Sat, April 11 2026

Helped by fine performances, director Krishnadas Murali reimagines the theme of the original to offer a somewhat engaging dark comedy

A dead body in the house can be one of the most horrific situations or a source of mirth, depending on the tone and treatment that a movie adopts. Mohiniyattam, which gently spoofs Drishyam, turns the situation into a hilarious affair, with periodic reminders of the dead man’s deceitful nature, supposedly to make us laugh without any sense of guilt. Sequels often end up as pale imitations of the original. But in conceiving a sequel to the mildly funny Bharathanatyam (which incidentally was a spoof of Balettan), Krishnadas Murali reimagines the original’s basic theme, injecting it with loads of dark humour and turning it into a markedly better film, like Vaazha 2 last week.

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Sat, April 11 2026

After a security breach in a small jail, a thief sneaks inside to steal a locked donation box. Two very different police officers, Anbuchelvan and Arjun, try to solve the crime, but things get messy when local YouTubers start filming everything for views. Between the weird prisoners and the media circus, the officers struggle to catch the clever thief who is using all the noise and confusion to stay hidden. Munishkanth appears at home as a laidback officer on the verge of retirement; it’s a role tailor-made for him. He’s alright, but it honestly doesn’t feel like a surprise. Subash Selvam, playing an ambitious constable, is more agile and enjoys stepping into the shoes of his role, hardly going overboard.

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Sat, April 11 2026

A couple in Pune loses their way in an intense but toxic romance that collapses under the weight of ego and ambition. Seven years after their breakup, they unexpectedly reunite in Japan. Against the backdrop of Mount Fuji, they must confront their painful past and the possible road ahead. The film predominantly revolves around the couple, and both the leads, Lalit Prabhakar and Mrinmayee Godbole, hold the fort with assurance. Lalit plays the more complex role with a better character graph; he’s efficient because you ultimately understand the man’s trauma and also despise him for his abusive behaviour towards his partner. Mrinmayee Godbole, as the woman bearing the brunt of mounting debts and an insensitive love interest, delivers an intense yet delicate portrayal that lingers long after the film ends. Omprakash Shinde is not left with much to do. The child artiste Kabir Jueelee Deven makes a mark with his happy-go-lucky presence.

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Fri, April 10 2026

Directed by Mohit Takalkar and written by Irawati Karnik, Toh Ti Ani Fuji is the kind of grown-up relationship drama which feels fresh, contemporary and urgent.

This Marathi language feature involves a pair of former lovers accidentally bumping into each other in Tokyo years after their painful parting. The meeting between Toh (He, Lalit Prabhakar) and Ti (She, Mrinmayee Godbole) causes facades to be peeled off, re-opening old wounds: can these two forgive each other, and is forgetting on the cards? Directed by Mohit Takalkar and written by Irawati Karnik, Toh Ti Ani Fuji is the kind of grown-up relationship drama which feels fresh, contemporary and urgent: as Toh and Ti are drawn to each other, trying to see how they fit in, we see just how complex the thing between two people can be, where ‘extreme hatred and extreme love’, as one of the two puts it, can appear to be the two sides of the same coin.

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Fri, April 10 2026

Lalit Prabhakar and Mrinmayee Godbole deliver terrific performances as a toxic couple who dare to reimagine a future together

In a mask, she looks like everyone else. It’s not her city or country, but it’s her home now. The Pune native goes about her daily routine in Tokyo: walking, thinking, dodging other feet, commuting to work on the metro. It’s muscle memory; you can tell she’s been here for a while. The only sounds she hears are of footsteps shuffling, metal doors opening, vehicles moving. Voices stay within; speaking is impolite. And then she sees him, after 7 years, looking perplexed on a platform. In a mask, he looks like the man she loved. They meet at a famous intersection. When they hug, it’s like the moment activates human motion; hundreds of walkers cross the congested street the second their bodies touch. They spend the next few days enjoying the familiarity of an ex-partner in a foreign environment. Everything is new and old at once. She shows him the place; they eat, stroll, run, giggle, puncture the silences, get drunk together. It’s everyone’s Before-Sunset fantasy. But it escalates quickly. When they kiss, it’s like the moment activates faster human motion; a speeding train darts behind them the second their lips meet.

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Sat, April 11 2026

The film aims to lift the veil on many things, most importantly how dysfunctional relationships work under the garb of yaari-dosti, bonhomie and pyar-mohabbat of blood ties

Without much ado, the film comes straight to the point. A man, but obviously Sohrab Handa (Vinay Pathak), is found murdered in a living room. For those of us who have seen ‘Knives Out’, the basic template does not come as a surprise. A whole lot of men and women, relatives and friends have assembled in this picturesque getaway home. Expectedly, the fingers of suspicion point in all possible directions. There is the disgruntled father (MK Raina), sleepwalking wife Isha (Koel Purie), business partner Raman Chawla (Neil Bhoopalam) who we later learn wants Sohrab out of their business, and TV anchor Kumar (Danish Husain) of a crime show, ‘Pardafaash’. Like most things here, this name hasn’t been chosen randomly.

