paradox that rings tragic and true both in reality and in the fictional world of Gandhari. The film is set in Joypurra, an unsettling place where the disappearance of young girls has been frighteningly normalized. The story opens by establishing a happy family of three. Taapsee Pannu and Ishwak Singh play a husband and wife and parents to a young girl Mishti. When Mishti suddenly goes missing the narrative dives straight into the conflict.
Sun, September 6 2026
Fri, September 4 2026
An incoherent ‘Gandhari’ stars Taapsee Pannu as a mother who pretends to be blind to search for her kidnapped daughter in a shady town
If I were younger and brasher, I’d start this review with something as direct as: Gandhari is one of the worst Hindi films of the year. I’d rant about how it creates a world record for the number of scenes in which characters speak off-screen so as to hide the clunky exposition and dialogue added in post-production; how lip-syncing is a mythical concept; how this is salvage-job filmmaking at its peak. I’d go on about how the movie treats feminism, motherhood, child trafficking, gender-based violence, trauma and breathing as a smug SoBo aesthetic; how the phrase “my culture is not your costume” was invented for screenplays like these. I’d balk at the Do Patti-coded twists, disorienting music and editing, disjointed acting and disingenuous metaphors. I’d be outraged by the film’s Haseen Dillruba-coded lens of toxic love, where the scene of a husband and wife literally clobbering each other is scored to a romantic ballad: such a ‘punchy’ love language. I’d be angry to the point of incoherence, much like the film in question.
Haiwaan
Crime, Thriller (Hindi)
A retired judge faces difficulty keeping his daughter safe from a convict he imprisoned. Later, when he gets murdered, a man with visual impairment who was loyal to him tries to defend his daughter.
Cast:
Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Boman Irani, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Saiyami Kher, Rajpal Yadav, Sharib Hashmi, Rajesh Sharma, Manoj Joshi, Asrani
Director:
Priyadarshan
Sat, September 12 2026
श्रीराम राघवन की फिल्म ‘अंधाधुन’ में एक अंधा पियानो प्लेयर एक खून होते हुए ‘देख’ लेता है। अब अंधा आदमी ‘देख’ कैसे सकता है? और यहीं से शुरू होती है छल, कपट और धोखे की एक अंधी दौड़ जिसमें कोई भी पाक-साफ नहीं है। प्रियदर्शन की इस फिल्म ‘हैवान’ में एक बिल्डिंग के अंधे मैंटेनेंस मैनेजर की जज साहब को मारने वाले एक खूनी से हाथापाई हुई है। वह उसे सूंघ कर पहचान लेता है लेकिन पुलिस उस अंधे को ही खूनी माने बैठी है। कैसे निकलेगा वह इस आरोप से? कैसे पकड़ा जाएगा वह खूनी? वह खून कर ही क्यों रहा है? क्यों वह ऐसा हैवान बना हुआ है जो अपने बदले की आग में मासूमों की जान लिए जा रहा है? सवाल कई हैं, जवाब यह फिल्म देती है। मगर क्या ये जवाब हज़म होने लायक हैं? आइए देखते हैं।
Sat, September 12 2026
Matching Mohanlal is a tough ask, but Saif makes the most of the opportunity that the unusual role presents
Transplanted from Kochi to Mumbai, a well-received Priyadarshan-helmed Malayalam crime drama that Mohanlal spearheaded a decade ago morphs in the same director’s hands into a Bollywood thriller with the Kerala superstar in a surprise cameo. Textually similar, texturally different and tonally entirely its own beast, Haiwaan, starring Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan, struggles to shrug off the shadow of Mohanlal and Oppam (2016). Comparisons here are not as odious as they usually are. They are, in fact, essential in understanding the trip that Haiwaan is on in the company of two Bollywood actors whose personas shape the film.
Fri, September 11 2026
As an overindulgent Akshay Kumar goes overboard, ‘Haiwaan’ loses its bite.
