Sat, January 24 2026

Debutant director Adhvaith Nayar’s ‘Chatha Pacha’, starring Arjun Ashokan and Roshan Mathew, nails the high-octane moves of WWE, but stumbles with a weak storyline

Every minute aspect about World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) wrestlers, ranging from their signature moves to their individual body dimensions, is imprinted in the memories of a generation that grew up in the 1990s. Debutant filmmaker Adhvaith Nayar’s Chatha Pacha attempts to tap into this enduring nostalgia of the WWE trump card-playing generation. On the surface, it appears the makers got a lot of it right, from replicating the signature moves of Undertaker and Rey Mysterio to recreating the mood of the wrestling ring with a local touch. Some of the fights in the ring have an unmistakable rhythm to them, which is further elevated by a few standout performers. But, scratch a little, and there emerges the shaky foundation, which could fall with even a weak kick, let alone a chokeslam.

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Sat, January 24 2026

Sat, January 24 2026

May not be a Stone Cold stunner, but works as a great tribute to a group of boys, who dared to try it at home... just like we all did

As an audience, perhaps we underestimate the power of nostalgia done right. In what was being marketed as India’s first WWE-style wrestling movie, the makers of Chatha Pacha could easily have begun their movie as a story about a group of twenty-somethings, who start their local wrestling league just as a business idea. But the writers of the film, which includes director Advaith Nayar, decide to begin the film with a flashback of three little boys, taking on each other in their life’s first wrestling ring… their parents’ double cot.

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Sat, January 24 2026

The TVF series dramatising ISRO’s landmark lunar mission is steeped in a lack of curiosity, craft and wonder

When Chandrayaan-3 nailed the first-ever soft landing on the South Pole of the moon in 2023, all I could think of was the mad scramble of studios to secure the rights to ISRO’s remarkable feat. I could almost sense it happening in real time. It didn’t take long for the child-coded euphoria to make way for an adult-coded wariness — who’s going to pitch first? Who’s going to overcook the perfectly good story? Who’s going to make the unglamorous heroes speak to each other like human ChatGPT apps? It felt inevitable, given the tailor-made ingredients: science, space, patriotism, spaced-out patriotism, a budget less than Nolan’s Interstellar, New India, first-world villains, a moon that doesn’t resemble Swiss cheese. TVF wasn’t on my Creator bingo card, but their slate has often used popular appeal to conceal themes of social conservatism and compliance over the years. Ironically, the current ‘2016 viral trend’ would flash back to TVF as the first movers and harbingers of Indian web storytelling. But space is not their jam; the future is not their cup of (mainstream) tea.

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Sat, January 24 2026

Sat, January 24 2026

23 अगस्त 2023 वह ऐतिहासिक दिन है, जब भारतीय अंतरिक्ष अनुसंधान संगठन (ISRO) के वैज्ञानिकों ने चंद्रमा के दक्षिणी ध्रुव पर अपना विक्रम लैंडर उतारकर इतिहास रचा। वो पल जब हर भारतवासी की आंखें खुशी से चमक रही थी, सीना गर्व से चौड़ा हो गया था। भारत चंद्रमा के दक्षिणी ध्रुव पर पहुंचना वाला दुनिया का पहला देश बना। लेकिन इस सफलता से पहले इसरो के वैज्ञानिकों को जुलाई 2019 में चंद्रयान-2 की विफलता भी देखनी पड़ी थी। चंद्रयान 2 की असफलता से चंद्रयान 3 की सफलता के इसी सफर को दिखाती है, TVF की यह नई वेब सीरीज ‘स्पेस जेन: चंद्रयान’।

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Sat, January 24 2026

Sat, January 24 2026

Two generations of a Muslim family hold the peace—barely—in Anusha Rizvi's sweetly drawn directorial return.

Farida Jalal didn’t grey her hair overnight. She’s been acting in movies since the 1960s. Since DDLJ, she’s been a sweet, endearing presence in Hindi films, buffing up large ensembles with her nourishing warmth. At 75, she’s a grande dame in the tradition of Zohra Sehgal and Nafisa Ali. Yet like those greats, Jalal is very much her own actor—as Shyam Benegal’s Mammo proved. Her new film, The Great Shamsuddin Family, directed by Anusha Rizvi, is also an ensemble comedy, with Jalal billed behind everyone else. Yet it only sparks to life when the actor joins the fray.

