Fri, April 3 2026

Despite its enjoyable silliness, the film starring Legend Saravanan is so stern that it doesn’t even try to get us on its side.

Of all the years of film-viewing, I never imagined I’d require visual descriptions (VD) to understand what an actor is trying to convey. RS Senthilkumar’s Leader, starring ‘Legend’ Saravanan, is best watched when the bottom half of your screen presents you with descriptions that tell you things as obvious as “he notices car”, “opens the door”, “closes the door”, “looks emotionally” and many more. One can argue that these were added for the benefit of those with hearing impairments to underscore imagery, but when the lead actor is Legend Saravanan, these descriptions become a crutch to help you understand the hidden meanings behind his expressions.

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Fri, April 3 2026

The film surrounds itself with so much of the ordinary that the images we see on screen begin to feel like they are ours.

There aren’t many filmmakers out there with as honest an understanding of the growing-up years as Vipin Das does. We see him begin most of his scripts by introducing us to his lead characters as children, often taking us into an aspect of their childhood that might not feel like much. This could be something as innocent as us joining Jaya on her walk to school through cashew plantations in Jaya Jaya Jaya Hain (2022). Vaazha: The Biopic Of A Billion Boys too begins in school with the formation of what appears to be an unlikely friendship. Its leads may come from different places and backgrounds, but these boys have a way of finding their gang during the strangest of events.

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Fri, April 3 2026

It is not that a film on the Sri Lankan war must depict all its excesses, but when 'Neelira' forcibly side-steps it, the film’s intentional blind spots turn its vision into a fish-eye

Neelira takes place over one night. There is a note at the end of the film, text on screen, that transcribes the long, arduous journey, from Sri Lanka to Europe, that now lies ahead for one of the characters—Vasuki. That text, pregnant with odyssey, suddenly made the film come alive for a brief second. Then, the film ends. Set in 1988, in Northern Srilanka, Neelira, the first Tamil feature directed by a Sri Lankan Tamilian, begins with the preparation for Vasuki’s wedding—including the logistics of getting permission from the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the Sri Lankan army, though we don’t see a scene with the latter. Have they ceded control to the IPFK in this narrative?

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Fri, April 3 2026

Director Someetharan's Neelira, starring Naveen Chandra, Roopa Koduvayur and Sananth Reddy, is a chamber drama set in the thick of the Sri Lankan civil war. The film is a straight-forward documentation of the effects of war on the lives of commoners.

There is a scene in director Someetharan’s Neelira where a group of children is playing outdoors in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war in 1988. One of them blurts," What’s a game without guns?," as they indulge in a shooting game. It takes only one scene to put everything into context. These are children who should be playing hopscotch or hide-and-seek. Instead, they are thinking about shooting each other.

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Fri, April 3 2026

Motocross gives a new turn to the familiar beats in director Abhilash Reddy’s emotionally-steeped sports drama, and Sharwanand reclaims his spot under the sun

There are times when a filmmaker chooses to not reinvent the wheel or the story, to be precise. But a new setting lets it breathe. The broad contours of the storyline, sub plots and character arcs in director Abhilash Reddy’s Telugu sports drama, Biker are familiar. Motocross, a sport that has rarely or perhaps never been explored in Indian cinema, gives it a new sheen. The cutting-edge audio-visual landscape and worthwhile performances make it fairly engaging.

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Fri, April 3 2026

कोर्ट-कचहरी की दुनिया के अजब-गजब केस, काले कोट वाले वकील, उनके साम, दाम, दंड, भेद वाले दांव-पेंच, और ढेर सारा ड्रामा। साल 2024 में वेब सीरीज ‘मामला लीगल है’ ने इन सारे तत्‍वों को एकसाथ पिरोकर दर्शकों का खूब दिल जीता था। इसलिए, पटपड़गंज सेशन कोर्ट और उसके अतरंगी किरदारों की ये कहानी अपने दूसरे सीजन में बढ़ चली है। चूंकि, इस बार कहानी के मुख्य किरदार विशेश्वर दयाल उर्फ वीडी त्यागी (रवि किशन) वकील का काला कोट उतारकर, कोर्ट के प्रमुख जिला जज की कुर्सी पर विराजमान हो चुके हैं, तो सीरीज भी जज साहब की जिम्मेदारियों, चुनौतियों और दुविधाओं पर ज्यादा फोकस करती है। इस कारण वकीलों की जद्दोजहद और कोर्ट रूम में गरमागरम जिरह वाला पहलू इस बार थोड़ा कमजोर रह गया है।

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Fri, April 3 2026

The law officers at Patparganj District Court in Delhi are back with new cases as the workplace comedy leans more into drama in round two.

