Rohan Naahar

Perhaps the single greatest scene in any movie released last year was the one where Colman Domingo’s character — a convict named Divine G — pleads his case during a clemency hearing in the startling prison drama Sing Sing. He tells the examining committee about the theatre programme that he has spearheaded at the facility, and how uplifting the experience has been not just for him, but each and every prisoner who has participated in it. The scene purposefully recalls the many similar moments in The Shawshank Redemption, in which a hopeful Red, played by Morgan Freeman, desperately begs for mercy. It isn’t a flashy scene, but one that relies almost entirely on Domingo’s (mostly reactionary) performance — easily the best that he has delivered in his career. The same is true of the film itself. Directed by Greg Kwedar, Sing Sing debuted on Max after a negligible theatrical run abroad. Based on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme that is conducted at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, the movie features a handful of ex-convicts playing semi-fictionalised versions of themselves. This gives it a layer of authenticity that would’ve been difficult to achieve with professional actors. There’s a rawness to the drama that’s mostly missing from mainstream American cinema these days, although Sing Sing — the movie premiered at Sundance in 2023 — doesn’t exactly qualify as mainstream.

The Studio has two things going against it. Films and shows about the entertainment business often struggle to crawl out of their niche corners, unless, of course, they’re packaged like Argo. Second — and this might be a bigger problem — The Studio is on Apple. Nobody watches stuff on Apple. At most, they watch Ted Lasso and Severance and swiftly cancel their subscriptions. The best that The Studio can hope for is to organically find an audience like those flagship shows did, because it certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as them. Clever, crafty, and caustic when it needs to be, it’s the best new comedy series of 2025 so far. The Studio features Seth Rogen in the lead role of Matt Remick, an executive who lives and breathes cinema, and harbours a long-held dream of becoming a studio head. In the first episode, he’s handed the proverbial keys to the castle on a conditional basis by the head honcho of Continental Studios, played by Bryan Cranston in a performance so boozy that it might require a breathalyser test. Tasked with fast-tracking a movie based on the beverage brand Kool-Aid — you read that right — and turning it into a billion-dollar hit akin to Barbie, Matt finds himself torn between his artistic aspirations and the primal impulses of his lizard brain.

Netflix should be flexing its UK arm more often. It seems to be doing all the heavy-lifting, especially when it comes to long-form programming. After last year’s One Day and The Gentlemen, Netflix UK has already delivered two stellar new shows this year; incidentally, the same writer is involved with both. Just a few weeks ago, the prolific Jack Thorne spearheaded Toxic Town, a crowd-pleasing drama about social injustice, told from the perspective of the women that were most affected by it. Thorne’s latest is the even better Adolescence, a psychological thriller that he co-created with actor Stephen Graham. It’s only March, but Adolescence, the fascinating examination of masculinity and urban alienation that it reveals itself to be, is already a contender for the best show of the year.

College kids of a certain age would be familiar with the practice of filtering assignments through a very rudimentary anti-plagiarism software, mainly to avoid being caught cheating by professors. So worthless were the results of this scam that a kid might even be shamed into putting in the actual effort and writing their assignment themselves. Not only were they submitting something unoriginal, it was also impossible to read. Essentially the same route is now being taken by filmmakers. This week’s new romantic comedy, Picture This, isn’t merely a remake; it’s a remake that is happy to be released in the same week as the Oscars and actively aim for a 2/5.

“Jackie Chan could come to Malegaon,” says a young man who has had the misfortune of being born there. “But his films won’t.” The young man is Nasir, the protagonist of director Reema Kagti’s new film, Superboys of Malegaon. Played by Adarsh Gourav, Nasir is the sort of cinephile who would have been logging at least three movies a day on Letterboxd had he been born a decade later, perhaps in a metropolitan city. And as hyperbolic as his words are, there is an element of truth to them. As we speak, the German auteur Wim Wenders is touring the length and breadth of India, taking selfies with Madhabi Mukherjee and reclining on Satyajit Ray’s favourite armchair. But you could be forgiven for not remembering the last time one of his films received a theatrical release here.

A few years ago, the global cinephile community — the sort of people who compose their Letterboxd reviews even before a film has ended — was thrown headfirst into a heated debate. As far as these folks were concerned, this was a debate of presidential magnitude — the kind of debate that could make a disagreement about Marvel movies seem like a ‘kavi sammelan’ in Lucknow. The British magazine Sight & Sound, which compiles a list of the greatest films of all time every decade, had published its latest rankings. And for the first time ever, the Belgian film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — previously viewed as a favourite only in niche circles — had claimed the top spot, sneaking past perennial favourites such as Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, and Vertigo.

Inviting Javed Akhtar to the premiere of Nadaaniyan, and making him sit through it — it doesn’t matter that he had a recliner to relax on — is tantamount to elder abuse. Directed by Shauna Gautam, the Netflix romantic drama singlehandedly demolishes any argument that nepotism apologists might have preemptively constructed in the run-up to its release. Ineptly put together, lacking any insight whatsoever into the human experience, Nadaaniyan is a blot on Karan Johar’s career as a film producer, and one of the most questionable originals ever produced by Netflix India — remember, this is the streamer that deemed Shirish Kunder’s Mrs Serial Killer to be worthy of sharing the same server space as Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma.

Malayalam filmmakers aren’t just pushing the boundaries of genre cinema in India, they’ve evolved to a stage where they can confidently toy with tropes. In Aattam, director Anand Ekarshi created magic within the framework of murder mysteries by unraveling the expectations that they come attached with. Ekarshi performed a deft act of cinematic misdirection, revealing that Aattam wasn’t a mystery at all, but a sharp satire of patriarchy. In Rekhachithram, director Jofin T Chacko observes the doctrines of police procedurals, pays due respect to them, and then sends the movie down an altogether unexpected path in the final 30 minutes.