Thu, December 25 2025

इस रिव्यू का हैडिंग पढ़ कर यदि आप सोच रहे हों कि यह फिल्म खिचड़ी या दलिए की तरह पौष्टिक होगी और तो ज़रा रुकिए… पहले इस फिल्म ‘तू मेरी मैं तेरा मैं तेरा तू मेरी’ (TMMTMTTM) का पूरा रिव्यू पढ़ लीजिए, फिर फैसला कीजिएगा। अमेरिका में बस चुका एक बेहद अमीर लड़का दिल्ली से सीधे क्रोएशिया जा रहा है-घूमने, अकेले। न बिक पा रही किताबें लिख कर (पता नहीं कैसे) अमीर बन चुकी लड़की भी वहीं जा रही है-घूमने अकेले। अब किसी टूर पर दो अकेले मिलेंगे तो दुकेले हो ही जाएंगे न! तो बस, यहां भी वही हुआ। पहले रार, तकरार, फिर बिस्तर वाला और बाद में सच्चा प्यार। लेकिन बीच में आ गई मां-बाप की दीवार। दरअसल लड़के की मां को अमेरिका में रहना पसंद है और लड़की के बाप को आगरा में। अब लड़का जा पहुंचा है आगरा में अपनी सिमरन के बाऊ जी को पटाने। क्योंकि वह सिमरन ही क्या जो बाऊ जी की मर्ज़ी के बिना शादी कर ले और वह बाऊ जी ही क्या जो अंत में यह न कह दें-जा सिमरन जा, जी ले अपनी ज़िंदगी। दुर्र फिट्टे मुंह!

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Thu, December 25 2025

Despite trying to tackle themes such as love and tradition, the execution in writing and acting fails to engage the audience. The film ultimately becomes more of a tourism ad than a cohesive narrative.

Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri. Any film with a title that aims for the tongue twister hall of fame — and failing spectacularly even on that front — is anyway trying too hard. The rest of it is no different. TMMTMTTM (took me multiple back space taps to get that right) tries too hard to be a breezy comedy. It tries too hard to be an intense romance. It tries too hard to have a cool cat of a leading man. It tries too hard to have a heroine in touch with her emotions. It tries to hard to conjure chemistry. It tries too hard to build conflict. It tries to hard to be an “it’s all about loving your parents” emo-drama (their words, not ours). And it tries way too hard be a “2025 ke hookup culture mein ‘90s ki love story.”

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Thu, December 25 2025

The title is a put-off, sounding like a stuck record. When it takes off with the glossy visuals expected from Dharma Productions, the scene’s set for fun, flirting, a helping of calibrated humour. But back-to-back songs in Croatia, shot like a travelogue, begin to discomfortingly resemble a tourist pamphlet. The he’s-so-annoying hero who has the heroine’s lips curled with irritation, is so textbook Hum Tum (2004) that ho-ho, how funny, slips into ho-hum, how silly.

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Tue, December 23 2025

Avatar: Fire and Ash is the weakest instalment of James Cameron’s trilogy. We discuss the many ways in which the movie betrays the franchise’s core values, the illogical directions that Cameron sends Jake Sully in, and the loose ends that the film ends with. We also talk about the lack of humour and self-awareness, the poor dialogue, and the incomprehensible third act action sequences.

Sat, December 20 2025

James Cameron commits to his vision so hard and for so long, like a character from Inception who’s missed the kick only to get stuck in limbo on a deeper dream level. There is no way out now.

Rarely have I seen so much used to achieve so very little. Unless you count the US invasion of Iraq — which, in the Avatar universe, would amount to cocky American soldiers looking for an excuse to plunder a mineral-rich planet after destroying their own. I want to say “empty spectacle”, but to be honest, Avatar: Fire and Ash is not much of a spectacle either. Spectacles do more than just look vast and technically proficient and convoluted and greedy in 2025; they do more than just go round and round and round in the painstaking and now-dated worlds they’ve built; they do more than employ disorienting 3D motion-smoothing effects to impress the fans rather than express the stakes; they do more than take two decades of technological advancements and old-fashioned originality only to end up feeling precisely like those superhero overkills they were once an antidote to; they do more than be a legacy of groundbreaking CGI; they do more than do more. James Cameron has made a career out of dreaming big and heavy, but with this third Avatar film, he’s a bit like that mad scientist who gets so obsessed with creating and reinventing that he bypasses the basic essence of the medium.