The witty legal comedy Maamla Legal Hai was launched in March 2024. The Ravi Kishan-led series was a unique workplace show that based its cases and plotlines on real-life incidents. The Hindi series, created by Saurabh Khanna and Kunal Aneja, becomes more of a dramedy in its second season as its characters mature and deal with more weighty issues. The ensemble comedy also adds a few new faces to mix but Maamla Legal Hai continues to focus more on the gang at Patparganj District Court, whose internal squabbles become more entertaining than the cases they are fighting.

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Fri, April 3 2026

The Drama takes a genre that has seen varied and multifarious interpretations over the decades

Emotional and behavioural upheavals linked to acts contemplated, mishaps suffered, tragedies faced and choices made or evaded (most of them in the past) threaten to derail an impending wedding in The Drama, a darkly absurdist and discomfiting film written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli. Starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as two deeply in love but massively conflicted individuals, The Drama is imbued with the Nordic spirit of moral inquiry of the kind that characterizes a Ruben Ostlund take on human foibles or a Thomas Vinterberg deep dive into ethical indiscretions that can send people and communities into a tailspin.

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Fri, April 3 2026

The eight-part show is certainly better than many others that are being cranked out from streaming factories, but it is also true that it turns out to be a mixed bag, with the sparkly bits interspersed with those which are flat.

Maths nerd Agastya aka Gast (Mihir Ahuja) has his heart set upon seeing his single mom Vinita aka Vinnie (Mona Singh) ‘settled’, so he’s in search of that perfect algorithm that will lead to a perfect match. In all the adding and subtracting, he forgets that humans are still the sum of their gloriously imperfect parts. No artificial intelligence can crack ‘em. At least not yet, fingers tightly crossed.

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Fri, April 3 2026

When it's not spouting excessive maths jargon -- algorithm alone is uttered a zillion times -- too many characters with too little context crowd the scenes and turn Maa Ka Sum into a slog

We’ve seen Shah Rukh Khan’s pre-teen daughter gatecrash a wedding to get her dad remarried in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Akshaye Khanna endeavour to reunite his widowed father to his childhood sweetheart in Mere Baap Pehle Aap and Ayushmann Khurana embrace the idea of his mom’s need for companionship in Doctor G. Maa Ka Sum draws out on similar single-parent child psychology in the story of a teen mathematics genius using his skills to create a perfect match for his lonesome mom. Except there’s a dark side to his purpose. He doesn’t just wish to see his mother happy with somebody but also make that choice for her.

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Fri, April 3 2026

Maa Ka Sum sets out to explore love through logic. Directed by Nicholas Kharkongor and written by Ravinder Randhawa and Sumrit Shahi, the Prime Video series is about a 19-year-old mathematics prodigy trying to “solve” relationships and matchmaking through equations and algorithms. Agastya (Mihir Ahuja) is on a mission to find the perfect partner for his single mother Vinita (Mona Singh). Their relationship is framed as unusually close, almost idealised, but quickly reveals a troubling co-dependence. Boundaries are virtually non-existent, with Agastya assuming the role of decision-maker in his mother’s romantic life, prioritising data and outcomes over her autonomy and feelings.

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Fri, April 3 2026

Riz Ahmed's new series Bait delivers a bitingly humorous, and topical commentary on a British-Pakistani actor's audacious journey auditioning for James Bond, challenging traditional casting norms and exploring complex themes of identity and representation.

A brown Bond may not be on the British bingo card… Until Riz Ahmed challenges the status quo as a struggling British-Pakistani actor auditioning for 007, following Daniel Craig’s departure in Bait’s six episodes of marvelously meta, humorous and unabashedly topical commentary. There are no shortage of actors vying for the role of the ‘white neo-colonial MI6 agent’, including Idris Elba and Regé-Jean Page.

