Debanjan Dhar

There’s something incredibly acute and sensitive in how Sandeep Kumar Paul’s debut, About An Intimate Matter, cuts through to scan a woman’s sense of self-worth amidst stifling social constraint. It knows the ever-morphing yardsticks foisted upon marginal bodies that are just thrust through one ring of damning perception after another. Financial autonomy preens itself as rescue but social gaping keeps jutting in. The heroine of Paul’s film, Swarna (Sreya Bhattacharya), is a self-possessed schoolteacher in a suburb in Bengal. She lives with her partner, Driti (Shimli Basu). Within the opening stretch, you get an inkling of her mettle, her quiet resolve. Amidst deliberations of her colleagues to petition for better working conditions, she dares to stand out.

In Vishwendra Singh’s debut feature, Khoriya, hope is a furtive, elusive thing. For migrants, their journeying is predicated on hope, which gets dashed again and again while they seize on some anchorage for the moment. The lives of such workers are fraught with abiding tension. What if the refuge shatters? The two Nepali half-brothers at Khoriya’s heart are up against India’s iron-grid social hierarchy that directs them to low expectations.

Digger is as depleting as films can get. Watching it is like being flogged mercilessly by its spitfire of self-aggrandising attitudes, a battery of dead metaphors. Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a self-indulgent filmmaker of some other bizarre dimension altogether. This isn’t a complaint. When an artist is as self-absorbed and thrilled by the import of their own statements and themes, it’s the ultimate act of inciting profound annoyance. It wants to say something about the dire state of the world, how we cope with the ever-increasing assault of horrors, the lavish, careless games of the uber-rich casually plunging civilisation into utter chaos. Is satire the only way to find some sort of release from the dread capitalism has forced upon the planet? Is it an evasion or the only honest, fitting response to grief and rage? All are welcome anxieties to examine. But Digger ploughs on and on with the kind of inflated self-regard that instantly spells doom for any undertaking. The final nail in the coffin is the coup casting of Tom Cruise.

Karthik Subbaraj’s Dorothy would like to believe that it has the kind of bravery that can singlehandedly cut wide open the possibilities of what mainstream Indian cinema can utter and traverse. There’s a swagger and bruised melancholy at its heart which almost seduces us. In its urgent, rallying reversals of the masculinity that trumpets itself through today’s cinema, Dorothy stands apart. Its eagerness to chart its own course, often unwieldy and turbulent and hypnotic, merits attention. Yet, it keeps chafing against its noble intentions. It opens against a landscape saturated with the violent, brutish excesses of men. We are plunged into the Madurai of the ‘90s. Even the flutters of a naïve friendship between two school boys, Subbu and Karthi, take place amidst bullying and the male prerogative to flex brawn.

Modernity arrives in several garbs all at once. It shifts between assimilation, a promise of progress and a threat of complete cultural loss. Development can wholly wash over a sharp sense of identity that once existed, chipping away at it one by one. Premiering in Platform competition at the Toronto International Film Festival 2026, Theja Rio’s brilliantly immersive debut, Angh, understands every shade of this complex negotiation. Rio, born in Nagaland’s Kohima, brings alive the state’s churning historical moment as Christianity burst in the 1960s. At the centre of the quiet, reflective drama is a tribal chief, Anghba (Anghlong Konyak). He’s a mournful witness to his community’s transformation under the sway of an American missionary (Douglas James Henshall). There’s a gentle ache in Angh that seeps under your skin, without a hint of rush.

Once again, the alleys of Delhi hum their ache, regrets and yearnings in Shaunak Sen’s debut fiction outing, Termite. It’s a short film as if Sen is testing the ground before hoisting his flag on it. Like his Oscar-nominated 2022 breakout doc, All That Breathes, the fiction short is also alive and porous to an ecological world, the fellow non-inhuman inhabitants we share our lives with, marginality and the deep curl of thoughts and fears you swat away in recesses.

With Resident Evil, Zach Cregger builds one of the year’s most pin-sharp, nerve-rattling cinematic openings. It lurches between extremes amid an expert orchestration of unpredictability. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier who’s having issues with his girlfriend, Michelle, over having kids. She wants an honest, direct conversation, but his deliveries keep coming in the way. He’s not sure if he’s ready for such a big change as parenthood. The film opens at a hospital. Amidst his efforts to get a delivery signed, he’s tapped to ferry a critical bag to Raccoon City. He’s cautioned that the location is far and the terrain snowy. But the pay is double. In just a beat, he agrees. However, shortly after, he realises things might be way harder than it seemed.

Pioneering Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás is the truest inheritor of the Borgesian tradition with a vision of cinema that trumps settled notions. There are no limits or a stiffening of what cinema can be allowed to do. Llinás co-founded Argentina’s, a radical El Pampero Cine collective, a group that includes the other great filmmaker of our times, Laura Citarella. In his latest massive undertaking, Life of Jorge Luis Borges, Llinás sculpts a new form of the creative biography. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Open – Non-Fiction section, this nearly six-hour saga flirts with the tether of creative possibility. An extensive foray into the life, work and politics of Jorges Luis Borges, who saw literature as a kingdom and books the only nation to believe in, the film achieves its mammoth scale through the smallest, most minute interventions. Llinás has no interest in a straightforward chronicle, a regular documentary’s beats. His probing builds through interruptions and flickering curiosities, stretching as far from the linear and conventional as possible.