Debanjan Dhar

Strange River is a rare gift of a film. This might be the closest cinema has come to approximating the unique headrush of queer teenage discovery. In his feature debut, Catalan writer-director Jaume Claret Muxart goes spare on dialogue and evokes patterns of thought, imaginative vision and tender melancholy. There’s a deep fragility so central to puberty which the director has precisely gauged. It’s that phase when feelings and fancies can shape up to be seismic. Everything feels bottomless, churning. The film maps this intensity against a drifting slipstream of recognition, denial and growth. Pain is inescapable as the callow heart seeks to scamper away and forge its own detour. Strange River builds an emotional, internal space by its own dream logic and lures you in without presupposing cues or needless connective filaments. Here’s a filmmaker inviting you to be one with his work’s peculiar, subliminal impulses even while it constantly evades a firm grasp.

The End Of Oak Street is the most fun I’ve had in a theatre this year. David Robert Mitchell’s dino fare brings ample suspense and heart into the vestiges of blockbuster commercial cinema trappings. It’s strewn with sequences that set my pulse racing and had me almost on the brink of whistles. Honestly, I have to scratch my memory real hard to even recall when a mainstream film got me jiving to its wavelength from the get go and refused to loosen the shackles. The End Of Oak Street is the definition of a proper, thrilling communal experience to get a film that exults in splendidly orchestrated moments. My regret is the theatre was much too empty to feel the ripples bounce across the breadth of the audience. Where are the moviegoers? You have been summoned.

Premiering in main competition at the Locarno Film Festival 2026, Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho’s The Riverbank (A Margem do Rio) pulses with dark, tropical atmosphere, a heated, shivering bundle of racy desire and cavernous menace. It buzzes with this strange, scary, sinister and sensuous personality of its own, aware of the subterranean networks of power undergirding desire. The filmmakers thrust us in Brazil’s Recife, a city recently on vivid display in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes winner and Oscar-nominated breakout, The Secret Agent. Farias himself co-edited the Wagner Moura starrer that took a heady dive into Recife’s past. The Riverbank situates Recife in a stealthy stream of intrigue, deception and intoxicating seduction.

In Homi Adajania’s Cocktail 2, Shahid Kapoor’s loyal, nice Kunal falls into the snare his long-term partner, Diya (Rashmika Mandanna) sets. It got on her nerves when he joked with their friends that she would never be able to find out if he cheated on her. This lodges in her head and she cannot shake it off, in spite of his reassurances. She gets paranoid about his infidelity which is telegraphed in a distasteful montage designed to be comic. When the couple arrives in Sicily for a vacation, an opportunity presents itself. Diya’s school friend, Ally (Kriti Sanon), a wild spirit, blasts in as a gale through the tameness, force of habit which Diya and Kunal’s relationship had sloughed into. She has no boundaries, which the couple dutifully sticks to.