A blind man, an innocent child, and an unhinged monster. As director Priyadarshan recreates Oppam for a Hindi audience, he sets the stage for an engrossing sensory thriller. It follows a visually impaired protagonist, Shyam (Saif Ali Khan), who accidentally becomes the protector of a young girl targeted by a ruthless serial killer, Parshuram (Akshay Kumar). The imagery of a thriller where the only man who can save a target can’t see the killer is appetising bait that pulls us to the edge of our seats. Alongside Sabu Cyril and Divakar Mani, the seasoned filmmaker designs an atmosphere where shadows and silhouettes combine to create subtext. In Saif, he has a performer whose visible hunger to become the character these days promises a believable clash. Playing a character etched for posterity by the inimitable Mohanlal, he internalises the blindness and creates a gaze devoid of intent. In his own way, he puts in the effort to bring the required gravitas to the character of a maintenance man in charge of a high-rise.
Fall 2
Thriller (English)
On a perilous climb across Thailand's Mount Kwan, two climbers become trapped thousands of feet above the ground, where vertigo-inducing heights, sheer exposure, and impossible odds turn every moment into a fight for survival.
Cast:
Harriet Slater, Arsema Thomas, Tom Brittney, Virginia Gardner, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Korakod Yensuk, Jordan Coleman, Maryna Bennett, Noen Perez, Nattapon Sukphiam
Director:
Peter Spierig, Michael Spierig
Writer:
Jonathan Frank, Scott Mann
Sat, September 12 2026
Sequel to 2022 original, Fall 2 is too grim for its own good. The film appears to believe that it is a meditation on grief and an inspiring fable about emotional emancipation, without actually tackling either idea with any depth.
Released in 2022, Fall stood out as an uncommonly well-made survival thriller — it had a killer premise, excellent performances and surprising emotional depth. The genre has only become more popular in the years since. This year alone, we’ve seen the Netflix films Apex and The Last House and the Prime Video title The Devil’s Mouth. None of them were any good, although Apex featured a memorably unhinged performance by Taron Egerton. This week’s Fall 2: Deadpoint most definitely comes up short of its predecessor, but more disappointingly, it can’t quite match the camp qualities of this year’s three other survival thrillers either.
Last Man in Tower
Drama (Hindi)
Masterji is a retired schoolteacher whose refusal to go along with those around him places him in direct conflict with his own community. His act of quiet resistance ripples outward, throwing into relief the choices and compromises of neighbors – including Mrs. Puri – as an offer of change tests what each of them is willing to hold on to.
Cast:
Manoj Bajpayee, Divya Dutta, Boman Irani, Sukant Goel, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Ujjwal Chopra, Swaroopa Ghosh, Uday Chandra, Madhuri Bhatia, Shrikant Yadav
Director:
Ben Rekhi
Sat, September 12 2026
Directed by Ben Rekhi, Last Man in Tower is an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s novel of the same name. The story revolves around a decrepit residential building in Mumbai and its residents, and how the lure of a better future changes ties when a builder arrives with an offer to acquire and reconstruct the property.
Directed by Ben Rekhi, Last Man in Tower is a perfectly pleasant adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s novel of the same name. But therein lies the problem; it is well-behaved when it should have been transgressive. At its core, this is a cautionary tale about the decaying morality of the Indian middle class, a satire about our collective lack of social trust. But filtered through Rekhi’s lens, the movie comes across as an ode to the undying spirit of Mumbaikars. The story revolves around a decrepit residential building in Vakola, Mumbai, an almost fantastical vessel where men and women of all ages, sexes, and social classes live in relative harmony. The building can be seen as a metaphor for India; a society we imagine existed before it was shredded to pieces by populist politicians. At its (moral) centre is a retired teacher affectionately known by everyone as ‘Masterji’. He’s played by Manoj Bajpayee in a terrific central performance that occasionally reveals the underlying rage that should have been more palpable in the film itself.
Fri, September 11 2026
Adapting Aravind Adiga’s acclaimed novel, Ben Rekhi builds a gripping moral battleground where a community chooses redevelopment to compromise its own foundation.
At the heart of Last Man in Tower lies Vishram Cooperative Housing Society, a decaying, close-knit enclave of middle-class Mumbai families. Their world is upended when a ruthless real estate tycoon, Dharmen Shah (Boman Irani), offers them a life-changing financial windfall to buy out the building for luxury redevelopment. The catch is that the payout is all or nothing, contingent on a unanimous vote. While his cash-strapped neighbours eagerly scramble for a ticket into the modern world, Yogesh Mishra (Manoj Bajpayee), a retired schoolteacher known as Masterji, stubbornly refuses to sign away the home that holds the memories of his deceased wife. What begins as a disagreement quickly degenerates into a psychological social pressure cooker, as the neighborhood’s collective desperation, led by the chirpy Sangeeta Puri (Divya Dutta), turns into targeted malice against the lone dissenter.
