Sat, September 20 2025

The series follows the story of an SI Raja and a gambler named Murali, and how they clash and unite for a common purpose later. Giving up his past, Murali seeks redemption by helping Raja solve a crime. After Raja’s aggressive actions in a few cases, his manipulative colleague Vaavar rises to prominence. Meanwhile, Raja tries to reestablish his position by making an offer to Murali to turn a cop.

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Sat, September 20 2025

Sat, September 20 2025

Fairly early in Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), a character is instructed on how to grieve. Don’t cut your hair, don’t ask for a second helping and walk bare feet for the next couple of days. Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) has just lost his father but his extended relatives have no time for feelings. The mourning ought to be communal and hence regimented, an ask which falls in line with their larger curiosity in Anand’s life: at 30 years of age, why is he still unmarried? The demand to conform and the desire to live form the crux of Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda, a strikingly assured debut and the first Marathi film to be premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. After Anand’s father passes away, his mother persuades him to go to his ancestral village for the stipulated 10-day mourning period. He resists suggesting that he will go to pick her up instead. A quiet telling-off changes his mind as they both journey back to a place which has more memories than people.

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Sat, September 20 2025

Sundance 2025: 'Sabar Bonda' (Cactus Pears), the first-ever Marathi-language feature to have premiered at the festival, was shown as part of their World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

A weepy gay man is a genre unto himself, moping throughout, a smile as though kryptonite, whose relationship to life is mediated by melancholy and self pity, a melancholy and self pity that gushes from the wellspring of his wounded sexuality. Valid or not, this misery is templated. Writer-director Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), the first-ever Marathi-language feature to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2025 as part of their World Cinema Dramatic Competition, both deploys and destabilises this genre. Here, the melancholy of Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), the queer protagonist, is actually grief — his father passed away, and it is under the shade of this grief that the story of his sexuality stretches itself in a quiet, twilled yawn.

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Sat, September 20 2025

Writer-director Anoop Lokkur’s debut Kannada feature had its world premiere at the 30th Busan International Film Festival

Maybe the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was right—“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Artists look at their past as grist they can reframe on their terms. And this anxiety of re-writing one’s personal history sometimes shines through—the best memoirs are, after all, shameless and transgressive, and timid are those that cave under the weight of this trespassing anxiety. or writer-director Anoop Lokkur’s debut Kannada feature Don’t Tell Mother, which had its world premiere at the 30th Busan International Film Festival, this anxiety has been swept aside and muscled under by nostalgia. Set in Jayanagar, Bangalore in the 1990s—a significant Brahmin bastion—the film follows two siblings, Akaash (Siddharth Swaroop) and Adi (Anirudh P. Keserker), young boys inching towards self-hood, as they make space for their childhood alongside punctures of parental influence and interference, school-day routines, classmate cacophony, and the sudden calls and catfights with neighbourhood friends. They live next to a mosque, so the azaan becomes part of their life’s sounds—one the film makes forceful, by cutting to images of the chanting minarets. (In a post-Babri 1990s, when the Infosys IPO is being launched, you feel the film will say more about this, but it doesn’t, and lets these images, like that of Muharram, puncture the proceedings as a form of spectacle without discourse.)

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Sat, September 20 2025

Director JSS Vardhan’s Telugu film is an aching tale of parental bonds, a woman’s quest for love, and the danger that lurks at the corners

At a time when Telugu cinema often leans on grand canvases and visual effects to mask weak storylines, it is refreshing to find reminders that storytelling still matters, even in modestly budgeted films. Little Hearts, released recently, captured the innocence of young romance and parental bonding with crackling humour. This week’s release, Beauty, written by RV Subramanyam, takes a darker path. Director JSS Vardhan, credited with additional screenplay and dialogues, slowly peels back the layers to deliver an unexpected jolt. Led by Ankith Koyya, Nilakhi Patra and VK Naresh, the film gradually assembles what first appears a frustrating puzzle into a striking whole.

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Sat, September 20 2025

The absence of a coherent, believable screenplay and the compulsion to deliver one shocking twist after another drains ‘Mirage’ of any impact

Sometimes, the final moments in a movie suddenly brings its title to mind, making us marvel at the ingenuity of naming it that way. Jeethu Joseph’s Mirage attempts something similar, only that one is left wondering how the titular warning was not fully understood. The final act of the movie is filled with mirages, one scene after another, each of which misleads us into thinking that this is the big reveal, only for the screenwriter to throw another ‘twist’ in the tale at us. After encountering several such mirages, one huffs and puffs to reach the real climax of the film, vowing never to trust any character in a film. In the larger scheme of things, screenwriters Jeethu and Srinivasan Abrol are also seeking a mirage — that of the perfect thriller climax which no one would guess. Red herrings, convoluted stories and obscure incidents tenuously connected to the narrative are thrown at us with this sole aim. That also proves to be the film’s undoing.

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Sat, September 20 2025

Asif Ali stars in a Jeethu Joseph film that’s surprisingly devoid of thrills.

It must have been some sort of a cruel in-joke to name the company Ashwin Kumar (Asif Ali) runs ‘Pure Facts’. It’s an online media company based out of Coimbatore, and we listen to Ashwin talk repeatedly about how he doesn’t believe in sensationalism or emotions, believing in a brand of objective journalism that provides pure facts to its viewers. You assume that he’s the stereotypical idealist but there’s always a dissonance between what he says and how he behaves. A few scenes later, after he’s tried to convince us of his ethical ways, he nonchalantly reveals how his modest operation makes money. Without making it sound like blackmail, he says he investigates the inner workings of big corporates and agrees to not reveal them on his platform for a “fee”.

