Guild Reviews
Khauf
Drama, Mystery (Hindi)
A young woman's hostel room in Delhi hides a history of violence. Haunted by her past, she battles inexplicable forces within the room's confines and beyond.
Cast:
Monika Panwar, Rajat Kapoor, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Abhishek Chauhan, Shilpa Shukla
Director:
Pankaj Kumar, Surya Balakrishnan
Writer:
Smita Singh
Brings to Life the Terror of Male Violence – Physical, Verbal and Emotional
Tue, April 22 2025
Smita Singh’s Khauf is deeply suspicious of the world around it. In the eight-episode miniseries, spanning five and a half hours, there are only a handful of moments when the bystanders come out looking good (or at least civilised). Nearly all men (boyfriends, colleagues, bus passengers, older relatives, autorickshaw drivers, landlords, streetside louts) vary from being insufferable, creepy and abusive to serial killers; there’s no white knight in this bleak, decaying world. I wouldn’t be surprised if Singh’s show is labelled misandrist or ‘men-hating’ by rungs on social media – like they did with Arati Kadav’s Mrs. Will Singh’s show achieve the ‘virality’ that Kadav’s film did? We’ll find out. But, for Singh’s sake, I do hope it earns some notoriety, because it will mean the show will have pierced through the veneer of smug Indian men, touching a nerve somewhere.
Mon, April 21 2025
(Writing for M9 News)
Big Goals, Mediocre Results
Sat, April 19 2025
Leaving her hometown, Gwalior, Madhu seeks a fresh start in Delhi, unaware that her hostel room harbours a sinister presence, alarming the other residents. They urge her to leave before it’s too late. While the warden brings in a shaman (doctor), Madhu pursues her assailant. She confronts him while the hostel women ally with the doctor. Madhu’s rage escalates as she unleashes vengeance. Monika Panwar effectively steps into the shoes of a small-town woman in a vulnerable phase in her life, struggling to find her way in a misogynistic world. Rajat Kapoor, in an unusually creepy role, generates adequate fear and tension through his portrayal of Hakim.
Puratawn
Family, Drama (Bengali)
In Puratawn, Ritika and Rajeev visit her ancestral house in Konnagar (in West Bengal’s Hooghly district) to attend her mother's 80th birthday celebration, only to discover her mother's deteriorating mental state, forcing Ritika to confront this difficult reality and its permanence.
Cast:
Sharmila Tagore, Rituparna Sengupta, Indraneil Sengupta, Ekavali Khanna, Subhrajit Dutta, Brishti Roy
Director:
Suman Ghosh
Writer:
Suman Ghosh
(Writing for The Common Man Speaks)
Sharmila Tagore provides an acting masterclass in this meditative drama
Sun, April 20 2025
Memory loss or issues with memory is an unusual problem. More than the person suffering from the same, it affects those around him or her. This is the base of writer and director Suman Ghosh’s Bengali film Puratawn (English title: The Ancient). The movie revolves around Ritika (Ritupatna Sengupta), a woman working in the corporate sector in a high position. Her marriage with Rajeev (Indraneil Sengupta), a passionate photographer, is going through turbulence. She, along with Rajeev, visits her ancestral home in a small town in West Bengal where her mother Mrs Sen (Sharmila Tagore) lives, to celebrate the latter’s 80th birthday in a grand manner. But there is also another reason for Ritika’s visit. She and Rajeev wish to reveal to her that their marriage is going nowhere. However, after arriving at the ancestral house, Ritika is pained to know that her mother is facing memory issues. Now, she is more hesitant to tell her about her troubled marriage as she doesn’t know how she would take it.
(Writing for Views and Reviews)
A tender portrait of the comforting perpetuity of memory
Sat, April 12 2025
Writer-director Suman Ghosh situates Puratawn (The Ancient) in a sprawling ancestral abode inhabited by a widowed matriarch and her housemaid. Many stories, some fading, others perennial, and many of them going all the way back to the 1970s and beyond, resides in this mansion and in the mind of its principal occupant. The physical location as well as the wizened lady’s psyche are sites where mere words and gestures do not convey as much immediate meaning as forgotten objects and indelible remembrances do. It is human to hold on to secrets, to create mysteries, and to conjure up conundrums in the course of the humdrum of existence — the protagonist of Puratawn does all that as she looks for ways to resist obliteration of what she holds dear.