Fri, September 11 2026
Adapting Aravind Adiga’s 2011 novel, Sooni Taraporevala’s screenplay expunges much of its mordant humour and tips instead to a straight-faced comment on India’s redevelopment boom.
What does it take to plough on even in the face of overwhelming opposition? In Ben Rekhi’s Last Man In Tower, the retired schoolteacher, Yogesh Mishra/Masterji (Manoj Bajpayee), finds himself sanded into a corner. He had supporters but the small number dwindled. This adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s eponymous 2011 novel spins around Mumbai’s Vishram apartment block. It’s one of the many old buildings that real-estate hawks have their eyes on as redevelopment razes the country. Masterji is the polar opposite of the smarmy builder, Dharmen Shah (Boman Irani), who insists everything in Mumbai is for sale. There are still some who fight tooth and nail to preserve those places that are receptacles of their memories, a record of their lives’ intimate tapestries.
Pradhama Dhrishtya Kuttakkar
Thriller, Drama (Malayalam)
Follows a woman constable who joins the police force through appointment after the death of her husband.
Cast:
Parvathy Thiruvothu, Vijayaraghavan, Unnimaya Prasad, Mathew Thomas, Sidharth Bharathan, Azees Nedumangad, Vinay Forrt, R. Parthiban, Balaji Sarma, Vrindha Menon
Director:
Shahad Nilambur
Writer:
Vijesh Thottingal, P. S. Subramanian
Fri, September 11 2026
Director Shahad crafts a compelling thriller about cops, crime, and a cover-up, with Parvathy and Vijayaraghavan in exemplary form
An accidental death occurs. The body has to be disposed of. Every trace of evidence has to be erased. The investigators have to be outsmarted. The truth has to be concealed forever. No, we are not talking about Drishyam here. But such has been the impact. It’s a benchmark in such thriller narratives, and lately there has been a surge in different iterations of this crime-cover-up trope in many languages. Maa Behen (Hindi), Kuttram Purindhavan and Blast (Tamil), Mohiniyattam (Malayalam)… On the surface, Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (PDK) has a similar premise. Something ghastly happens, and this time around, the duel is between cops themselves. Four low-ranked ordinary cops vs a veteran officer with an unblemished track record. The result is a gripping police procedural thriller that’s cleverly written, packed with tension and twists, and never takes the audience for granted.
The Revolutionaries
Drama (Hindi)
The Revolutionaries narrates the inspiring tale of brave young Indian freedom fighters who fought for ending British Raj with their unwavering spirit and ideology.
Cast:
Bhuvan Bam, Pratibha Ranta, Rohit Saraf, Gurfateh Pirzada, Jason Shah, Paoli Dam, Prosenjit Bhattacharya, Pallavi Chatterjee
Director:
Nikkhil Advani
Writer:
Sanyukta Shaikh Chawla, Akshita Wadhwana
Fri, September 11 2026
Fri, September 11 2026
Nikkhil Advani earlier floored us with ‘Freedom At Midnight’, which recounted the years that led to India’s freedom struggle
“Hum se pehle bhi kranti, hamare baad bhi kranti…” Yet many of us are not fully clued into the tale of armed resistance and revolutionaries who fought for the freedom of our country, not always successfully, but never in vain. Creator-writer Nikkhil Advani, who floored us with ‘Freedom At Midnight’, recounting the years that led to India’s freedom struggle in many sterling ways, is back again. This time, he digs further back into history — early 20th century. The heroes of his earlier series — Gandhi, Nehru, Patel — are household names. But Rash Behari Bose, Jatindranath Mukherjee aka Bagha Jatin and Sachindranath Sanyal urf Sachin are at best names which ring a bell, but only a few among us fully know or understand their tales of valour.
