Sun, July 5 2026

The benchmark for the YRF Spy Universe isn’t particularly high, especially after the War films. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to find a taut, breezy action thriller that doesn’t waste time dwelling on unnecessary detours. For starters, this is a completely romance-free enterprise, and that itself is a rarity in mainstream Hindi cinema. There are no mandatory love songs shot in exotic locations or forced romantic subplots. In fact, there are only a couple of songs, and for the most part, the film moves at a brisk pace.

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Sat, July 4 2026

Sat, July 4 2026

Alia Bhatt brings the attitude and physicality but struggles to do much with the wafer-thin material.

The question isn’t whether the latest instalment from the cinematic universe of slick superspies and walking, talking action figures can reinvigorate the creatively dead universe. It’s whether we can get even a basically satisfying blockbuster romp. Where Alpha, from director Shiv Rawail (The Railway Men), stands apart from its Spy-verse counterparts (Pathaan, War and Tiger films) is that it packs in what feels like more plot in its first 15 minutes than all those films combined. From swapped babies to separated twins to super soldiers, more happens than can be summarised in a single review, but here goes. The program is shelved, and he’s forced to close it down, but not before his senior officer, Colonel Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor always understands the assignment), injects his dying pregnant wife with the serum in the hope of saving her life. He fails. She dies. But, unbeknownst to the good Colonel, their newborn survives. But she’s confiscated by (the bad) Colonel Lakhawat because “she’s now India’s property” as a result of the Alpha superserum coursing through her veins.

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Sun, July 5 2026

A tense, triggering and fearlessly honest investigative thriller, Satluj unearths one of Punjab's darkest chapters with unflinching honesty and gripping intensity

Inspired by true events, Satluj chronicles the courageous and harrowing journey of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who exposed Punjab Police’s role in thousands of alleged extrajudicial killings and illegal cremations during the insurgency. Despite repeated threats from those in power, Jaswant Singh Khalra refused to be silenced. He did not buckle under pressure, choosing to pursue the truth, fully aware of the consequences that awaited him. Before his abduction and subsequent murder in 1995, he alleged that Punjab Police was responsible for at least 25,000 illegal killings and secret cremations. Punjab carries the scars of a deeply troubled past. The 1980s and 1990s were among the state’s darkest years. As the government sought to crush insurgency and separatist violence, security forces were granted sweeping powers with little accountability. Under officials such as Director General of Police KPS Gill, counter-insurgency policies, coupled with a state-sponsored bounty system, allegedly enabled extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and extortion.

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Sat, July 4 2026

Diljit Dosanjh shines as a solitary lamp whose conviction outlasts the darkest night in this moving tribute to social activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, where director Honey Trehan examines the rhetoric around the dehumanisation of citizens

A quiet hymn sung for the thousands of names in Punjab that the state machinery tried to wipe during the insurgency, director Honey Trehan tells the story of a god-fearing, resilient man who looked at a landscape of fear and chose not to look away. Armed with the fragile pages of municipal logs and the calculated weights of cremation firewood, he resurrects the disappeared, meticulously piecing together a forensic paper trail that strips away the senior police leadership’s complicity. For the uninitiated, Satluj (originally titled Panjab 95) chronicles the true-life crusade of social activist Jaswant Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh), who risked his life to uncover thousands of secrets behind the state-sanctioned extrajudicial cremations in the 1990s when Punjab was on the boil.

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Sat, July 4 2026

This is a clear win for filmmakers who want to tell the story of an actual person, time and place, with unwavering conviction.

Satluj opens with a chilling sequence which sets the tone of the film. It is pitch dark, a jeep full of joshing cops stops, pulls out a few men, their hands tied behind their backs, and shoots them dead. The casual cruelty that colours this shocking scene gives us, in a snapshot, the darkness that had engulfed Punjab in ’95, rolling over from the decades-long battle the state had waged against insurgency. Men, women, even children weren’t spared in this clean-up operation, which became a battle against ordinary citizens, who were rounded up and killed, their gutted bodies dumped in the river to be picked clean by hungry fish. It’s in this atmosphere of dread that Jaswant Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh) steps in, and steps up, first as just a concerned individual asking about a disappearance, going to the local thana for help, receiving nothing but threats, and warnings to stay away. And then, slowly and steadily becoming the fulcrum of the fight against the massive human rights violations happening under the iron-fist of the Punjab police.

