Sat, October 24 2026

Kaushal Oza’s film stars Hridansh Parekh, Gulshan Devaiah and Rasika Dugal.

Thomas Miranda (Hridansh Parekh) has two pressing concerns: where do babies come from, and how can he get a baby brother? When he was six, he wanted a zoo; now at seven, he is convinced that he needs a sibling. His attempt to find answers lead him to a priest, his kindly neighbour Mrs Braganza (Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal) and conversations with his two friends: Nigel, who has an insatiable appetite, and Murthy, a science enthusiast. Thomas’s parents Desmond (Gulshan Devaiah) and Jessie (Rasika Dugal) run a bakery, but business is slow. Jessie teaches piano, but dwindling interest among children in learning music threatens her livelihood. Desmond and Jessie’s disagreements are shaped by everyday pressures, though Thomas, naturally, sees things in much simpler terms.

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Sat, October 24 2026

A gentle slice-of-life tale about growing up and holding on to wonder.

When he witnesses his parents fighting over the everyday struggles of middle-class life—expenses, responsibilities and survival, seven-year-old Thomas Miranda (Hridansh Parekh) realises that life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Yet, in his innocent logic, he believes that a little brother could bring the family closer and make them happier. But with their finances crumbling, his parents – piano teacher Jesse (Rasika Dugal) and baker Desmond (Gulshan Devaiah) are too preoccupied with keeping their household afloat to think about expanding their family or rekindling their romance. At the heart of director Kaushal Oza’s tender tale is a child who wants to believe in miracles but must eventually confront reality. Set in the sleepy neighbourhood of Fontainhas in 1990s Goa, the film unfolds like a gentle childhood lullaby, evoking a time when life moved at a slower pace and childhood was unburdened by the noise of the world.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Little Thomas is a little overstretched in the last third of its 125-minute runtime, but it does something few children films are able to do in India: it lands gracefully.

It’s hard to make a worthy film for children in India, where the mainstream inherently infantilises its audience. It’s not surprising then that a large section of supposed films for children that come out in India, are often trying too hard. The lack of assurance stems from a film second-guessing itself, and serving what adults presume children will like. The result, more often, are films so unbearably screechy and annoying that one has to wonder who the filmmakers were even targeting in the first place. At the very least, Kaushal Oza’s Little Thomas doesn’t have that insecurity, as it balances its protagonist’s sense of wonder with adequate padding of the gritty world of the grown-ups, which pokes holes into the fantasy.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Director Kirtan Nadagouda's 418, backed by KGF and Salaar fame Prashanth Neel, is a horror thriller with a message about mental health. With a predictable storyline, the film relies heavily on jump scares and sound design to unsettle the audience.

Indian cinema has often diluted the horror genre by blending it with comedy, making genuinely frightening films a rarity. And even among those that attempt pure horror, finding one that delivers consistent scares is no easy task. 418, backed by KGF and Salaar filmmaker Prashanth Neel, made headlines after the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) reportedly found it too scary. After several delays, the film has finally arrived in theatres. Does it live up to the hype? Let’s find out.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Four cash-strapped friends turn to car theft as Inspector Sumati Bhalerao closes in. Their chase loses momentum amid an overextended screenplay and crowded subplots.

Four friends, empty pockets and a talent for turning every good day into a disaster. Chaar Yaar looks like a cool, young crime caper about hustling your way to the top. There are stolen cars, dangerous gangsters, messy friendships and a cop on their trail. The boys have the jugaad, the attitude and the ambition. They believe their story is an RGV-style drama, but what they don’t have is a screenplay that knows when to stop.

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Sat, October 24 2026

Fri, October 23 2026

The busy 8-episode series revolves around four talkative friends and their template-riddled descent into the Mumbai underworld

Somewhere between passive-viewing content and algorithmic entertainment, there is a field. Shows like Chaar Yaar (“Four Friends”) will meet you there. It is not bad. It is not good. It is arguably something worse: middling and overlong. The 8-episode crime drama takes a stacked cast full of watchable performers and flattens them into a distracted underworld tale that keeps chasing its own tail. Watching the series is strange because most scenes look fine at an individual level: the acting, writing, staging, banter. But they don’t make sense as an aggregative experience, pulling us in multiple directions like a shopkeeper trying to exhaust his stock on a lazy customer.

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Fri, October 23 2026

Created by Erin Foster, the romance series moves Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody)'s relationship to the next stage, leading to lovely moments of togetherness.

It’s time to say mazel tov! Kristen Bell’s Joanne and Adam Brody’s Noah are now living together, and the former decides to take the next big steps in her conversion to Judaism. The Netflix rom-com had a shaky second season where the couple questioned their relationship status, but now, their bond is stronger than ever. Based on creator Erin Foster’s real-life experiences, Nobody Wants This Season 3 also explores the connection between Joanne and Noah’s siblings, Sasha (Timothy Simons) and Morgan (Justine Lupe). From family interferences to sibling tiffs, the new instalment has plenty of fun and chaotic sequences.