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Sat, December 20 2025

James Cameron’s third film in the sci-fi franchise dazzles on the surface, but history keeps repeating itself — right down to the tropes, the arcs, and the messages — all delivered with more spectacle than novelty

James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash picks up things where the second part, Avatar: The Way of Water, left us. Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), the second son of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), is ridden with the guilt of being the reason for the death of his elder brother Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). Even Sully seems to blame him for the loss; he even spells it out, giving the necessary redemption arc to Lo’ak, who continues to defy orders — just like his father from the first part.

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Tue, December 23 2025

You cannot separate a film’s politics from its craft—you cannot separate your own politics from your opinion. To do so would be like judging a Dal Makhani on the basis of presentation but not taste. Dhurandhar is vile propaganda whose influence will spread beyond even its target audience of unemployed youth and WhatsApp uncles. We discuss how objectionable every scene involving R. Madhavan is, how abrupt the climax feels, and why director Aditya Dhar is so afraid of examining complexity. We also talk about the incendiary red screen scene and its possible implications, and wonder why they chose to make the protagonist a murderer for hire instead of a real patriot with real motivations to undertake such a high-stakes mission.

Sat, December 13 2025

The soul of Dhurandhar is rooted in quiet deception. Wait, I’m talking about Hamza Ali Mazari’s (Ranveer Singh) mission. He’s a spy operating across borders in this 214-minute film, and given this running time and the number of characters, motivations and political threads it handles, this film could very easily have collapsed into something rambling and frustrating. But it doesn’t, largely thanks to a smart structural decision: chapter segregation. The eight chapters keep the narrative in control, allowing the film to introduce competent characters like SP Aslam and Rehman Dakait as formidable, thinking opponents rather than fragile villains. The nuanced performances help too. Akshaye Khanna is potent, yes, but also so human in confusion and rage.

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Wed, December 10 2025

Aditya Dhar’s second film after 'Uri: The Surgical Strike' stars Ranveer Singh as a patriotic spy trapped in an inert and distracted action thriller.

Since deception is the language of a spy thriller, let’s pretend that movies exist entirely in isolation — like an introvert on a Saturday night. Let’s pretend that Dhurandhar, Aditya Dhar’s directorial return after Uri (2019), has absolutely nothing to do with the world around us. (One could argue that it doesn’t, but that’s a mob attack for another day). Let’s also pretend that film criticism is about seeing a movie for what it is, regardless of its moral character or ideology. It’s only fair, given that we all admire great serial killers for being awesome at what they do, legendary dictators for being no-nonsense leaders, wars for being the epitome of courage and technology, and plane crashes for doing tragedy so well.

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Tue, December 23 2025

Despite its scattered pleasures, the final season of the series, touted to be Indian version of Sex and the City and Girls, delivers tidy resolutions, minimal tension, and dated portrayals of friendship and desire

Four More Shots Please! returns for its fourth and final season the way it always has: mid-chaos, mid-confession, and mid-freakout. The opening image is telling. There is a wedding underway, and right at its centre is Siddhi Patel (Maanvi Gagroo), spiralling. She is high on brownies, overwhelmed by commitment, and quietly devastated by the absence of her father, whose death still sits like an unprocessed ache. It is a familiar emotional cocktail for this show: intimacy laced with panic, humour doing the work of survival. But after the vows are sealed, the four women make a pact: to confront the patterns they keep dragging from season to season. It is a neat way to begin a finale. It is also, unfortunately, emblematic of a season more interested in tying ribbons than in pulling threads tighter.

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Mon, December 22 2025

Franchises are the flavour of the season, and Honey Trehan’s Raat Akeli Hai remains a highly specific one. Once again, a murder mystery is investigated by the no-nonsense, middle-class cop Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), with the victims being members of a powerful family in Uttar Pradesh – the Bansals. The Knives Out template is reworked through a bunch of crazy, rich Indian issues and layered with an exterior coating of capitalism in Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders.

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Sat, December 20 2025

Nawazuddin Siddiqui carries the film and is more than convincing in his single-minded pursuit of truth

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is back as Inspector Jatil Yadav, and in sync with his name, so is the complexity of the case he cracks in the second outing of this Honey Trehan directorial. In the very first scene, Meera (Chitrangda Singh) races out of her house frantically and drops of blood fall on her face. Scene shifts. Inspector Jatil is asked to investigate what appears to be black magic, cast on this well-heeled family.

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Sat, December 20 2025

The best written character remains Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Jatil, still moving his mouth in the way he did in the first film, as the moral centre of the film.

‘Yahan par hathyakaand hua hai, force bhejiye.’ Small town cop Jatil Yadav and his trusty phatphatiya are back, solving murders most foul. The Lucknow-Kanpur axis is very much present in this spiritual sequel of the 2020 thriller Raat Akeli Hai, as are several key characters, but the ensemble is much bigger, with multiple bodies this time round.

