Fri, June 26 2026

The Moment of truth arrives when Akshay pleads 'Hum sab bhand hain' in the face of fear and power. If only the rest of this slog was as self-aware as this single scene

When the first Welcome came out in 2007, the comic camaraderie between Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar as Majnu and Uday delivered on its laugh out loud promise. With the second one, Welcome Back, the madness appeared to be losing its edge save for the lone, loony graveyard scene elevated by Anil and Nana’s superbness in a leave-your-brains-behind brand of comedy. Third time’s the charm? If chuckling five times in three hours is the new definition of hilarity, sure, why not? Welcome To The Jungle’s crowded chaos strays wholly from its loony gangsters theme to achieve its ‘big is better’ beliefs. Director Ahmed Khan replaces Anees Bazmee for this sillier-by-the-second spectacle starring a swarm of stars. As a matter of fact, one hour of its 164 minutes long circus is spent introducing its unending stock of characters as part of Welcome To The Jungle’s grand humorous plan.

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Fri, June 26 2026

Lacks the sense to refrain from mocking a particular body type, ageing, speech and voice defects of various kinds, a language, and even myopia, in its blind pursuit of amusement. Not funny at all.

An action-comedy that never finds its way out of the woods, Welcome to the Jungle jangles along mindlessly down a messy path. It delivers chaos, cacophony and confusion in bushels. Like it or lump it. The film gives an unwieldy cast the kind of freedom that only a muddled, overstuffed screenplay can. The actors stop at nothing, hamming it up like there is no tomorrow. While they have a ball, and then some, the Firoz Nadiadwala-produced film, directed by Ahmed Khan (who has toted up quite a few sequels and takes over the reins of this one from Anees Bazmee), lurches merrily from one massive wobble to another.

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Fri, June 26 2026

Fri, June 26 2026

Amol Parasher has grown into his role, and while he shares the screen with everyone else, it is his Prabhat, refusing to give in, and give up, which is the fulcrum.

Season 2 of this rural-com returns with its low stakes, lo-fi storytelling, in which the TVF mandate– keep it cosy, bro– stays comfortably uppermost. No surprises then that our idealistic doctor stays the course, even as the clashes between the twain– the citified outsider and the set-in-their-ways villagers– continue. Also back in harness are his little unit of compounder, nurse and helpers, the colleague-turning-into-friendly-companion, the rival local quack, and the gaonwalas themselves, slowly if reluctantly, understanding the value of a real ‘daaktar saab’ who can actually save lives.

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Fri, June 26 2026

Season 2 of 'Gram Chikitsalay' continues to reimagine 'Panchayat' in a rural-healthcare context, and continues to be middling in its returns

With Panchayat going downhill, you’d think Gram Chikitsalay would be looking to forge its own identity after acting like a stalker in its first season. But the essence of “TVF Rural Universe” goes beyond the template of an idealistic urban character arriving to work in a ramshackle village full of idiosyncratic residents, aggressively colourful dialects, mundane conflicts and backward mindsets. The shared formula is more of an excuse to make the same series twice over. It’s a bit like watching a famous South Indian director making his Bollywood debut by remaking — or culturally adapting — his biggest hit. The remake always looks more rehearsed, functional, designed, and bereft of spontaneity.

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Fri, June 26 2026

The filmmaker and the screenwriter seem to have taken the period setting of the film in the early 1990s a little too seriously, for the writing and making have a visible hangover of that era

One of the highly charged sequences in Ananthan Kaadu, directed by Jiyen Krishnakumar and written by Murali Gopy, happens inside a college campus in Thiruvananthapuram in the early 1990s. This “mass” scene featuring the screenwriter himself in a highly imaginary scenario, hardly has any connection with the main plot, almost as if it accidentally got mixed into this film from the edits of some other film. Its only intention appears to be to inject some regressive political points into the narrative. This particular sequence might not be surprising for those who have watched Tiyaan (2017), the previous team-up of Jiyen Krishnakumar and Murali Gopy, which had its share of regressive politics packaged in the garb of a progressive film.

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Thu, June 25 2026

Supergirl has more spark than Superman in spirit, If not in scale. Milly Alcock is superb as an emotionally numb drifter masking deep-seated grief with impulsive behaviour and a sense of exhaustion. She channels Kara's dormant rage and lingering heartbreak with remarkable conviction.