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Fri, October 23 2026

The bittersweet five-episode series revolves around a studious teenager who decides to lose her virginity, much to the chagrin of her single father

It’s easy to suggest that a low-key dramedy about girlhood feels refreshing because it’s written entirely by women. But that’s a generalisation of sorts. We’ve seen women-led shows behave like their sensationalist counterparts in an aggressive tit-for-tat way; they tend to be reactionary — a statement to all testosterone-driven productions — rather than natural. The reason Matargashti works is because it refuses to look like the defiant story of a 19-year-old girl. It doesn’t pretend to be the unapologetic female (or feminist) version of those sex comedies featuring funny boys trying to lose their virginity. If anything, it reclaims the diversity of middle-class conflict from the clutches of male-created TVF family universes. You almost don’t expect the setting to be Lucknow. It unfolds like a lightweight antidote, not a conscious subversion, to a genre largely dominated by men.

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Fri, October 23 2026

Directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker pull off a wholesome entertainer, which is simple, straight and touching, without having pretensions, or songs-and-dances, about being anything else.

With 190 episodes over seven series, Shaun the Sheep is among the longest-running animated series on British and German television, with the characters around for over 30 years. In all that time, the sheep have hardly changed. It is a remarkable success given that the stop-motion animation involves no dialogue; its animals don’t talk and its humans only utter unintelligible words. The Beast of Mossy Bottom underlines why, as directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker pull off a wholesome entertainer, which is simple, straight and touching, without having pretensions, or songs-and-dances, about being anything else.

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Wed, October 21 2026

The story of the first successful conquest of Everest is handled with sensitivity and respect towards local culture.

Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing has many echoes of Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018), including the at-first seemingly underwhelming premise for their respective films. We know how it ended. They scaled Mount Everest. They landed on the moon. What’s the point? Chazelle managed to turn his film into an urgent family drama, around a grieving father. One of the towering achievements of First Man was underlining how the triumph of the space race ventured through a series of funerals. Many paid with their lives or were exposed to significant mortal danger, while working with technology that was still not as state-of-the-art as it is today.

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Fri, October 16 2026

Films like Tenzing don't come very often, because people like Tenzing Norgay don't come very often. A deeply moving portrait of the man who climbed many mountains before Everest.

Films like Tenzing don’t come very often, because people like Tenzing Norgay don’t come very often. Most of us know his biggest achievement. In 1953, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. We know the historic story, we have seen the photographs, and we know how significant that climb was. But do we really know Tenzing? What did he have to go through before he finally reached the top of the world? That’s where this film makes a difference. Available on Apple TV, Tenzing, directed by Jennifer Peedom, takes us beyond the famous climb and tells us about the man behind it. And what I found most interesting is that Tenzing’s biggest challenges did not begin on Mount Everest. They began much earlier in his life.

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Mon, October 19 2026

The Yami Gautam starrer gives her the spotlight, but the tale and its telling feel too contrived, with tone shifting from sitcom to mythological grandstanding

In Nayyi Navelli, what you see is not what you get. Bantu (Anurag Thakur) is convinced that his bhabhi Mohini (Yami Gautam) is “Ramsay Bros wali daayan” a.k.a. witch and sets out to convince everyone in the Awasthi household that there’s more to her than meets the eye. This is when audiences are supposedly watching a horror comedy but what they get is only a few laugh-worthy moments and next to zero scares. The way these scenes unfold with scores of family members seated in the aangaan (courtyard) at times listening and wondering, and at other times berating and taunting Bantu in an exaggerated way, it almost feels more like a sitcom than a feature film. It doesn’t help that for most of the first half, Yami’s Mohini is seen only through Bantu’s dubious eyes and unending narration. So far so meh.

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Sun, October 18 2026

Yami Gautam and Anurag Thakur do the heavy lifting in a film that has a convoluted screenplay. While the first half entertains, post-interval, the film nosedives into a deep illogical pit.

The flight of fancy scales unimaginable heights with this one. In director Balaji Mohan’s supernatural-meets-mythology comedy caper Nayyi Navelli, Yami Gautam plays a mysterious woman with special powers. On the onset, the film appears to mix comedy and horror- a template well established by the Stree franchise. But the film’s punchlines and wit soon segue into mythology. No harm there either, considering the film is one of the big Dussehra releases this year in India. However, the film quickly spirals thanks to a convoluted plot that infuses too many things into one story, making the second half extremely tedious to watch. The story of Ramayan has been a source of inspiration for filmmakers for decades. The entire concept of good vs evil is a theme that never goes out of fashion and can be interpreted in multiple ways. Nayyi Naveli, to its credit, takes a lesser-known part of the Ramayana and spins an intricate tale. It may not always make sense, but it still makes for an interesting plot.

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Sun, October 18 2026

Mon, October 19 2026

This is no straightforward biopic of Ujjwal Nikam, but the film has wider ambitions that don’t get fulfilled.