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Sat, July 4 2026

Despite capable performances, Pritam and Pedro struggles with predictable writing, muted emotional impact, and storytelling that never rises above polished mediocrity.

There are certain names in cinema that arrive long before the credits roll. They carry with them not merely recognition but a formidable burden of expectation—a promise of excellence painstakingly accumulated over decades. Rajkumar Hirani belongs comfortably to that rarefied league. His films have consistently blended humour with humanity, wit with wisdom, and entertainment with emotion, creating stories that linger long after the curtains have fallen. From the irrepressibly charming Munna Bhai series to the socially resonant 3 Idiots, the delightfully irreverent PK, and the emotionally layered Sanju, Hirani has fashioned a cinematic identity that is at once distinctive and deeply endearing.

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Sat, July 4 2026

Bringing his magical touch to long-form storytelling, Rajkumar Hirani turns a cold, clinical cyber-thriller into a heartwarming buddy-cop comedy where old-school muscle beautifully collides with modern computer code.

Moving past a heavy-handed Dunki, Rajkumar Hirani finds his deft touch, imbuing a warm soul into the Over-The-Top streaming space where even empathy feels algorithmic these days. Instead of adding to our daily anxiety, Hirani, who works as a series creator, along with director Avinash Arun, takes the clinical world of cybercrime and wraps it in an engrossing buddy-cop comedy that educates and comforts the audience. Reflecting the anxiety of the times when a single digital mistake can ruin a life, the series effectively uses the theme of forgiveness to heal people and relationships. Led by Arshad Warsi, who balances his signature effortless humour with a tougher tone, and debutant Vir Hirani as his father’s creative voice of the outsider who questions the absurd rules of the world, the narrative finds its sweet spot when the points of view of Pedro, an old school policeman nursing a young wound and Pritam, a modern hacker, living with his grandfather under an assumed identity, collide.

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Fri, July 3 2026

'Pritam and Pedro' has no granularity. It is cybercrime explained at the level of a school assembly

Rajkumar Hirani has spent two decades turning simple ideas into big, feel-good hits. The six-episode JioHotstar series is directed by Avinash Arun Dharware, the filmmaker behind Killa, Paatal Lok, and Three of Us. It’s an odd pairing on paper. Hirani makes cheerful, sanded-down cinema. Arun makes moody, textured, specific work. None of that specificity survives here. The show looks and moves like a generic OTT product. Pedro (Arshad Warsi) is a Crime Branch cop in Goa, punished for a colleague’s mistake and shunted off to the Cyber Crime Cell. To him, typing a password already counts as hard labour. Pritam (Vir Hirani) is a young ‘cyber genius’ who actually sells vacuum cleaners for a living. When a politician’s son goes missing, the two team up: Pedro needs the case solved to earn his old job back, while Pritam wants help recovering his grandfather’s stolen tape recorder, which holds an old recording of his late grandmother’s voice.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Fri, July 3 2026

It’s a different kind of reality check to battle the Mumbai monsoons to watch a film, only for the film to remind you that the very same showers might well have taken your life. In Baby Do Die Do, director Nachiket Samant imagines a world where Mumbaikars do not die by falling into manholes or getting swept away in man-made floods. Instead, the season’s biggest accessory – an umbrella – becomes the murder weapon. In an angle that strangely reminded me of Johnny Lever’s Chhota Chhatri in Awara Paagal Deewana, it isn’t just the weapon that adds spice to this dark comedy. Nor is it the fact that Samant’s protagonist is a woman. The third layer – that she is deaf and mute – gives the film the extra quirk it needs.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Nachiket Samant’s efficient and stylised movie stars Huma Qureshi as a deaf-and-mute contract killer with a Mumbai-shaped hole in her heart

As an assassin story, Baby Do Die Do is not out of the ordinary. The only novelty is that the brooding hero is a deaf-and-mute hitwoman, not a hitman. The tropes are Freudian and familiar. A childhood tragedy turns this woman named Baby (Huma Qureshi) into a cold-blooded contract killer. She works for a father figure called Papa (Chunky Panday). She’s slick and experienced at her job; a sharp-shooting umbrella is her weapon. She finds a good man (Rachit Singh), and suddenly, the secret is too heavy. She wants out of the profession. She wants to be human. Except it’s not that simple. She’s in too deep. A bloody mess is imminent.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Directed by Mallik Ram, Netflix’s first Telugu original series turns a familiar conversation on sex education into an engaging rural dramedy

The more we assume things have changed, the more they probably have not, at least not for everyone. While some urban homes and schools have moved beyond awkward ‘birds and bees’ conversations to adopt a more pragmatic approach to sex education, the subject remains taboo in many households. In a remote village, those conversations become even harder. Super Subbu, Netflix’s first Telugu original series, directed by Mallik Ram and starring Sundeep Kishan in the title role, builds an engaging drama around this premise. Some of the early scenes evoke school days when teachers would skip sex education lessons to avoid uncomfortable giggles in the classroom. They also reveal the unease many educators themselves feel around the subject.