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Fri, April 10 2026

Vinay Pathak’s brutal turn exposes the toxicity of dysfunctional relationships cloaked in civility in this Rajat Kapoor whodunit

Quietly subversive and more interested in human frailty than genre payoffs, Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa is a quintessential Rajat Kapoor film. It doesn’t reinvent the whodunit, but it humanises it, turning a murder mystery into a mirror held up to the insidious violence we inflict on the people we claim to love. The final reveal and tonal balance don’t fully satisfy, but it is a respectable experiment that fiercely tugs at the deepest strings of the heart. To celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, Raman (Neil Bhoopalam) and Jayanti (Palomi Ghosh) invite a close group of friends and family for an intimate getaway at a sprawling century-old mansion in the hills. Among the guests is Raman’s business partner, Sohrab Handa (Vinay Pathak), a sharp-tongued, unapologetically abrasive presence who dominates every conversation with his acid wit and honesty. Sohrab is perceptive, knowing which insecurities to poke and how to cloak them in humour.

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Fri, April 10 2026

Rajat Kapoor continues his alt-mainstream career with a perfectly pitched murder mystery that unfolds in a cabin full of guilty characters

15 friends (an introvert’s nightmare) meet at a holiday home for a wedding anniversary party. One of them is found dead after midnight. 14 of them become suspects. Nobody is allowed to leave. Rajat Kapoor’s Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa shares a thematic universe with Rajat Kapoor’s Kadakh (2019): overlapping cast members, colourful characters, a dead body, an annual party, free-flowing banter and tense arguments, fragile bonds and incriminatory secrets. But the staging is slightly different. Kadakh was about a couple trying to hide the corpse of a man who accidentally kills himself before their Diwali party. This film is a whodunnit that, in terms of social suspense and tonal flow, shares a universe with ‘psychological’ dramas like Death in the Gunj, Monsoon Wedding (plus a murder) and Titli. It unravels as a deceptively poignant indictment of modern society, armchair morality and rage, and the many ways in which we reverse-engineer our values to fit in.

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Fri, April 10 2026

In cinema, or in the worlds that inspire it, some concepts are inherently dated. One such relic is dacoity. What do you picture when you hear of a film titled Dacoit? I go straight to the Chambal Valley, or maybe think of a Veerappan type, clad in camouflage, sporting a handlebar moustache, clutching hunting guns with a bullet rack slung diagonally across the torso. Given the dubious ways of Telugu cinema, I would at least expect one of those routine one-man battles against the system to protect mothers and sisters. Shaneil Deo’s film, however, delivers none of that. Instead, Dacoit tries to be everything else, none of which resembles a dacoit.

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Fri, April 10 2026

Fri, April 10 2026

Director Shaneil Deo’s debut mixes romance and social commentary, but does it land?

Dacoit: A Love Story keeps its biggest surprises under wraps, even as its team amped up pre-release promotions. Directed by Shaneil Deo and led by Adivi Sesh and Mrunal Thakur, the Telugu-Hindi bilingual is, at its heart, an emotional love story with an Indian ethos, told through a Western lens. The emphasis on “at its heart” is deliberate — embedded within is a distinctly old-school romance that nods to cinematic tropes of the past, hoping to resonate with a swipe-era audience. For that to land, the writing of both characters and subplots needs to hold. Sesh and Shaneil, who share screenplay credits, pack the film with layered, often complex characters. Threads of possible deceit and double-crossing keep the narrative engaging at key moments. While a few characters verge on being one-note, the complexity of the central figures ultimately works in the film’s favour.

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Fri, April 10 2026

Ken Karunas’s debut film is 'self-aware' enough to see its flaws, but not brave enough to fix them

Over the years, Tamil cinema has trained the mass audience to always root for the loser. For example, Maan Karate’s protagonist, Peter (Sivakarthikeyan), is the poster boy for this brand of hero. In essence, Peter has no redeeming qualities. He is a lazy and incompetent bloke who lives off a gang that has a premonition that he will win a boxing contest. For a villain, the film features a character who has toiled his entire life to become a professional boxer. Yet, the film encourages the audience to back the hero because he is supposed to be relatable to the masses. Isn’t it easy to imagine a person winning in life without any effort?

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Fri, April 10 2026

Director Vignesh Shivan's Love Insurance Kompany aka LIK, starring Pradeep Ranganathan, Krithi Shetty and SJ Suryah, is a fun rom-com set in the futuristic world. The film explores the consequences of surrendering control of your life to apps.