The Stolen Girl
Drama, Mystery (English)
A mother-of-two has her world turned upside down when she agrees to let her nine-year-old daughter have a sleepover at her new best friend's house.
Cast:
Denise Gough, Ambika Mod, Holliday Grainger, Jim Sturgess, Bronagh Waugh, Michael Workeye, Layo-Christina Akinlude
A pulpy but forgettable thriller.
Sun, April 20 2025
A mom allows her nine-year-old daughter her first-ever sleepover at the home of her new friend in school. When she lands up the next afternoon to pick her up, her world falls apart when she discovers that her daughter has vanished, with no trace of the family that supposedly lived there. That is the rather intriguing premise of The Stolen Girl, a pulpy, if often incongruous thriller, that relies a lot on convenience and contrivance, but is engaging while it lasts. Playing out on Jio Hotstar over five pacy episodes, The Stolen Girl is akin to a page turner, a trifle sensationalist if you may, tracing how the seemingly perfect lives of Elisa Blix (Denise Gough), a high-flying stewardess, and her lawyer husband Fred (Jim Sturgess) come to a standstill when their nine-year-old daughter Lucia is kidnapped. The police are pressed into action, even as red herrings — a ransom note, Fred’s brief affair, Elisa’s predilection to document every aspect of her life on social media — are strewn all through the narrative. It is good fun while it lasts, but The Stolen Girl — Eva Husson directs an adaptation by Catherine Moulton of the 2020 Alex Dahl-written novel Playdate — sacrifices its potential to become yet another series that doesn’t know what to do with its material after the initial episodes.
Naangal
Drama, Family (Tamil)
It's the 1990s, in a sleepy hillside town in Southern India there is a cavernous mansion surrounded by plantations, inside three preadolescent brothers live with their German shepherd. They buy the groceries, lug water up the slopes in plastic cans, get each other ready for school and lend a hand to workers on the estate. The boys may practically run the house, but the lord of this forsaken domain is their father, a ruthless martinet whose mere sight frightens them to the core.
Cast:
Mithun V, Rithik M, Nithin D, Abdul Rafe, Prarthana Srikaanth, Sab John, Vignesh Raja
Director:
Avinash Prakash
Writer:
Avinash Prakash
(Writing for The Federal)
A haunting memoir of Tamil brothers, steeped in childhood trauma
Sat, April 19 2025
In Avinash Prakash’s Tamil feature film Naangal which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this week, time is stretched by a limited set of events as if perched on a non-stop Ferris wheel. They are the same moments with their ups and downs, same life-altering triggers that repeat in a cyclical fashion. Three preadolescent siblings — Karthik (Mithun V, eldest, 13 years old), Dhruv (Rithik Mohan) and Gautam (Nithin D) — live somewhere near Lovedale in the hills of Tamil Nadu with their father (Abdul Rafe as Rajkumar) who owns plantations, a house too huge for four individuals and is the Chairman and Principal of their modest school.
Dispassionate Yet Profoundly Moving Film Hits Home With Phenomenal Force
Sat, April 19 2025
Epic in length - it has a runtime of nearly four and a half hours - but squarely focused on the minutiae of the life of three boys and their excessively stern father, Naangal (This Is Us) is an exceptional piece of cinema. Calling it a piece of anything would be somewhat incongruous - it is far larger than that. Naangal - the Tamil film is part of the Asian Cinema Competition at the ongoing 15th Bengaluru International Film Festival - is a striking and sweeping collage of innumerable shards of memory, mostly unsettling, collated and rendered in the form stunning images underwired by a fantastic background score and strung together with impressive skill and imagination. Written, directed, shot and edited by Avinash Prakash, Naangal has the look of a work helmed by a seasoned director. But it is a debut film. A deeply personal essay, its length is bound to be commented on. What is important is that the time that Naangal takes to tell a story that spans about a decade seems completely justified. Growing up is never easy particularly when home isn’t what it is meant to be - sweet home.