Fri, September 11 2026
Never draws you into its world nor explains the mind and motivation of its heroes or even the mood within a nation they're going through so much trouble for,
The idea of The Revolutionaries came about with filmmaker Nikkhil Advani’s desire to bring a young generation’s underground movement to focus. Though committed to India’s fight for freedom, these headstrong men and women employed methods in complete contrast to Mahatma Gandhi’s pacifist philosophy. Expressing disappointment at the latter’s criticism of their ways, it’s the armed side of India’s independence struggle, inspiring the likes of Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh in the future, that finds favour in the eight-part series. Series like Freedom at Midnight and Rocket Boys render Advani a perfect fit to adapt Sanjeev Sanyal’s Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom. The filmmaker proved himself to be solid at the long format, period drama gig but there are just too many things going on and going wrong to invest in the events leading to its goals of Ghadar. Set in the 1910s, The Revolutionaries picks its key figures in Rash Behari Bose (Bhuvan Shome), Sachindra Nath Sanyal (Rohit Saraf), Bagha Jatin (Gurfateh Pirzad) and Pratibha Lahiri (Pratibha Ranta) as the plot skims to and fro between Benares, Dehradun, Delhi and Kolkata.
Life of Jorge Luis Borges
Documentary (Spanish)
A biography of Jorge Luis Borges working from an exhaustive review of the papers he left, the books he read, the places he went to. And with this, an attempt to decipher a very peculiar life: someone who lived like a hidden, underground warrior, whose cause was literature, literature conceived as a kingdom and as a landscape. If Cold War spies fought from their desks or from an uninhabited house to defend their half of the world, Borges strove from a library to elevate and broaden the territories of his own tribe: the people for whom the most important part of the universe is books, plots and words. This film is devoted to that secret pilgrim (to borrow from Le Carré, the king of all spies).
Cast:
Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Montequín, Nicolás Helft, Laura Paredes, Milva Leonardi, Pablo Dacal
Director:
Mariano Llinás
Fri, September 11 2026
Venice Film Festival 2026 | The ultimate vagrants of contemporary cinema, Argentina’s El Pampero collective has produced another rambling, nearly six-hour adventure between life, fiction, fantasy and charming investigation.
Pioneering Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás is the truest inheritor of the Borgesian tradition with a vision of cinema that trumps settled notions. There are no limits or a stiffening of what cinema can be allowed to do. Llinás co-founded Argentina’s, a radical El Pampero Cine collective, a group that includes the other great filmmaker of our times, Laura Citarella. In his latest massive undertaking, Life of Jorge Luis Borges, Llinás sculpts a new form of the creative biography. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Open – Non-Fiction section, this nearly six-hour saga flirts with the tether of creative possibility. An extensive foray into the life, work and politics of Jorges Luis Borges, who saw literature as a kingdom and books the only nation to believe in, the film achieves its mammoth scale through the smallest, most minute interventions. Llinás has no interest in a straightforward chronicle, a regular documentary’s beats. His probing builds through interruptions and flickering curiosities, stretching as far from the linear and conventional as possible.
The Colour of the Sun
Drama (Japanese)
During summer break on Okinawa's main island, Kamei and his friends face uncertain futures, until they meet Colin, a teenager from the American base in Naha, and everything changes.
Cast:
Naoto Shimajiri, West Mulholland, Ichiro Andre Castro
Director:
Xavier Tera
Writer:
Xavier Tera
Fri, September 11 2026
Venice Film Festival 2026| Towering over the Orizzonti competition, Xavier Tera’s debut is an intimately observed coming-of-age marvel, finding light amidst grief and teenage uncertainties.
Kamei (Naoto Shimajiri) has been silently grieving. His father’s recent death hangs over his thoughts. In Xavier Tera’s The Colour of the Sun, bereavement also turns a conduit for the inevitable exploration youthfulness catapults. There’s a lot of hurt, unprocessed emotion which has him darting in circles. Neither can he really open up to his mother. The closed line of dialogue, a stunted chance to vent, makes healing an incredibly lonely journey. Premiering in Orizzonti competition at the Venice Film Festival, Tera’s gently shaped drama zeroes in on fine emotional detail, accruing power through modest, nevertheless piercing suggestion.
Our Share of Sand
(English)
After years apart, 12 year-old Maya returns to India with her mother to reunite with her father - a sandmining business man. Immersed in a world where labour, legacy and extraction collide, she forms a fragile bond with Kiran, a young worker. After a tragic event, a police investigation turns Maya into a key witness, with her father relying on her to absolve him. Torn between loyalty and a growing unease she cannot name, Maya begins searching for the truth. As her mother quietly unravels, Maya uncovers a pattern of silence, exploitation and repeated harm forcing her to confront her father's deception and the family's complicity she must choose to break.