Avinash Arun’s Prahaar, being marketed as “the untold story of Ujjwal Nikam”, might not be the most accurate description of the film. And that’s because it has little first-hand insight on the much-chronicled public prosecutor in the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts case. This is consistent with the Hindi film biopic, where the subject rarely has to work hard to become the protagonist. It’s something that is consistent here as well, where Rajkummar Rao (playing Nikam) gives a speech at a celebration, after the verdict of the 1993 bomb blasts case. “The foot soldiers faced the consequences, but the main conspirators are still free,” he says, “The job is not finished” and an inspirational score fills the background. I braced myself for yet another hagiography, where the subject is next to God. However, soon enough, Arun’s film zooms out from Nikam, introducing supporting characters, who, reluctantly, express the film’s larger ambitions.

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Sun, October 18 2026

Avinash Arun's heavy-handed ‘Prahaar’ stars Rajkummar Rao as Ujjwal Nikam, public prosecutor in the Ajmal Kasab trial

The trial for Ajmal Kasab, the only terrorist captured alive in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has just begun when public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam (Rajkummar Rao) plays his first hand. He refers to the defense attorney, Abbas Kazmi (Sikandar Khen), as “terrorist lawyer”; when Kazmi objects, he says he meant “terrorist’s lawyer”. Later in the film, Kazmi brings this up with Nikam, tells him how it stings to be called that when you’re Muslim. Nikam says it wasn’t personal and that’s the last we see of Kazmi. Unwittingly or not, the lawyer’s strategy is echoed by the film. Nikam knows his wordplay will be censured but says it anyway, for the drama and the swarm of reporters. Prahaar, directed by Avinash Arun and written by Sumit Roy, is careful to explain that Kazmi is just doing his job, that he’s taking a huge risk as a Muslim lawyer accepting this case. But there in the trailer, attention-grabbing and meme-ready, is “terrorist lawyer”. It’s a little jab in the film, but it feels more significant out of context. For the many who’ll see the trailer but never get around to watching the film, it might be the one thing they remember about Prahaar.

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Sun, October 18 2026

The Avinash Arun directorial might present a utopian vision for the country at the moment, but it is still a vision worth fighting for

There’s nothing better than a film that surprises you. I admit, I did preemptively box Prahaar: The Ujjwal Nikam Story as another propaganda piece– a subtler one if not of the blaring loud type. It wasn’t an unfounded opinion. If you read up about Ujjwal Nikam you will find an impressive CV. Before getting on the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks trial, the Maharashtra-based lawyer had already served as a special prosecutor on high-profile cases like that of the 1993 Bombay bombings and that of T-series head Gulshan Kumar’s murder. If you research a layer deep, you will find that the lawyer was a candidate for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from Mumbai North Central Lok Sabha constituency in the 2024 Maharashtra state assembly elections. A Caravan article details how the BJP played up Nikam’s image as the lawyer who delivered the death penalty to terrorist Ajmal Kasab and reduced the whole campaign to be either for or against terrorism. Nikam lost the election but was given a Rajya Sabha seat by the ruling party in 2025.

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Sun, October 18 2026

Created by Debora Cahn, the political thriller kicks into second gear as the US and UK relations are especially fraught in the fictional series.

The addition of Allison Janney, who just won an Emmy Award for her supporting role, may be the best thing The Diplomat has done. The Debora Cahn series is back for a tense fourth season which deals with the fallout of the events from the Season 3 finale when the US covertly takes a nuclear machine from a Russian submarine that’s lying in UK territory. Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), the American ambassador to the UK, and her husband, Vice President Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), balance not only their marriage but also the growing tensions between the two countries. The result is a delicious interplay of politics and diplomacy as the US leader, President Grace Penn (Janney), establishes her presidency.

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Sun, October 18 2026

‘Street Fighter’ is better at recreating the experience of the game than making a case for its characters

Translating a video game into a feature film requires more than recreating its characters and signature moves. In Street Fighter, the appeal of the arcade game lies in its colourful fighters, distinctive techniques and the immediacy of one-on-one combat. A film, however, needs to give these characters a reason to occupy the same space beyond the prospect of a fight. The latest adaptation of Capcom’s video-game franchise understands the spectacle better than the storytelling. Directed by Kitao Sakurai, this is the third live-action feature film based on Capcom’s video-game series, which began in 1987 and became a landmark in the fighting-game genre with Street Fighter II in 1991. Sakurai’s film draws on this legacy, though familiarity with the game does not necessarily translate into an interest in the lives of its characters.

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Sun, October 18 2026

Marvel Television's family trilogy revolving around the Maximoffs ends in an emotional and satisfying flourish.

To launch their streaming service, Disney+, in 2020, the series WandaVision came out the gate with a bang. Created by Jac Schaeffer, it set the standard for all other shows to follow. The limited series featured Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) dealing with the death of Vision after Infinity War. To overcome her grief, she creates a suburban haven in Westview until reality sets in. The second part of the trilogy, Agatha All Along (2024), introduced one more part of the puzzle with her son Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke). Now, with the final instalment, VisionQuest, created by Terry Matalas, reveals two more pieces as Vision (Paul Bettany) and Tommy Maximoff (Ruaridh Mollica) reunite. But what happens when Ultron (James Spader) interferes in the long-awaited father-son reunion?

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