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Sun, December 21 2025

Daayam, which is a Malayalam film, takes place in a town in Kerala. Kalyani (Aathira Rajeev) is going through the most emotionally challenging period of her life after her mother passed away a few days back in the most unexpected manner. Her house is full of relatives as they need to complete a few rituals for the departed. There are murmurs about all not being well between her mother and father Raghu (Pradeep Geedha) in recent times. Kalyani mentally takes stock of these situations as she tries settling into a new life with her father.

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Fri, December 19 2025

In his sophomore venture, Daayam (Inheritance), Prasanth Vijay tiptoes gently and noiselessly into the inner world of a girl dealing with the premature death of her mother. The result is a subtle, mellow study of bereavement and its upshots. The independent Malayalam-language film makes a sharp departure from the conventions of the coming-of-age genre. It uses the muted and delicate narrative approach of the kind that marked the director’s critically acclaimed 2017 debut, The Summer of Miracles.

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Fri, December 19 2025

With his sophomore film ‘Daayam,’ Prasanth Vijay, one of the exciting homegrown talents, has shown that he is here to stay

Grief does not always arrive as a torrent. Sometimes, it seeps in ever so slowly, evoked by things which used to be mundane till a few days ago. In Prasanth Vijay’s film Daayam (Inheritance), being screened in the Malayalam Cinema Today section of the 28th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), an old voice note from her deceased mother about some daily chores brings 17-year old Kalyani (Aathira Rajeev) to tears.

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Sun, December 21 2025

Director PR Arun's web series Pharma, starring Nivin Pauly and Rajit Kapur, is a battle between a common man and a corporate giant. Set in the pharmaceutical world, the show is gripping despite minor shortcomings.

Nivin Pauly delivered the only and greatest comeback of the week. A character in the film calls him the Comeback King and by the end of the show, you realise why. Pharma, being his foray into the OTT space, brought back memories of the films that the actor nailed in the past. While the past few years have seen fewer films and fewer hits, it feels like a huge relief to see him having so much control over his craft in PR Arun’s Pharma. The eight-episode series, streaming on JioHotstar, is a delightful thriller, though with minor shortcomings.

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Sat, December 20 2025

Series driver Madhuri Dixit is ripe for roles which are out of her comfort zone: she no longer has to appear glamorous to catch our attention. But she’s written flatly, like many other stretches.

A serial killer is on the loose in Mumbai, targeting his victims with a coil of lurid green rope, arranging them in different poses in different locations. A grizzled cop (Priyanshu Chatterjee) with a long memory remembers a much older series of killings 25 years back in Pune, whose perpetrator has been in prison for that long. Are these copycat killings? But who would know about those murders, carefully buried in dusty case files? Cue Mrs Deshpande (Madhuri Dixit) who is whistled up by the senior policeman to help them crack this case, whose victims seem to have no connection to each other other than a striking similarity in the modus operandi of their murders. She’s been far away from Mumbai, in Hyderabad central jail, being a model prisoner, suspiciously good, in fact.

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Fri, December 19 2025

Madhuri Dixit stars in a stagey crime thriller that unfolds in a hurry.

Nagesh Kukunoor’s had quite the year: an uncanny performance in Paatal Lok 2, the maker of the meticulously dramatised The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, and now the director of a series in which Madhuri Dixit plays a serial killer. It’s no small deal, particularly because Dixit’s role in and as Mrs. Deshpande feels like a spiritual sequel to her role in Anjaam. This six-episode series is based on a French thriller called La Mante, but Dixit’s homemaker is very much the future of that vengeful widow who slaughtered all the evil men that ruined her life. As a character, Mrs. Deshpande is less personal and, in keeping with the times, more patriotic. The stillness about her borders on inertia. Her vague modus operandi revolves around finishing off societal villains like paedophiles, rapists and corrupt politicians. (Add film critics to her list this month). An ethical vigilante of sorts, the show opens with the middle-aged woman being summoned from Hyderabad jail when a copycat killer seems to be on the loose. The style of murder is hers, so she is the only one who can help an absurdly trustful police team to solve the case. A young inspector named Tejas Phadke (an awkward Siddharth Chandekar) leads the investigation, and he’s very suspicious of Mrs. Deshpande — who has renamed herself as Zeenat — and her chequered history. He takes a while to warm up to her in the safehouse. She loves cooking for everyone, but he wonders what plan she’s cooking.