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Fri, April 3 2026

The breezy coming-of-age teenage drama delves into the group's bonds of friendship and love in their final year at KISS

The Netflix spinoff series XO, Kitty follows Kitty Song Covey’s adventures as she goes abroad to Seoul, South Korea for love and family. Kitty has come far since she first landed clueless in The City of Palaces. But since then, she has found her place at the Korean Independent School of Seoul (KISS). However, the friendship group is growing up and thinking about their future in the third season. With new showrunner Valentina Garza injecting new energy into the season, the show takes some much-needed steps ahead. Now in Season 3, XO, Kitty is still relying on the power of the To All The Boys franchise to pull in viewers.

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Thu, April 2 2026

This thriller delves into themes of marriage and trust while delivering gruesome twists and supernatural scares.

For all those (and by that I mean almost everyone) who, at some point, has felt that marriage is a death sentence, the experience is quite literal in the ominously named Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. Events that fall in the very, very bad category — and that is putting it mildly — do take place in this fresh-off-the-block Netflix series, all of which has to do with its protagonist’s decision to marry her “soulmate”.

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Sun, March 29 2026

Aditya Dhar's latest film stars Ranveer Singh as an Indian spy embedded in the criminal underbelly of Karachi, Pakistan

German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl wasn’t the only person making propaganda for the Third Reich. She is remembered simply because she was the best. By that measure, director Aditya Dhar may be painted with a similar brush, because while his fellow Bollywood opportunists choose to spoonfeed their message, Dhar deploys his through subterfuge. Overlong, gratuitously violent, and brimming with a self-indulgence that borders on arrogance, his latest film, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, ought to be canceled on artistic grounds alone before even a word is spoken about its problematic politics. The film serves as a mouthpiece for India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and not, as it claims on several occasions, a bipartisan story about the bravery of true patriots.

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Tue, March 24 2026

Dhurandhar: The Revenge doubles down on everything that made the first film so controversial. The level of sycophancy on display borders on the pathetic. We discuss the film’s plodding narrative, pointless diversions, and shameless devotion to the ruling party. We also talk about plot twists that you see coming from a mile away, the protagonist’s muddled motivations, and the convenience with which certain hurdles are overcome.

Sun, March 22 2026

Highlights an ongoing issue of tokenism and lack of agency for women in mainstream cinema.

A little more than 40 years ago, cartoonist Alison Bechdel formulated The Bechdel Test, which, over the decades, has become an essential metric to evaluate the representation of women in media, with special emphasis being laid on film. The Bechdel Test has a simple ask — to assess whether a piece of performing art has (a) at least two named women and (b) whether the female characters in it engage in a conversation (or more) on a topic which is something other than that centred on a man. Many films, since then, even while not being feminist in the classical sense of the term (or female-centric, according to commonly-used parlance), have proved to be worthy candidates of the test. Many others have not, despite their on-the-surface female presence, been able to pass muster. But no film, at least in recent times, would perhaps have failed it as spectacularly as Dhurandhar: The Revenge.

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Sun, March 29 2026

Sun, March 29 2026

Created and directed by M Manikandan and B Ajithkumar, Kaattaan is a redemption saga about an enigmatic man who has been killed.

Muthu Alias Kaattaan, starring Vijay Sethupathi, begins on a shocking note. A few minutes into the first episode, a local villager discovers a severed head perched on top of a rock — with no body in sight. It is the kind of opening that promises a gripping, atmospheric mystery. Across 10 episodes on JioHotstar, the series attempts to deliver on that promise. Does it get there? Let’s find out! The village police station is facing an existential crisis — negligible cases have brought it to the brink of shutdown. When officer Kalai Pandiyan (Vadivel Murugan) receives a call about the severed head, he seizes the opportunity and nudges his seniors to take up the case. An elderly villager (Balaji Sakthivel) identifies the dead man as Muthu, and the investigation begins.

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Sat, March 28 2026

The series is never in a hurry to reveal all its cards

Before Tamil superstar Vijay Sethupathi, who is also the producer of the Tamil series ‘Muthu Engira Kaattaan’, appears in his titular part, we see his smiling head. To begin with, the thriller set in a Tamil village and in a forest area rests on the dilemma of three policemen. The outsider wants the station to be shut because it is visited by creatures like snakes. Constable Kaali Pandiyan (Vaidivel Murugan), who happens to be the son of an affluent goat herder from the village, is so besotted with his wife that the thought of leaving the village for an outstation posting is outright unpalatable to him.

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