Imagine Chennai in 2040, transformed into a bustling metropolis resembling Times Square on its busiest day. Monorails traverse the skyline, government hospitals resemble hi-tech labs, and drones deliver goods across a hyperconnected city. This is the world Vignesh Shivan creates in Love Insurance Kompany, portraying a technologically advanced yet emotionally distant society dominated by apps, especially one called Love Insurance Kompany, led by the mysterious Suriyan.

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Fri, April 10 2026

Vignesh Shivan's future-world rom-com is bright, funny, and utterly committed to love, but the definition it champions turns out to be its weakest link

What makes Vignesh Shivan an interesting filmmaker is his relentless pursuit of packaging what an irreverent Gen Z would call boomerish as an ultra-modern ‘sheesh’… something even an unaware Gen Beta would lap up as a perfectly in-vogue emotion. Poda Podi is about a modern dancer whose husband eventually convinces her that family rearing matters more than her dream of winning dance competitions. Naanum Rowdy Dhaan was a cool story of a pure-hearted gentleman, now called out for being a stalker. Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal is about a polyamorous hero whose love for both heroines is so pure he doesn’t consummate the relationship with either. With Love Insurance Kompany, Vignesh Shivan has taken this righteous hero into a future where love has been utterly commodified — and it is up to him to teach his lover, and the world, what true love is.

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Fri, April 10 2026

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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Wed, April 8 2026

It could be argued that Krisstofer Borgli’s film has too much fun with the premise, turning it into a psychological comedy of sorts.

One of my favourite scenes in Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) – starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet – is when April (Winslet) greets Frank (DiCaprio) for breakfast, after a colossal fight the night before, during which things were said that neither can ever take back. As she (much to his surprise) performs her part of a ‘supportive’ wife, while he riffs on his role as the polite, clueless breadwinner of the family, the quiet breakfast – a symbol of suburban bliss – begins to feel suffocating and emotionally claustrophobic. Both Winslet and DiCaprio act the hell out of this scene, playing the wounded, flawed couple trying to deflect from the unpleasantness of their once-loving marriage, hoping things would get back to normal with time.

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Sat, April 4 2026

The Drama, written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, certainly lives up to its title—but not in a way that works to its advantage. There is no shortage of drama here, but what value does it hold when you feel absolutely nothing for the people at the center of it?

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Sat, April 4 2026

Modern-day romance is complex. Gone are the days when boy-meets-girl and they fall in love form the ideal rom-com in Hollywood. An entire generation may have grown up on light frothy rom-coms that Hollywood used to churn out in a dozen back in the day. But that very generation has now grown up and is navigating complexities in life. And thus, Kristoffer Borgli’s latest dramedy, The Drama, may resonate with many of its viewers. Featuring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in the lead, Borgli’s film explores love in the time of violence, accessibility and wokeness.

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Sat, April 4 2026

The Patparganj gang returns with sharper satire and deeper heart to uphold the spirit of law.

Delhi’s Patparganj District Court is back in session, and this time the madness has escalated into full-blown judicial chaos. If the first season of Maamla Legal Hai proved that Indian district courtrooms can be funnier than a stand-up special, the second season takes the gavel and runs with it, balancing sharp social commentary with genuine rib-tickling comedy with a layer of introspection in between.

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Sat, April 4 2026

To package wisdom and social commentary in a show with a quintessential delightful flavour remains the franchise’s biggest triumph

Courts, we presume, are dreary places of extreme decorum and discipline. Yet they can provide much fodder for merriment, as has been shown in umpteen films and most delectably in the Ravi Kishan-starrer web series ‘Maamla Legal Hai’. As it rolls on to the second season, the idea is still the same: to reflect upon thorny legal battles — actually, social issues — with humour. If you believe first time is the real charm, to begin with, the second outing of ‘Maamla Legal Hai’ may not seem as much fun. But soon enough, it finds its feet, just as the main protagonist Visheshwar D Tyagi (Ravi Kishan) does in his newly elevated position of Principle Judge of Patparganj district court.

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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

Despite the random and unnecessary detours, Leader gets its basics right, and never gives you time to put on your logic-tinted glasses

Vanity. A few years back, business magnate Saravanan decided to be the face of his multi-million-dollar empire. He was plastered across TV ads, in newspapers, and on YouTube. The next ideal step was to take up the political route or don the greasepaint. Saravanan decided to become an actor. And then… he rechristened himself as Legend Saravanan, and made his acting debut with… wait for it… Legend. It was heavily trolled for its content, his performance, and everything else in between. Four years later, Legend Saravanan has come back to collect his dues with Leader, under the aegis of director RS Durai Senthilkumar. He embarks on a path to redemption courtesy a clever director, a compelling script, a convincing ensemble, carefree masala-cinema sensibilities, and, of course, good ol’ money.

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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

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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