Superhero fatigue has been setting in for quite some time now, with both Marvel and DC struggling to find the right footing. In the race for bigger spectacles, sprawling multiverses, time travel, and interconnected sagas, many superhero films traded genuine emotion and character for sheer scale and experimentation. Audiences, understandably, began to lose interest. James Gunn rebooted the DC Universe with Superman (2025), introducing the dimpled David Corenswet as the new Man of Steel. While the film dazzled with its scale and visual ambition, it often felt emotionally scattered and underwhelming. What lingered long after the credits, however, were the brief but memorable glimpses of Milly Alcock’s carefree, rebellious Supergirl.

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Tue, June 23 2026

Sat, June 20 2026

Director Sasi's Nooru Sami, starring Swasika, Ajay Dhishan and Vijay Antony, is a well-intentioned drama that explores remarriage. While the story great potential, it has many shortcomings in terms of its presentation.

Director Sasi and actor-composer Vijay Antony reunited for Nooru Sami, 10 years after Pichaikkaran, a film that ended up as a sleeper hit for the actor. Pichaikkaran is an emotional drama about a mother and son, while Nooru Sami explores the concept of remarriage for a widow in a conservative world. Selvi (Swasika), a widowed mother, raises her two sons Bhaskar (Ajay Dhishan) and Vivek (Sakthi) on her own. She watches them come up in their lives only for them to be consumed by ego and hating each other. One day, Selvi, in passing, mentions that she might like to remarry, much to the shock of her two sons.

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Sat, June 20 2026

Led by a brilliant Swasika, Sasi’s ‘Nooru Sami’ is a moving portrait of a woman reclaiming her desires, dignity, and right to a life of her own.

Life in the hinterland can be brutal. Identities are distinctly carved out between the haves and the have-nots — the “have” here can refer to material wealth or social standing. In director Sasi’s Nooru Sami (A Hundred Gods), Selvi (a fabulous Swasika) is a young widow with two sons, struggling to raise them in a society that is judgmental and not very kind. Sasi is known for his deft portrayal of village life and its people, and Nooru Sami, based on a real-life story, benefits from his vision. It is filled with little nuggets, some pleasant, most not, which drive home the torment in Selvi’s heart.

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Tue, June 23 2026

Sun, June 21 2026

‘Balan: The Boy’, from Chidambaram, director of ‘Manjummel Boys’, is at different times a thriller, home invasion film, procedural and melodrama.

There is an incredible time jump a little over halfway into Chidambaram’s Balan: The Boy. A police station hide and seek battle between a police constable and a lost little boy (Adiseshan) occurs in parallel with the search for his identity, conducted by the police officer, the one who’s given the constable babysitting duties. We move between the officer’s investigation outside and the game in the station as the nonplussed constable launches a frenetic search only to hit a wall. With a medium size hole in it small enough for the boy to crawl through. A painful realization dawns on her face and a match cut takes us to a bus window with the solitary face of a teenager speaking a language from another part of India. The whole sequence is hardly a few minutes long, but Chidambaram, cinematographer Shyju Khalid and editor Vivek Harshan take us on such a delirious ride that we transcend time.

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Sat, June 20 2026

A painful ode to lost innocence and a boyhood that never was—a heartrending drama about a son's search for his mother, even when the film wanders a little too far from its core.

The Boy, directed by Chidambaram, calling it a painful ode to lost innocence and a boyhood that never was—a heartrending drama about a son’s search for his mother, even when the film wanders a little too far from its core. Vishal admires how unengineered the storytelling feels; rather than a constructed plot, it plays like someone recalling the most vivid memories that defined his childhood. He traces Indhu (Farzana), who gave birth to the titular Balan in prison, as she and her son move from city to city, terrain to terrain, even religion to religion, assuming fresh identities and back stories while she reminds herself to trust no one. Vishal lingers on the duo’s outlaw spirit, the recurring sense of the past catching up with them, and the moments—a shopkeeper’s request, a marriage proposal, a heart-shaped earring—that each become Indhu’s cue to flee.