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Sat, September 20 2025

Fri, September 19 2025

Despite a powerful premise and timely themes, the film is over-scored and underwritten. Moments never have room to breathe, resulting in a highlight reel that struggles to leave a lasting impact.

In Athiyan Athirai’s sophomore film, Thandakaaranyam, the eponymous forests become a MacGuffin that is forever out of reach of the protagonists. It’s a story that’s ostensibly about the fault lines and simmering tensions between the state, comprising a nexus of the police, paramilitary forces that collude with politicians and conglomerates, and the tribal population that is given the unqualified title of Naxalites. The forests remain in the margins in Athirai’s film (his Irandam Ulagaporin Kadaisi Gundu remains one of the best debuts in Tamil cinema of the last decade); they are not landscapes for conspiracy, separatist forces or ambushes — it comes across as a conscious decision. The forest is more life and livelihood, one that is as one with the self as skin. But the forest security offices and the training camps, the locations where injustices truly roost, are the places of interest.

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Fri, September 19 2025

Vetri, a debt-ridden entrepreneur, turns a gigolo after seeking financial help from a college senior, Karthikeyan. In his new role, he encounters Namrata, a lonely woman dealing with a miscarriage and a broken marriage. Meanwhile, Shraddha, a rebellious college student, keeps her romance with a classmate, Adi, a secret. As they meet at her home when her parents are away, the night takes a wild turn.

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Fri, September 19 2025

Directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, the biopic on Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd sticks to the surface of what it wants to tell.

Swiped recounts the history of the dating app explosion of the 2010s, which was led by Tinder and followed by Bumble. Whitney Wolfe Herd was at the center of both, and the Hulu film explores her journey from someone who started out wanting to make a difference with charitable work to the woman who ended up changing the face of dating. The biopic benefits from having the likeable Lily James star in this average retelling of the rise of startup culture, which only dips into the more controversial points. Swiped follows Whitney (James) as she goes from a 24-year-old marketing director to the CEO of Bumble/Badoo at 31. The film shows the early days of Tinder and how it evolved into the biggest dating app on the scene. Whitney had a big hand in its success, but it is her word against the founders, who block her out of the company. She picks up the pieces to start her own app, Bumble, which puts the safety of women above all.

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Fri, September 19 2025

Fri, September 19 2025

Created by Jay Carson, the network drama once again addresses topical subjects, but once again the show suffers from having too many characters to focus on.

The Morning Show was launched in 2019 as a vehicle for stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. The show also reflected on the changing landscape of TV journalism with topical issues like the MeToo movement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and even the January 6th riots at the Capitol. This season, the Apple TV+ returns with a focus on the 2024 Olympics in Paris while also tackling AI (artificial intelligence). Already crowded with pending storylines, The Morning Show adds fuel to the fire by introducing several new conflicts for its burdened characters. Alex Levy (Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) have survived the events of the last season of The Morning Show. The new season returns two years after the events of the last, with Alex as a top executive at the new UBN network and Bradley seemingly retired as a journalist. So what reunites the two again? The TV anchors face it all this time around with deepfakes, conspiracy theories, and corporate cover-ups that keep threatening them and those around them. The stakes are even higher, as this time the two women battle a hidden enemy.

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Fri, September 19 2025

Created by Will Smith, the British espionage drama has plenty of juice in its tank to power several seasons.

It may not get enough awards love or attention, but Slow Horses is quietly plodding on as one of the most dependable and exhilarating spy series on streaming. With Season 5 about to premiere, the sixth and seventh seasons are already in the works at Apple TV+. The fifth season brings yet another puzzle to Gary Oldman’s spymaster, Jackson Lamb, who proves to the MI5 heads why he’s the best they’ve got. With strong performances by Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Saskia Reeves, the newest season is another thrilling ride. The rejected MI5 agents of Slough House get yet another opportunity to save the day and one-up the headquarters at Regent’s Park. This time, a terror plot links back to one of their own, as tech guy Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) has been honey-trapped. The British intelligence organisation gets a taste of their own medicine as potential terror incidents take place all over London, rattling those in power. It’s up to Lamb and his underutilised and underarmed team of ‘rejected’ spies to step in with their wits to avoid a larger catastrophe.

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Fri, September 19 2025

In India, the concept of godmen — spiritual leaders elevated to the status of demigod — has spawned a series of narratives. Fiction (Aashram ) and non-fiction (My Daughter Joined a Cult, Cult of Fear: Asaram Bapu, etc) alike have responded to the peculiarity of the culture. Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s new film, Bayaan, a loosely wound police procedural that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a frustrating reiteration of the template. To be fair, Bayaan is largely effective and well-made with slight exceptions. The plot is rooted in Rajasthan, where a godman, ‘Maharaj’ (Chandrachur Singh), runs an ashram full of young girls. When one of them tips off about his sexual abuse, a Delhi-based police officer, Roohi (Huma Qureshi), is assigned to the case. She might be a novice, but she knows the way. Her father (Sachin Khedekar) has been in the profession for a long time and is celebrated by peers. Mishra’s film outlines the way in which an anonymous tip opens a can of worms for the godman, only for Roohi to realise that she, a privileged urban woman, inhabits a world as compliant as that of the rural women.

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Mon, September 15 2025