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Thu, July 2 2026

It is but a coincidence that Super Subbu has released a day before Pritam and Pedro. Besides the fact that the titles of the two series are based on the names of their protagonists, Super Subbu takes a leaf out of the Rajkumar Hirani (who makes his digital debut as producer with Pritam and Pedro) book of mirth-meets-message, camouflaging bitter truths and taboo life lessons with humour, managing to pack in some succinct social commentary along the way.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Satya Dev delivers a career-best performance as director Venkatesh Maha experiments with magical realism and an edgy narrative that offers plenty to unpack

The final stretch of Rao Bahadur is an absolute riot. The carefully constructed drama gives way to a series of delightful twists that are both entertaining and thought-provoking. It is here that director Venkatesh Maha gently pulls the rug from under the audience, forcing them to view the entire film from a fresh perspective. Telugu cinema lovers may remember a similar narrative flourish in his debut indie film, Care of Kancharapalem. While that film offered a deeply realistic portrait of a neighbourhood grappling with questions of gender sensitivity and social hierarchy, Rao Bahadur ventures into fantasy, lacing its psychological drama with touches of magical realism.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Not all movies ought to be dignified with a review. Yet here we are…. reviewing Welcome to the Jungle. Everyone is in this film. And I do mean everyone. There isn’t a face you won’t recognize. From Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Raveena Tandon, Disha Patani and Jacqueline Fernandez to Paresh Rawal, Kiran Kumar, Farida Jalal, Zakir Hussain, Krushna Abhishek and Kiku Sharda it’s a literal stampede of familiar faces and proven talent. What should have been a comic goldmine becomes a traffic jam of characters, each written with roughly the same attention to detail usually reserved for out-of-focus background dancers. You could swap one actor with another and absolutely nothing would change.

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Mon, June 29 2026

A promising satirical premise buried beneath bloated storytelling, shrill humour, uneven performances, and exhausting excess, resulting in a deeply disappointing cinematic experience.

Reality, on rare occasions, possesses an uncanny habit of imitating fiction—not deliberately, but with an irony so exquisite that it borders on poetic justice. One suspects that director Ahmed Khan had little inkling that his latest spectacle, Welcome to the Jungle, would ultimately become the most eloquent metaphor for its own creative bankruptcy. Conceived as a madcap satire on the film industry and the absurd economics of blockbuster filmmaking, the film instead collapses under the crushing weight of the very mediocrity it seeks to lampoon. The result is not a parody of commercial cinema but an inadvertent specimen of everything that has gone catastrophically wrong with it.

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Sun, June 28 2026

The basic premise of Welcome To The Jungle instantly reminds you of Farah Khan’s Tees Maar Khan (2010), which also starred Akshay Kumar in the lead. The main difference is that he played the director in that movie. But the difference that matters the most is that WTTJ is better than the 2010 flick, although the latter had its moments here and there. It is anybody’s guess that one needs to keep logic and reasoning miles away while watching such movies. But this is worth only when we get non-stop entertainment in return. That is what happens with Welcome To The Jungle. The basic plot of a wealthy business wanting to make a flop film itself is funny and interesting. It is also something that used to happen during the olden days. The screenplay gives you no time to breathe. There are plenty of bizarre happenings, both during the film shoot and the second half when the terrorism angle takes over. But, again, the fast pace and the fact that the film is honest in what it is trying to do ensures that you don’t mind that much.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Michael Sarnoski film is neither a mood piece nor a swashbuckling thrill-ride. It is a character study of a deeply unpleasant man whose self-hatred borders on the repulsive.