A heart-rending memoir of childhood trauma and coming to terms with it
Sat, April 19 2025
Cwtch, which means embracing someone to offer a sense of warmth, is a famous Welsh word some of us might be familiar with. An inter-title before Naangal commences introduces us to another one word — Hiraeth — which means homesickness for a home one cannot return to or one that never existed. Very rarely can an entire film’s plot, conflict and resolution be summed up in a word, and director Avinash Prakash establishes precisely that in the first frame of his film, which also doubles as his biographical. With Naangal, Avinash puts us in the middle of three brothers’ traumatic yet transformative upbringing in a dysfunctional family. Rajkumar (Abdul Rafe) is a man whose once-affluent family is now bankrupt. After parting ways with his wife and some financial setbacks, he has become the chairman of a run-down school. With no place to assert dominance, he takes it out on his three children — Karthik (Mithun V), Dhruv (Rithik Mohan) and Gautam (Nithin D) — who stay with him and are forced to endure his physical and emotional torture. What happens when their resilience gets tested forms the rest of Naangal.
Chhaava
History, Action, Drama (Hindi)
Shivaji's death sparks the Maratha-Mughal conflict. His son Sambhaji leads resistance against Aurangzeb's forces. Amid battles and intrigue, both sides face challenges in a struggle for power.
Cast:
Vicky Kaushal, Rashmika Mandanna, Akshaye Khanna, Ashutosh Rana, Divya Dutta, Pradeep Ram Singh Rawat, Vineet Kumar Singh, Neil Bhoopalam, Santosh Juvekar, Rajiv Kachroo
Director:
Laxman Utekar
Writer:
Rishi Virmani, Laxman Utekar, Kaustubh J. Savarkar
Vicky Kaushal’s worrisome streak hits an all-time low; who’ll take responsibility for inciting violence?
Sat, April 19 2025
One of Javed Akhtar’s favourite stories to tell is about fishing. Regardless of the venue — it could be an international seminar or one of those ‘naastik parishad’ meetings that he enjoys attending — he regales the audience with a carefully constructed bit about why fishing is considered a relaxing recreational activity while hunting is mostly outlawed across the world. The only reason for this, he declares in his punchline, is because fish don’t have vocal chords. They can’t shriek in agony when they’re pierced by a hook, scaled alive, and left to suffocate. Fishing has great PR, as do the folks behind the blockbuster film Chhaava, even though it incited a riot.
Film that launched a thousand protests
Fri, March 28 2025
For nearly two hours, Chhaava runs like a mishmash of the testosterone-heavy Marvel and DC universe action spectacles. Here, it leads to one battle after another, as Maratha king Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj (played by Vicky Kaushal) duels against a lion (cue Russell Crowe in Gladiator), excels in aerial fights and takes on the Mughal army, often single-handedly. Accompanied by a bombastic background score by A.R. Rahman, the historical extravaganza comes alive in the last half hour, when the punches are not literal, but verbal. With the protagonist captured and chained, audiences finally get to see the daring hero and his enemy, a haggard Aurangzeb (Akshaye Khanna), in one frame. “Mughalon ki taraf aa jaaao. Zindagi badal jaayegi. Bas tumhein apna dharm badalna hoga (Join hands with the Mughals. Your life will change. All you have to do is convert to Islam),” says Khanna’s Aurangzeb in a final offer of freedom to the brutalised Chhaava. The Maratha king, his spirit untethered, retorts, “Humse haath mila lozindagi badal jaayegi aur dharm bhi badalna nahin padega (Join hands with Marathas. Your life will change and you won’t even have to change your faith).”
Sun, February 16 2025
The Pitt
Drama (English)
The staff of Pittsburgh's Trauma Medical Center work around the clock to save lives in an overcrowded and underfunded emergency department.
Cast:
Noah Wyle, Tracy Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, Supriya Ganesh, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Gerran Howell, Shabana Azeez
Thrilling, trailblazing; the next best show of 2025 is already here, mere weeks after Netflix’s Adolescence
Sat, April 19 2025
Tears are just grief leaving our body, says Dr Michael Robinavitch in The Pitt. It’s one of the many pearls of wisdom that he drops through the 15-episode first season of the medical drama, which is streaming in its entirety on Jio Hotstar. Known as ‘Dr Robby’ to everyone around him, and those who will never see him again, he is the ‘chief attending’ at a Pittsburgh hospital’s emergency department. His job is to run the day shift as smoothly as he can, despite all the difficulties that the modern healthcare system throws at him. He must do his best with an under-staffed and under-funded team; he must deal with belligerent patients, and, towards the end of the season, an unprecedented tragedy that will require him and his fellow doctors to go above and beyond the call of duty.