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Fri, December 19 2025

A body is staged leisurely before the murderer vanishes. It’s déjà vu for Mumbai’s Commissioner of Police Arun Khatri (Priyanshu Chatterjee) who dials the central jail in Hyderabad. Mrs. Seema Deshpande (Madhuri Dixit), the serial killer he had imprisoned twenty-five years ago, is still behind bars. Who’s the copycat killer who has patterned himself/herself on Mrs. Deshpande’s modus operandi?

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Fri, December 19 2025

In a time when love is often reduced to language and performance, Prabhash Chandra's film sits with the cost of loving someone till the very end.

There came a scene in Prabhash Chandra’s Alaav (which as the English title Hearth & Home) when my jaw dropped on the floor. A 60-something Bhaveen is helping his 90-something mother, Savitri, relieve herself. It’s the part of a caregiving film, where most filmmakers prefer implying it by either starting the scene before or after the said deed. But in Alaav, the camera (thanks to the dependable ingenuity of cinematographer Vikas Urs) remains strategically placed, straddling a pencil-thin ethical line – where on one side they could be accused of being voyeuristic and exploitative; on the other end, it could be held for trying to lessen the blow of a hard-hitting reality. Remaining true to its static, observational style – the scene went on for longer than I was ready for, making me shift in my seat uncomfortably. It’s only then did I recognise what Chandra was trying to highlight – the selflessness of it all. We hear truisms like ‘being of service’ to something bigger than us, but nothing quite tests it like when we take care of a loved one in a hopeless situation, and when everything is only steadily regressing.

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Thu, December 4 2025

Stands apart as one of the most quietly affecting Indian independent films of recent years, resonating with audiences at global festivals for its authenticity and emotional precision.

Life stands still and yet flows inexorably in Alaav – Hearth and Home, written and directed by Prabhash Chandra. The uncompromisingly austere film approximates the restrained tempo of existence when old age takes its toll on both the giver and recipient of geriatric care. With its meticulously composed frames and strikingly unhurried rhythm, Alaav delineates the weight of ageing and its repercussions on a 95-year-old woman and her sexagenarian son sheltered in a well-appointed Delhi home.

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Fri, December 19 2025

In its effort to create a film that tries to be wild, we’re left feeling like we’re watching gibberish on screen.

Ever since directors like Karthik Subbaraj and Lokesh Kanagaraj made it socially acceptable for a film to be termed a “fanboy sambhavam”, we as the audience were aware that this sub-genre would eventually spread to all languages, catering to almost every fanbase. Dhananjay Shankar’s Bha Bha Ba is among Malayalam cinema’s most desperate attempts at cashing in on this cow and the film tries to do this by milking the fanbases of two of its major stars—Dileep (obviously) and Mohanlal.

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Thu, December 18 2025

Directed by Dhananjay Shankar, Bha Bha Ba, starring Dileep and Vineeth Sreenivasan, is an attempt at madcap comedy with numerous meta references. The film, however, feels more like Dileep asserting his innocence in the wake of his recent acquittal.

Bha Bha Ba, short for Bhayam, Bhakthi, Bahumanam (fear, devotion, respect), is billed as Dileep’s “great comeback” that he has been waiting for. From the trailer to the film’s promotional materials, the film is regarded as the actor’s biggest return to comedy, a genre that originally defined his career. With Mohanlal playing a cameo, will Bha Bha Ba help Dileep deliver the “comeback” that he’s hoping for? Keep reading to know what we feel.

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Thu, December 18 2025

Created by Darren Star, the rom-com revolving around Europe's most famous American expat is back with a wiser outlook.

The American fashionista Emily Cooper is back, and this time, she’s setting up base in Rome, Italy. Au revoir Paris? Not quite yet. The Netflix series Emily in Paris returns for a fifth season that once again puts our favourite bunch of Parisians through the ringer. There are hookups and breakups, goodbyes and hellos as the characters have some big life decisions to ponder. Created by Darren Star, the romantic comedy has settled in, only to reinvent itself yet again.

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Wed, December 17 2025

Based on the popular video game, the entertaining post-apocalyptic series picks up where it left off as Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) head off to New Vegas.

Fallout first premiered alongside The Last of Us in 2024 and established itself as a worthy addition to the world of video game adaptations. Now, as it returns for its second season, the Amazon Prime Video game doesn’t waste time in setting up the universe anymore. It dives right into the next phase as the main characters are once again separated, off on personal quests to seek answers. The one exception is Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), who reluctantly team up. Their dynamic is what drives this exciting new instalment that shifts into second gear, with vast, unexplored locations, new characters, and more.

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