Thu, January 29 2026

Tere Ishk Mein, the new film from director Aanand L. Rai and his longtime writer Himanshu Sharma, might be more offensive than anything Sandeep Reddy Vanga has ever made. A misogynist, hate-mongering pile of slop, the movie exists to validate its incel male audience’s opinions about all womankind. It would be foolish to question why Dhanush and Kriti Sanon agreed to make this film, but for A.R. Rahman and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub to participate in something like this says a lot about their politics. We talk about the film’s unhinged story, the poor acting by the two leads, and its overall disdain for the audience.

Sat, November 29 2025

Sat, November 29 2025

Dhanush rages and Kriti Sanon recoils in Aanand L. Rai’s love story of epic proportions, which eventually begins to test your patience

Bollywood is in love all over again. After Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara, Aanand L Rai, another master of the poetic portrayal of passion and pain, returns with a gripping interrogation of love’s destructive underbelly, set in a social context. Connected to Raanjhanaa(2013) by an umbilical cord, Tere Ishk Mein talks of the magic of love that is lost in modern life’s logic, which entices us to trade emotions. In Rai’s universe, love is both poison and panacea, and once again, he has taken up a risky subject — the transformative power of romance.

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Tue, January 27 2026

Oliver Hermanus' film is a deeply restrained love story that allows intimacy to exist in glances, harmonies and silences

The History of Sound is a quiet, deliberately paced film about missed chances and unresolved lives. Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted by Ben Shattuck from his short stories The History of Sound and Origin Stories, the film traces one man’s journey through music, memory and emotional restraint. The story opens in rural Kentucky in 1910, where Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) grows up on a farm dutifully following in his family’s commitment to physical labour, finding release through song. “It never occurred to me that music was only sound,” Lionel reflects, a line that establishes music as something far larger than art. It is also a means of survival, a repository of memory, and conduit for connection. When a local teacher recognises his singing ability and helps him secure a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, the opportunity briefly lifts Lionel out of a dead-end life.

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Tue, January 27 2026

It reminds us that history’s greatest feats are often built on quieter, irreversible losses

Sometime in December 2020, Icelandic mountaineer John Snorri was on the cusp of making history. He was getting ready to scale the second highest mountain peak, the K2, in the winter. Around then the temperatures go down to -60 degrees celsius near the peak. Compounded with the steep incline of the K2 (part of the Karakoram range) with winds blowing up to 150 mph, even experienced mountaineers dubbed it as a tricky climb. Every other record in the mountaineering world had been achieved. Having arrived in Northern Pakistan a good two months in advance, to help himself acclimatise to the conditions, Snorri – with his Pakistani counterparts, Ali Sadpara and his son Sajid – looked set to take on arguably the most gruelling climb ever attempted.

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Tue, January 27 2026

Khalid Ka Shivaji (Marathi movie with a good amount of Hindi) tells the story of Khalid (Krish Raj More), a fourth standard student. He stays with his father Hayad (Priyadarshan Jadhav), mother Ruksana (Snehalata Tagde) and grandmother (Sushama Deshpande) in a small village in Maharashtra. His family is struggling to make ends meet. Khalid and his rest of the class is taught the story of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj eliminating Afzal Khan. Khalid’s classmate Ganya (Ankur Wadhave) is highly arrogant since his father (Khemraj Bhoyar) is the village Sarpanch. After learning the aforementioned story in the class, Ganya mocks Khalid as ‘Afzal Khan’ since the latter is a Muslim. Ganya is joined by a number of other students.

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Mon, January 26 2026

The newest Marvel series, co-created by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, has little action but contains all heart with its grounded superhuman story.

Marvel’s Wonder Man is a different kind of superhero series with fewer characters and an engaging story about an actor trying to break into Hollywood, while hiding a terrifying secret. The eight-episode series is co-created by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest and features Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Simon Williams, a struggling actor looking for the role that will change his life. Enter the perfect project with Wonder Man and an old familiar face with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley). The superhero series veers away from the usual Marvel tropes and instead creates a refreshingly honest and emotional story of two friends who connect over shared passions.