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Mon, December 22 2025

In between all the family banter and drama, writer-director Anusha Rizvi subtly weaves in the larger anxieties and insecurities of being a Muslim in today's India

Bani Ahmed (Kritika Kamra) wants to write. With just 12 hours to submit an application that may land her a job in the United States, she finds herself interrupted by the doorbell. Continuously. Each subsequent ring sees the arrival of a member of the Shamsuddin clan. There’s her easily gullible and recently divorced cousin Iram (Shreya Dhanwanthary); an over-intellectual ex (Purab Kohli) and his latest young girlfriend; another cousin in Humaira (Juhi Babbar Soni); inquisitive and opinionated aunts (Dolly Ahluwalia and Farida Jalal); another cousin and his bride-to-be. Simply said, Bani just cannot catch a break.

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Mon, December 15 2025

Watch it for the array of solid performances, helmed by the wonderful Farida Jalal and Sheeba Chaddha, with Anup Soni’s criminally brief appearance leaving a mark. It isn’t perfect, but it makes you smile and think.

Racing towards a 24-hour deadline to submit a presentation which will hopefully get her into a top US university, Bani Ahmad (Kritika Kamra) settles down to it, but she hasn’t taken into account her family, and friends: the door-bell rings with an unexpected visitor, and within a few minutes, the trickle into a flood, and it’s full-blown mayhem. Anusha Rizvi’s second directorial feature, 15 years after rural satire ‘Peepli Live’, circles back to the city, with one day in the life of a Delhi-based comfortably-off Muslim family. It’s the kind of family we almost never see in mainstream Hindi cinema, because usually a Muslim character is safely tacked on to the periphery, biding his or her time for when the script bothers to remember them, and even that kind of tokenism has been steadily erased over these past years.

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Sat, January 24 2026

Kapil Sharma is once again a man with many wives in this belated sequel; it's satire meets fantasy meets low comedy

You’ve watched Dhurandhar. You’ve watched Tere Ishk Mein. You’ve watched Haq. You wouldn’t admit it, but you’ve also watched The Taj Story. Now you want to fold the year in peace. How about a silly Kapil Sharma comedy? I hadn’t seen the trailer for Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon 2 and went in expecting more of the same: a tumescent comedy about a man with many wives, with no wars or social unrest to worry about, no particular politics to propagate. The first film, released in 2015, was some form of a hit. Surely the sequel will abide?

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Sat, December 13 2025

कपिल शर्मा कॉमेडी की दुनिया के धुरंधर हैं। बचकानी हरकतों और बातों से भी ऑडियंस को हंसा ले जाने की कला वह जानते हैं और यही काम वह अपनी फिल्म ‘किस किसको प्यार करूं 2’ में भी कर रहे हैं। यह फिल्म उनकी 2015 में आई डेब्यू फिल्म ‘किस किसको प्यार करूं’ का सीक्वल है, जिसमें वह तीन बीवियों के फेर में फंस जाते हैं। लेकिन कैसे? इस बात में लॉजिक ढूंढने की गलती, गलती से भी ना कीजिएगा।

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Sat, December 13 2025

10 साल से ऊपर हो गए जब कॉमेडी के लिए चर्चित कपिल शर्मा बतौर हीरो अपनी पहली फिल्म ‘किस किस को प्यार करूं’ लेकर आए थे। उस फिल्म में उन्होंने एक ऐसे युवक की भूमिका निभाई थी जिसे मजबूरी में तीन शादियां करनी पड़ती हैं और अब वह अपनी पसंद की लड़की से चौथा ब्याह रचाने जा रहा है। उस फिल्म में रोमांस की हल्की खुशबू के साथ कॉमेडी का तड़का था और दर्शकों ने उस फिल्म पर अपनी पसंदगी का ठप्पा भी लगाया था। यह फिल्म ‘किस किस को प्यार करूं 2’ उसी कड़ी की अगली फिल्म है। लेकिन यह उसका सीक्वेल नहीं है बल्कि लगभग उसी कहानी पर फिर से बनाई गई फिल्म है-कुछ अलग तड़के के साथ

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Thu, January 22 2026

Despite differing opinions about their individual personas and careers, viewers are often drawn to their collaborative works

Cognitive bias based on the positive traits of a person often makes human psychology assume that the individual in question has other unrelated qualities that are also likable. This is the ‘Halo Effect’. The Halo Effect, by association, extends itself to assuming that if you like a person, you tend to start liking (sometimes, not always) those he or she associates with, even if you may not have had a good impression of them in the first place. That happens with me when it comes to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. I like Damon — actor, human, overall great guy, et al. Affleck — sporadically interesting on screen, controversial off it, perpetual hangdog demeanour — I am not a fan of. But I always enjoy watching the two together. One of Hollywood’s strongest, lasting friendships makes for a great creative partnership — as co-actors, co-producers, co-writers — meeting as they did 45 years ago when Damon was 10 and Affleck two years younger. They even have an Oscar together, and their joint interviews are tinged with warmth, wit, charm and congeniality.