Logout
Thriller (Hindi)
Pratyush, a social media influencer who is about to reach his biggest milestone in terms of followers to land a deal with a brand, loses his phone to a fan obsessed with him. Trapped in his own house without his phone, Pratyush must find a way to reclaim his identity and his career.
Cast:
Babil Khan, Nimisha Nair, Rasika Dugal, Gandharv Dewan
Director:
Amit Golani
Writer:
Biswapati Sarkar
(Writing for M9 News)
Decent Cyber Thriller
Sat, April 19 2025
After distancing himself from his family and having just broken up with his girlfriend Smriti, Instagram influencer Pratyush lives alone in his apartment. He’s under pressure to reach the 10 million mark on the platform while competing with a rival. However, his plans go kaput one night when he loses his phone, only to realise that an obsessed female fan stole it. Babil Khan may not be getting the opportunities he deserves, but he is definitely making his presence felt in the digital space with his consistency, representing realities that mainstream cinema often tends to ignore. Logout is no different and is a story apt for his age, driven by a strong screenplay and eliciting a good performance out of him.
Log in to ‘Logout’
Sat, April 19 2025
We all are prisoners of our mobile phones. So, when the very first line of ‘Logout’ reminds you of it as well as drives home precisely why it’s called a cell phone, you can only nod in unison. The same can be said about the entire runtime of the two-hour film. Much of what unfolds is relatable, much has already been documented, maybe with greater precision and depth. But the Amit Golani directorial focuses on the life of an influencer and serves the tale as a psychological thriller; murder in the very first scene. You might be on a familiar path; after all, reams have been penned on the perils of social media, invasion of privacy and cyber frauds. But the way Golani weaves a world where ‘phone hamare liye distraction nahin puri duniya hai’, you are neither distracted by the subject nor its treatment. Rather, you are fully clued in on the fate of this young celebrity.
The fallout of digital dependence
Sat, April 19 2025
There are two sides to digital media influencer connections. The first is the connection created by these influencers—designed, manufactured, marketed, finessed, and posted on their socials. These are aimed at gaining likes, shares, and follows, all to increase the creator’s relevance and brand value. On the other side of the mobile device screen, someone else is consuming this content—often obsessively, even addictively. Writer Biswapati Sarkar’s script for Logout (Zee5) is a cautionary tale that examines how an alarming number of subscribers are entrapped by their ‘cell’ phones.
Arjun S/O Vyjayanthi
Action, Crime, Thriller (Telugu)
In order to protect the people of his village, a man becomes a ruthless vigilante against his police officer mother’s wishes.
Cast:
Kalyan Ram, Vijayashanti, Saiee Manjrekar, Sohail Khan, Srikanth, Arjun Rampal
Director:
Pradeep Chilukuri
Vijayashanthi, Kalyan Ram’s film withers under the weight of a dated tale
Sat, April 19 2025
A scene in the final portions of the Telugu action drama Arjun S/O Vyjayanthi offers a moment of shock, establishing how far the protagonist would go to protect a loved one. Barring that moment, the film is an outdated relationship drama of a mother and son who find themselves at opposite ends of a flawed system. Had the makers approached the story with a new narrative style, perhaps the story’s emotional crux would have had the necessary impact. Instead, the film squanders the potential with its formulaic approach and gets tiresome with each passing action sequence. Vijayashanthi’s formidable presence and Kalyan Ram’s earnestness are in vain. The film unravels with a series of introduction sequences. Vijayashanthi’s introduction sequence doffs its hat to her iconic, tough-as-nails police officer characters in the 1990s. It establishes how she does not buckle under pressure, putting her own safety at risk. As the action sequence unravels, the film, written and directed by Pradeep Chilukuri, is aware that audience will not question how her young son reaches her in the forest even before the rescue team.
Odela 2
(Telugu)
In a remote village, steeped in rich cultural heritage and age-old traditions, its true saviour Odela Mallanna Swamy always protects his village from evil forces.