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Mon, January 26 2026

Sat, January 24 2026

The “Supreme” in Marty Supreme has dual connotations. The obvious one is that here’s an underdog hero who will stop at nothing to achieve sporting supremacy. Marty Mauser will be an anti-hero, a hustler, a fraud, a narcissist and whoever it takes to summon his destiny of being world champion. Usually, such protagonists have to overcome the system with talent and grit. Here, the talent and grit are almost incidental. It is assumed he has those, so he’d rather game the system in the language of those who run it. As a Jewish shoe salesman in 1950s New York in a post-Holocaust world, he is accustomed to selling his identity more than proving it. America and table tennis are merely his mediums to be seen; he is neither patriotic nor a purist. If he’s an allegory for the entitlement of US capitalism and the illusion of the American Dream — where he upends multiple lives and puts everyone at risk to get what he wants — so be it.

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Sun, January 25 2026

Clint Bentley’s Oscar-nominated ‘Train Dreams’, starring Joel Edgerton, is a thoughtful and mysterious era-spanning story

There’s a scene I often return to in Apur Sansar (1959), the third in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, that’s an eloquent defence of ordinariness. Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is being gently pulled up by a friend for his lack of ambition. He ventures that he’s writing a novel, and starts narrating the story: a boy grows up in the village, moves to the city, studies hard. “We feel he has in him seeds of greatness, but…” “He doesn’t succeed?” the friend guesses. “He doesn’t,” Apu replies. “But to him this isn’t a tragedy. He realises one must face reality. One must live!” Robert Grainier wouldn’t be able to articulate this, but he’d agree. He’s a young orphan at the start of Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, in a tiny town in rural Idaho. “He quit attending school in his early teens, and the next two decades passed without much direction or purpose,” the voiceover says. He becomes a logger, and though he works a few other jobs, that’s the only real profession he has. He’s in his 80s when the film closes, and has lived most of his life in the same small town.

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Fri, December 5 2025

Train Dreams reclaims the importance of feeling like someone, not just anyone. Of knowing that no emotion is futile, no sadness is small, no memory is hollow, and no life is pointless.

In Train Dreams, life is but an accruement of endings. Based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Clint Bentley’s tender fever-dream of a film is rooted in the anonymity of time: an anti-Forrest Gump of sorts. It’s about the kind of man that history is wired to forget: a humble woodlogger and railroad construction worker, a normal husband and father, a survivor and soliloquy, a grafter and griever. A voice-over introduces Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) as an orphan in his childhood; it closes with him at 80, having lived and loved and lost and lived in the shadow of loss. He is a reluctant protagonist masquerading as just another person. It’s almost as if the story keeps leaving him behind in the hope that he will catch up.

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Mon, December 1 2025

Adapted from a 2011 novella written by Denis Johnson, Bentley’s film chronicles the tenderness and awe in Robert’s seemingly ‘ordinary’ life, most of which isn’t immediately apparent to him.

It takes a special kind of film to be aware of its surroundings. It is one thing to fetishise nature and invite comparison to the sweeping scale of a Terrence Mallick film but Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams does something interesting with the vessel of a meandering Mallick film. It cuts and splices the essential bits of a man’s journey fuelled by cosmic wonder: the meaning of it all. And it does that using a specific means: a voiceover (by Will Patton).

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Sun, January 25 2026

Directed by Sharan Koppisetty, Cheekatilo is a murder mystery headlined by Sobhita Dhulipala. With valid lessons on patriarchy, the film bites into cliches of an investigative thriller.

Murder mysteries and investigation dramas always rely on thrills, suspense and high-stakes drama. Most whodunnit thrillers have a male hero leading the investigation from the front. The Telugu film, Cheekatilo, has the feisty Sobhita Dhulipala leading a murder mystery, thereby standing out from a crowd of films of the same genre. Did Cheekatilo manage to crack the formula? Let’s find out!