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Tue, June 23 2026

The Shahid Kapoor, Kriti Sanon, Rashmika Mandanna starrer broaches the right questions about relationships, but doesn't dive deep enough to offer potent answers

Be practical (read: boring and safe) or free-spirited (read: fun and unpredictable)? That’s the life-defining choice Kunal (Shahid Kapoor) has to make by the end of two hours and 30 minutes of Homi Adajania’s Cocktail 2. It sees the audience go from drab Delhi to sunny, sandy and scenic Sicily and back to drab Delhi, witness an excess of sartorial flourishes from costume designer Anaita Shroff Adajania and watch the trio—Ally (Kriti Sanon), Diya (Rashmika Mandanna) and Kunal—laugh their way through life to such extravagance that your own cheeks hurt at their expense.

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Sat, June 20 2026

Sat, June 20 2026

There is no delicate way to put this: Cocktail 2 boasts one of the most ludicrous stories I have encountered in recent memory. A spiritual sequel to Cocktail (2012), the film ostensibly wants to discuss modern relationships, commitment issues and the institution of marriage. Unfortunately, it takes such a circuitous route to get there that it makes a GPS with no signal look reliable.

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Mon, June 22 2026

Based on an actual incident that took place in January 2024, The Voice of Hind Rajab bares open the atrocities that have ravaged Palestine due to the war. The docu-drama uses actual audio recordings of the five year old Hind Rajab, which makes the film all the more authentic and raw.

There is a certain uneasiness inside you after you finish watching the Voice of Hind Rajab. The voice of five-year-old Hind Rajab, or Hanood as she was called fondly, continues to echo in your ears hours after the film is over. Directed by Kaouther Ben Henia, the docu-feature blends reality and fiction to deliver a heartwrenching account of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab and her urgent pleas on calls to Red Crescent volunteers to rescue her after her family was ambushed by the Israeli forces in January 2024. The Voice Of Hind Rajab is a film that is a testament to the times we live in. And while the semi-fictional semi-real film makes you uncomfortable, angry, emotional and ultimately numb, it is an important watch.

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Sat, June 20 2026

“The tank is next to me.” “They are shooting at me.” “Come get me. I’m all on my own.” Few films begin with lines this freighted with irrevocability. The Voice of Hind Rajab confronts us with the real voice of a five-year-old girl whose fate is already known, stripping cinema of suspense and replacing it with something far more devastating: certainty. If urgency in the narrative holds it together as a piece of cinema, it is inevitability that makes director Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama an impossibly heartbreaking affair. The film is set inside the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s call centre in Ramallah on January 29, 2024. As the war between Israel and Palestine rages on, employees operate in a heightened emotional state, trained to respond to civilian SOS calls amid constant crisis. Omar (Motaz Malhees), Rana (Saja Kilani), Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), and Nisrine (Clara Khoury), the fictional leads, along with the late Hind Rajab’s real voice on a phone call, have guts of steel, but their hearts ache too, as do those of the viewers.

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Sat, June 20 2026

Kaouther Ben Hania's Oscar-nominated docudrama, built around a five-year-old's real phone calls from Gaza on the last day of her life, had failed to get a Central Board of Film Certification clearance earlier this year. The film, which releases in India today, makes the audience sit through the dread of knowing how it ends.

The most wrenching performance in The Voice of Hind Rajab was never performed. At the centre of Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama sits a real recording: the shaking voice of a five-year-old girl captured on the last afternoon of her life. Everything assembled around it is staged. The friction between the two — actors straining toward a child who is already beyond their reach — is what makes the film almost unbearable. The facts are a matter of record. On 29 January 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab was trapped in a car in Gaza City, hemmed in by the bodies of her aunt, uncle and four cousins, after Israeli fire tore through the vehicle as the family tried to flee. She was the only one left alive. For hours, she stayed on the line with volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, asking, over and over, for someone to come for her. The ambulance that was finally dispatched never reached her; its two paramedics were killed, too. Hind was found dead days later. The recordings of those calls, released afterwards, went around the world. Ben Hania built her film around them.

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Sun, June 21 2026

Naseeruddin Shah headlines a film about love and loss and longing.

It has been a week since the end credits rolled for Imtiaz Ali’s Main Wapas Aaunga, but the film has been playing non-stop inside my head and heart. It has been peeling itself, layer by layer, to reveal the nuances that might have been missed when you were bawling your heart out for a love lost, and people displaced. This is the second movie this year to pay spiritual homage to Sargodha — the first was Sriram Raghavan’s tender anti-war film Ikkis, about war hero Arul Khetarpal. I confess I saw the movie through the many stories of escape I had heard in my six years (1997-2003) in Delhi, living in Old Rajinder Nagar, one of the colonies the refugees settled in. Many Papajis and Maajis still shed salty tears for their Pind, for the people, potted plants and property they left behind, never to return to. As we knitted on chill winter mornings when the sun played peekaboo, the creases on Maaji’s face softened, and yet another past memory resurfaced.