Cast:
Tamannaah Bhatia, Hebah Patel, Vasishta N. Simha, Naga Mahesh
Director:
Ashok Teja
Writer:
Sampath Nandi
(Writing for The Hindu)
Tamannaah cannot salvage this outdated sequel
Fri, April 18 2025
The 2022 film Odela Railway Station, directed by Ashok Teja and featuring Vasishta Simha and Hebah Patel, was a rural thriller focusing on sexual crimes in a quiet Telangana village. The narrative followed a woman’s chilling revenge after discovering that her husband was the perpetrator. With its use of graphic visuals and a voyeuristic lens on violence, the film, despite its disturbing tone, garnered significant viewership on OTT (Aha Telugu). Ashok Teja and writer Sampath Nandi reunite for its sequel, Odela 2, led by Tamanaah Bhatia, reimagining the story as a supernatural thriller. After meeting with a horrific end at the hands of his wife, Tirupathi (Vasishta N Simha) returns as a vengeful spirit, undeterred and more dangerous. His spirit manipulates a new set of men, reigniting a similar pattern of crimes in the village. As chaos escalates, the stage is set for the arrival of Bhairavi (Tamannaah), a mythical force destined to restore order. A conventional good-versus-evil showdown ensues.
Black Mirror S07
Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Drama, Mystery (English)
Twisted tales run wild in this mind-bending anthology series that reveals humanity's worst traits, greatest innovations and more.
Fri, April 18 2025
Government Cheese
Drama, Comedy (English)
When Hampton is released from prison, his long-awaited family reunion doesn't quite go as he hoped. In his absence, Hampton's wife and sons formed an unconventional family unit, and his return spins their world into chaos.
Cast:
David Oyelowo, Simone Missick, Jahi Di'Allo Winston, Evan Ellison, Bokeem Woodbine, Jeremy Bobb, Louis Cancelmi, Adam Beach, Mykelti Williamson
David Oyelowo Starrer Struggles To Maintain Narrative And Tone
Wed, April 16 2025
The new Apple TV+ series Government Cheese is billed as a family comedy but veers into deep drama at times as well. Set in 1960s California, the surreal comedy never seems too sure about its initial premise and veers all over the place. David Oyelowo is the cheerful protagonist and former felon who is ready to do everything to get things back to where they were with his family. However, his criminal past can never quite escape him. The meandering dramedy pushes off strong but loses itself as more characters are introduced. Oyelowo is Hampton Chambers, a check forger sentenced to the Chino State Prison, who is let out early with certain conditions. His family, wife Astoria (Simone Missick), and sons, Einstein (Evan Ellison) and Harrison (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), have all moved on in his absence, and Hampton struggles to form their bond again. Working to launch his new handyman invention and pay off the local crime family to whom he owes a debt, Hampton falls deeper into chaos.
Warfare
War, Action (English)
A platoon of American Navy SEALs in the home of an Iraqi family overwatches the movement of US forces through insurgent territory.
Cast:
D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo
Director:
Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland
Writer:
Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza
Feels Like a Sobering Admission of America’s Futile, Bloody Invasion of Iraq
Tue, April 15 2025
t’s curious how all the prestige around Hollywood war films – lucrative, quasi-recruitment videos and vanity projects for young actors – was punctured by one joke. More than a decade ago, comedian Frankie Boyle said in a set – “Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people – but what’s worse is, 20 years later, they’ll make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers very sad.” It’s a stinging line that rightfully sullied the stock character of the haunted American war veteran. Especially, when such films didn’t show similar sensitivity towards the broad-stroked, faceless ‘jihadis’ and innocent civilians, whose lives are boiled down to just being ‘collateral damage’ before the eventual triumph of the American military. What was once a sure shot for an Oscar nomination – through films like Saving Private Ryan (1998), Black Hawk Down (2002), The Hurt Locker (2007) – has now become a relatively more introspective and self-reflective genre, with even filmmakers like Michael Bay making an effort to assess the problematic presence of America in a foreign land, without glorifying their soldiers.
Deeply unnerving and immersive, warfare is filmmaking at its finest
Sat, April 12 2025
After Adolescence’s single take technical brilliance, Warfare’s impeccable sound design, intense storytelling, cinematography and atmospherics will leave you shaken. There is no music, the enemies are barely shown and the entire film is shot at one location. This no-frills innovative approach creates a film so immersive, terrifying and gripping that you want to be evacuated, let alone have popcorn or coffee! Alex Garland’s spectacular war movie can be classified as horror for its edge of the seat, relentless and raw onslaught of terror. He leaves you no room to relax or catch a breath. It strips off the glamour and chest-thumping heroism of war films to give you the real picture. There’s also brotherhood and empathy, surfacing when there’s no expectation. Warfare is a technical masterpiece that never overlooks human emotion and horrors of war. This one’s bound to blow your mind.