The term “deconstruction” is often thrown around in the world of haute cuisine, which director Michael Sarnoski took a long whiff of in his phenomenal debut feature, Pig. It starred Nicolas Cage as a reclusive former chef who lives in a self-imposed exile in the woods, accompanied by a pet truffle pig and his many demons. Pig remains one of the finest directorial debuts of the last decade, and is a great lead-in to Sarnoski’s latest film, The Death of Robin Hood.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Her family's repute is revealed to be seemingly ill-gotten; a rebel hopes to overthrow the British Empire someday and Moriarty’s politics is hard to question, as Enola races to find her kidnapped brother, Sherlock, in this third offering in the Enola Holmes franchise.

​Make no mistake, it is a minor miracle that Enola Holmes, the Netflix film franchise which had its first outing in 2020, hasn’t been corrupted by everything that has happened in the past half-decade. The franchise has survived two Trump administrations, a pandemic and whatever the Russo Brothers (filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo, known for directing four Marvel films) have done to the streaming industry (they reportedly tried to revolutionise the space with offerings like Citadel and The Electric State, but received limited success). And yet somehow, the Enola Holmes movies — revolving around the adventures of the newly-imagined sister of English literature’s legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes — are still as earnest as ever.

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Thu, July 2 2026

Directed by Philip Barantini, the engaging young detective franchise moves out of London to sunnier locales

The Enola Holmes franchise is growing up. With the third film, the intrepid young detective played by Millie Bobby Brown is about to marry Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) when disaster strikes. The team behind the award-winning Adolescence comes together for a new mystery that takes viewers to Malta, where the remnants of the past affect the future. The young leads of the film franchise, Brown and Patridge, have grown up as the film’s prior flashbacks show. And while it’s great to see the familiar faces again, the Victorian mystery is missing some of that London magic. In Malta for her wedding to Tewkesbury, Enola has some cold feet but on her way to the church, her brother Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill) gets kidnapped. As Enola pieces together the when and why, she uncovers a plot that links back to Tewkesbury’s past. With the help of her husband and Dr. John Watson (Himesh Patel), they uncover a military cover-up that leads to a shocking truth and brings back a familiar villain, at least for Sherlock. Will Enola be able to save her family before it’s too late?

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Thu, July 2 2026

Elle reimagines an icon, reinstates that pink is powerful and a personality but struggles to recapture her spark

Elle, the 2026 reboot of Legally Blonde set in 1995, feels more like a nostalgic fan tribute than a worthy prequel. It is sweet and easy to watch, unfolding like a familiar teen campus drama, but lacks the wit, cleverness, and unmistakable charm that made the original so memorable. Written off as a shallow Barbie in her new school, Elle must win people over with empathy and sincerity. Along the way, she finds herself torn between two romantic interests — campus jock Miles and activist Dustin - builds an unlikely friendship with Shannon, clashes with resident mean girl Kimberley, and gets entangled in a controversy involving the school principal.

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Thu, July 2 2026

Isakapatnam aspires to be a sprawling crime saga in which every murder has consequences, every betrayal shifts the balance of power, and every character carries old wounds. Directed by Garry BH from a script by Prashant Ragathi with dialogues by Tajuddin Syed, the Prime Video series stars Samuthirakani as feared gangster Naidu and Aishwarya Rajesh as his daughter Bharathi. Sunil, Naresh Agastya, Merin Philip, Sudhakar Komakula, Rajeev Kanakala, Raja Chembolu and Banerjee round out an ensemble of characters including henchmen, townsfolk, cops and businessmen. The Prime Video series is set in the fictional coastal town of Isakapatnam. The town owes its prosperity to its docks, shipping trade, trucking business and steel plant – a fertile setting for a story about the nexus between crime, commerce and politics. Oddly, though, the series barely uses any of it. The docks have little bearing on the story, which unfolds mostly in houses, police stations, hideouts, and an occasional boat scene.

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Wed, July 1 2026

Created by Graham Yost and based on Hugh Howey's novels, Silo returns for a triumphant third season, which digs deep into the show's past lore.

The key to the future lies in the past. That’s the message of the wildly thrilling third season that returns after a year and a half on Apple TV. Led by Rebecca Ferguson, the sci-fi series Silo has always been about rebellion. But this time, it delves into the question of why. Why are the residents of Silo 18 not allowed to go outside and who is controlling them? The answers to all of these begin in the past as the series based on Hugh Howey’s trilogy finally lifts the curtain on the founders. The more that Silo reveals, the more intriguing the origin story becomes, making the sci-fi series one of the most riveting series on the streaming service.

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