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Tue, June 16 2026

In the end, Imtiaz Ali, though sometimes full of feeling, seems full of sermonising.

In a scene during Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga, when Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) takes the stage at an open mic in London, I braced myself. In my head, Ali is notorious for dipping his toes in subcultures he considers ‘hip and trendy’ (like stand-up comedy here, fresco painting in 2009’s Love Aaj Kal) – including them as passing details in a film, never to be brought up again. Over here, it’s used to establish Nirvair as a young wastrel (from a wealthy family in Amritsar) coasting through life. He can’t stick to a job for more than two months, he can’t commit to his girlfriend, Kaveri (Banita Sandhu). His father (Rajat Kapoor) asks, “Why do you keep running?” – a narrative failsafe, lest the metaphor be lost on someone unfamiliar with an escapist Imtiaz Ali protagonist.

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Mon, June 15 2026

At a time when the politics of hostility has engulfed the world and escalated it into senseless wars Main Vaapas Aaunga's unwavering belief in love is a testament to cinema's uplifting gifts

Survivors of Partition could never truly move on as the horrors it brought on continued to haunt their hearts for the rest of their days. So did the hope to see their home once in their lifetime. They never really believed they won’t be able to return ever again. I’ve heard of the displacement and a desire to revisit their home in stories of my grandparent-in-laws. They, like many others, on both sides of the border, died without getting their wish fulfilled. Scenes of burying their wealth in the backyard with hopes of reclaiming it on return, fleeing bloodthirsty foes on the other side with the help of friends from the same community or women wearing a vial of poison around their necks in the event of violent mob attacks, days and days of uncertainty spent in camps would become stories of staying alive. One that flocks of homeless and heartbroken refugees, like my relatives, would remember and remind generations to come.

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Sat, June 20 2026

ஸ்வர்ணாவை (சமந்தா) காதல் திருமணம் செய்ததால், அனிருத் (திகந்த்) தன் குடும்பத்திடமிருந்து பிரிந்திருக்க வேண்டிய நிலை. மீண்டும் அதில் இணைய ஒரு வாய்ப்பு கிட்ட, அந்தப் பெரிய கூட்டுக் குடும்பத்தின் முழுமையான அன்பைப் பெற்று, அந்த வீட்டின் ‘எங்கள் தங்கமாக’ (மா இண்டி பங்காரம்) ஜொலிப்பதை லட்சியமாக ஏற்கிறார் மருமகள் ஸ்வர்ணா. ஆனால் ஸ்வர்ணாவின் இந்த அமைதியான வாழ்க்கைக்குப் பின்னால், ரத்தச் சிவப்பான, வன்முறை நிறைந்த ஒரு இருண்ட முன்கதை இருக்கிறது. பல வருடங்களாக மறைத்து வைக்கப்பட்டிருந்த அந்த ரகசியம், எதிர்பாராத விதமாகக் கொடூரமான வில்லன் கருணாவால் (குல்ஷன் தேவைய்யா) வெளிச்சத்திற்கு வருகிறது. தனது அன்பான குடும்பத்திற்கு வரும் ஆபத்தை ஸ்வர்ணா ஆக்ஷன் மோடில் எப்படிக் கையாண்டார் என்பதே ‘மா இண்டி பங்காரம்’ (தமிழில் ‘எங்கள் தங்கம்’).

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Sat, June 20 2026

Director Nandini Reddy's Maa Inti Bangaaram, starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Gulshan Devaiah, is a female-led commercial film with great action. It is also a film that proves women can headline an action drama and do it convincingly.

An orthodox family preparing for a wedding. A couple who eloped three years ago returns to the family and their village, hoping for acceptance. The protagonist is worried if all will go well. Meanwhile, the protagonist’s past comes to haunt the family. And the character, backed by a massy background score, is ready to put her life on the line to protect the family. Sounds like a usual commercial drama, isn’t it? Now, picture a woman, in a saree, holding guns, and machetes and sickles, all for her family. That’s what Maa Inti Bangaaram is all about. Swarna (Samantha) and her ‘green forest’ husband Anirudh (Diganth Manchale) arrive at her in-laws village home to attend her sister-in-law’s wedding. The couple is meeting their family for the first time in three years after getting married against their parents’ wishes. In an attempt to win the family’s acceptance, Swarna does everything to impress her new family.