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Fri, January 23 2026

Sharan Kopishetty’s Telugu film works more as a compelling social commentary than an edge-of-the-seat whodunnit

There are two strands to Cheekatilo (In the Darkness), the Prime Video original Telugu film directed by Sharan Kopishetty. On the surface, it is a crime drama that attempts to build an edge-of-the-seat whodunnit. At its core, however, it is a social commentary that urges silenced voices to speak, heal and find closure to long-buried wounds. In a film led by Sobhita Dhulipala, this second strand proves far more compelling.

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Sun, January 25 2026

Baby Girl, directed by Arun Varma and starring Nivin Pauly, Lijomil Jose, Sangeeth Prathap, and Abhimanyu Shammi Thilakan, is an emotional thriller about the kidnapping of a three-day-old baby. The film struggles to balance drama and thriller elements, ultimately failing to do justice to either genre.

A few minutes into Nivin Pauly’s Baby Girl, we are taken into a hospital where the doctors have called Code Pink. Those who are familiar with medical dramas like Dr House or Grey’s Anatomy would be instantly hooked, as Code Pink means a baby is missing. In director Arun Varma’s Baby Girl, a three-day-old baby girl goes missing. Sanal Mathews (Nivin Pauly) is an attender who is in the thick of things here. At its core, Baby Girl shows immense promise to be an emotional thriller. But, Baby Girl takes a different route and struggles to find a balance between being a drama and a thriller.

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Sat, January 24 2026

With the story of a newborn’s disappearance from a hospital losing momentum by the halfway mark, the rest of the film plods along with the aid of the emotional drama and a few convenient contrivance.

Fifteen years ago, Malayalam cinema was not in the pink of health when the screenwriting duo of Bobby-Sanjay came up with Traffic, which would give a new sense of direction for the industry. In 2026, when the same duo returns with Baby Girl, after a mix of memorable and forgettable films in the intervening years, they borrow some of the elements from their most successful film yet. But then, times have changed and the tastes of the audience too have evolved, and things that worked back in the day might not work now, which is what unfortunately happens with Baby Girl’

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Sun, January 25 2026

Border 2, like its predecessor Border (1997), throws light on the Indian defense forces’ bravery during the 1971 India-Pakistan war. But unlike the 1997 film, this one focusses on different characters who took part in the war. Major Hoshiar Singh Dahiya (Varun Dhawan) of the Indian Army, Flight Officer Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon (Diljit Dosanjh) of the Indian Air Force and Lieutenant Commander Mahendra S Rawat (Ahan Shetty) of the Indian Navy become thick friends during their training days at the National War Academy. They share a respectful relation with their trainer Lieutenant Colonel Fateh Singh Kaler (Sunny Deol).

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Sun, January 25 2026

Patriotism, in its truest form, is an unexplainable emotion. If you are patriotic, you know it is largely a one-sided relationship, almost like one’s belief in God. You either feel it, or you do not. I remember discussing Laal Singh Chaddha with someone, where the titular character saves a slain Pakistani soldier purely out of humanity. The idea that brotherhood should be placed above national pride was something my head understood, not my heart. As I sat down to watch Border 2, I wished it could evoke that unadulterated feeling, which is second only to our love for kith and kin.

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Sun, January 25 2026

Sun, January 25 2026

The six-part series, led by Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner, engages viewers with the suspense of the heist mastermind till the end

Sophie Turner stars in the London heist thriller Steal, which escalates the drama with each episode. Creator and writer Sotiris Nikias takes viewers into the largest armed robbery in British history as a pension-fund investment company is looted right in their own offices. The twisty drama follows Turner’s Zara, who finds herself at the heart of the mystery and police investigation as she tries to save herself. With a small cast of characters that are hard to read, the Amazon Prime Video series Steal is a bingeable watch for the weekend.

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Sun, January 25 2026