Cast:
Maya Mehta, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Ellora Torchia, Krish Raj More, Ravi Patel, Jyoti Dogra
Director:
Shalini Adnani
Writer:
Shalini Adnani
The City of the Living
Drama, Thriller (Italian)
Luca is twenty-three years old. He lives with an adoptive family who loves him. He moves between the suburbs and the city center with his friends and has a girlfriend with whom he shares a love that is young, yet significant for them both. Luca is searching for his path at an age when everything still feels possible and, at the same time, already lost; in this pursuit, he leads a double life. One night, after a seemingly chance encounter, the trajectory of Luca’s life is shattered, colliding with blind and senseless violence.
Cast:
Emanuele Maria Di Stefano, Valerio Mastandrea, Simona Senzacqua, Roberta Mattei, Gaia Merlonghi
Director:
Edoardo Gabbriellini
Writer:
Damiano D'Innocenzo, Fabio D'Innocenzo
Fri, September 11 2026
Venice Film Festival 2026 | Emanuele Maria Di Stefano powers this murky, sexually ambiguous Orizzonti title which retraces the 2016 murder of 23-year-old Luca Varani.
True-crime narratives trade in lurid shocks. They have this unseemly, grotesque fascination that inadvertently replaces human consideration. The rush for dramatic re-staging bleeds out any concern for the victim, what their fuller story preceding the tragedy might be. The event itself becomes the driving lens through which we view an entire life. Premiering in Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival, Edoardo Gabbriellini’s The City of The Living’s greatest triumph is that it wholly goes beyond this limiting approach, constantly finding the complex, fledgling humanity of the victim.
The Burning Giants
Drama (Thai)
Follows an environmental and Indigenous rights activist from the Karen group who is killed after protesting the forced eviction of his village from a protected forest.
Cast:
Awat Ratanapintha, Pakapol Srirongmuang, Waywiree Ittianunkul, Tanatwut Rodpai
Director:
Phuttiphong Aroonpheng
Fri, September 11 2026
Venice Film Festival 2026 | After Manta Ray, the Thai filmmaker returns to Orizzonti competition with a formally disruptive skewering of State-backed violence.
Phuttiphong Aroonpheng is among the most aesthetically committed, politically cogent filmmakers working today. The Thai filmmaker who broke out with Manta Ray (2018) is back at Venice Film Festival, competing in Orizzonti with The Burning Giants. A mysterious virus cloaks a population in fear and uncertainty. There have been forceful evacuation, disappearances and uprooting of a community from their homes. When the film opens, we are placed right in its peculiar setting. Smoke envelops. The forest is manned by officers who have cordoned off entire sections.
The Difficult Bride
Fantasy, Drama, Thriller, Horror (Bengali)
Zai, a bride-to-be in present-day Dhaka, is in love with her groom and dreams of a fairytale wedding, but secretly struggles with her body’s resistance to wedding rituals. As stress and emotional pain intensify, a mysterious woman with long hair begins appearing in Novera’s imagination.
Cast:
Zaineen Karim Chowdhury, Reekita Nondine Shimu, Sunerah Binte Kamal, Azmeri Haque Badhon, Dameer Khan, Saberi Alam, Shatabdi Wadud, Mohammad Bari
Director:
Rubaiyat Hossain
Fri, September 11 2026
Venice Film Festival 2026 | Trailing a bride-to-be’s uncanny visions and troubled sensations, Bangladesh’s first-ever Orizzonti selection comes undone in a lame, blunt screenplay that is sorely out of sync with Leonor Teles’ striking imagery.
Leading Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain is a fascinating voice with brave, brilliant ideas. Premiering in Orizzonti Competition, her new film, The Difficult Bride, comes with massive expectations. It’s billed as a historic selection, the first-ever Bangladeshi film to land a Venice film festival competitive slot. On top of that, Hossain has repeatedly described it as a passion project, an idea that has been with her for two decades. She has honed and shaped it over many years, taking it through notable labs and grabbing prestigious grants. So, it’s a real mystery to find the eventual shape the film has resulted in as so terribly undercooked, unconvincing and painfully strained.