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Sat, June 20 2026

Samantha Ruth Prabhu convincingly embraces a mass-action avatar in Nandini Reddy’s family drama, but a familiar template and underwritten twists keep the film from realising its full potential

At the end of Maa Inti Bangaaram (MIB), I kept thinking about what it could have been had the team gone all out with its blend of action entertainer and family drama. Telugu cinema rarely presents a sari-clad female protagonist who can deliver punches powerful enough to send shivers down the spines of thugs. That role belongs to actor-producer Samantha Ruth Prabhu, who once again makes her action sequences convincing. The audience cheers during the high moments; that kind of stardom is earned over time. Samantha’s third outing with director Nandini Reddy, co-produced by Raj Nidimoru, has plenty going for it. Parts of the film are genuinely enjoyable, blending humour, subtle social commentary and action. It remains immensely watchable but falls well short of being a standout.

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Sat, June 20 2026

Toy Story ranks among Hollywood’s longest-running animated franchises. More importantly, in an industry where sequels are often accused of existing primarily to generate revenue, the Toy Story films have consistently managed to be a few notches above the rest. The journey began in 1995 and, with its newest instalment, the franchise is still going strong. Crucially, it continues to keep itself relevant with changing times and audiences.

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Sat, June 20 2026

With little meat on it but a Taylor Swift song and a $250 million budget, is as good a story of excess as any.

Child’s play has always been serious business in the Toy Story franchise. Now, it’s just business. The fifth iteration of this profitable Pixar franchise is way past its game and, more importantly, has lost its sense of play. The central idea is that tech and tablets are replacing toys and imagination. By the end, the central takeaway is that the twain can co-exist happily. After all, says a wisened Jessie/Sheriff (Cusack), once much water has flown under the bridge, the sole mission on Earth for all of them — the ageing Woody (Hanks) to smitten Buzz (Allen) to new-plaything-on-the-block Lilypad — is to be there for the kids when they need them, at the right moment.

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Fri, June 19 2026

इंटरनेट और सोशल मीडिया के इस युग में बच्चों को मोबाइल या स्क्रीन से दूर रखना आज हर माता-पिता के लिए सबसे बड़ी चुनौती है। बच्चे खेल और खिलौने छोड़कर इंटरनेट की वर्चुअल दुनिया में गुम होते जा रहे हैं। इसी मौजू विषय को मनोरंजक अंदाज में दिखाती है ‘टॉय स्टोरी 5’, जो दुनियाभर के बच्चों की पसंदीदा एनिमेशन फिल्म है। करीब 30 साल पहले 1995 में शुरू हुई ‘टॉय स्टोरी’ ऐसी कामयाब फ्रेंचाइजी रही है, जो बच्चों के साथ उनके माता-पिता को भी लुभाती रही है। अब शुक्रवार 19 जून 2026 को ‘टॉय स्टोरी’ की पांचवी कड़ी सिनेमाघरों में रिलीज हुई है। हालांकि, यह पहले जैसा प्रभाव नहीं छोड़ती, लेकिन बच्चों को मनोरंजन के साथ अच्छा सबक जरूर देती है।

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Fri, June 19 2026

The action unfolds inside a massive office tower in the middle of a densely populated city, when a disgruntled scientist launches a bioterror attack during a seminar conducted by his former partner.

A sporadically clever but ultimately convoluted affair, Colony is somehow both underwritten and over-plotted. The Korean horror-thriller marks a long-awaited return to the zombie genre for director Yeon Sang-ho, who broke out internationally almost exactly a decade ago with the clutter-breaking horror hit Train to Busan. That film took a deceptively simple premise, injected it with some old-fashioned melodrama, and managed to appeal both to Western and Asian sensibilities. In the subsequent decade, Yeon has remained highly sought-after, having directed several movies and as many as three Netflix shows. With Colony, he returns to his roots, armed with a bigger budget, seemingly brighter ideas, and a significantly larger canvas to splatter with gore and other grimy fluids.

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