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Wed, January 21 2026

The actor-director’s spy spoof aims for absurdist satire but collapses under stereotypes, scattered themes, and overextended gags, despite flashes of wit and a fun Aamir Khan cameo.

The directorial debut of Vir Das and Kavi Shastri, Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos, introduces us to Happy—played by Das himself—a 34-year-old, UK-based wannabe secret agent whose most dangerous skill is assembling a sandwich so good it brings joy to his British dads. He is earnest, clumsy, and armed with optimism rather than competence. Naturally, chaos follows. Written by Vir Das and Amogh Ranadive, the 121-minute film operates on hope—hope that a goofy British spy of Indian origin can carry a full-blown absurdist comedy. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it really, really hopes it works.

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Mon, January 19 2026

Sun, January 18 2026

Comedy is serious business – and not everybody can get that right. The gags could be physical (think of ‘thoda khao thoda pheko’, in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, (1983) or any Bustor Keaton, Charlie Chaplin film), situational like Chupke Chupke (1975) or a Golmaal (1979) that got everything right. Then we had the Kadar Khan Shakti Kapoor comedy in the 80s & 90s and Aamir Khan Productions own Delhi Belly (2011) had some funny situations.

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Mon, January 19 2026

Kalamkaval—the new investigative thriller in which Mammootty plays a serial killer—is a dull, dour, and deeply frustrating film. We talk about director Jithin K. Jose’s indisciplined screenplay, which repeats the same information over and over again as if it knows audiences are going to tune out. We also discuss its lack of interest in the killer’s victims, whom it treats as mere plot devices. We find that the performances of the two leads are entirely mismatched, and the movie is more interested in pulling the rug from under the audience’s feet than examining why people do what they do.

Mon, January 19 2026

Kalamkaval—the new investigative thriller in which Mammootty plays a serial killer—is a dull, dour, and deeply frustrating film. We talk about director Jithin K. Jose’s indisciplined screenplay, which repeats the same information over and over again as if it knows audiences are going to tune out. We also discuss its lack of interest in the killer’s victims, whom it treats as mere plot devices. We find that the performances of the two leads are entirely mismatched, and the movie is more interested in pulling the rug from under the audience’s feet than examining why people do what they do.

Thu, December 11 2025

It’s one thing to make a biography or documentary on an over-exposed crime episode. It’s another to sprinkle it with cinematic liberties and hope it magically transforms into a chilling superstar saga. Jithin K. Jose’s debut feature Kalamkaval attempts the latter and ends up as an engaging yet deeply implausible effort that feels dystopian. Tragically so, because almost nothing in its setup or screenplay reflects the conservative, observant, and perpetually inquisitive social fabric of Kerala.

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Mon, January 19 2026

Nia DaCosta's masterfully written zombie thriller does the unthinkable: it strips the genre of its dangerous flights of fancy, reclaiming the Zombie as a monster of science, not faith.

Nia Dacosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple directly takes off from where Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025) left off. The setting is quarantined Britain, 28 full years after the Rage Virus — a mutated strain that transformed its victims into hyperaggressive zombie-like creatures — tore through the continent in 28 Days Later (2002). Few humans have survived. Young Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves the sheltered isle after the death of his cancer-riddled mother (Jodie Comer) to “come of age” on his own terms in the zombie-infested mainland. This film opens with him getting roped into the weird ‘gang’ that rescued him at the end of the last film — except they turn out to be a toxic Satanic cult run by a psychopath named Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell). Spike is too scared to escape the Jimmys, a group that spends their days skinning and killing survivors as a sacrifice to the devil. Parallely, a lonely Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who urged Spike to find his own way, forges an unlikely bond with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the Alpha leader who terrorised them not too long ago. It’s apparent that, at some point, the paths of the iodine-smothered orange-skinned doctor and a Jimmy’d Spike will cross. What’s not apparent is how a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller can be unexpectedly funny and profound at once: not spoofy-Shaun of the Dead funny, more like Tarantino-Spike-Lee-revisionism funny.

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Sun, January 18 2026

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple comes within a year of its predecessor’s release, with both films being shot back-to-back. Directed commendably by Nia DaCosta, this is the fourth film in the 28 Days Later franchise that started back in 2003 with Danny Boyle at the helm as the director with a script conceptualized by Alex Garland who has also written the last two 28 Years Later films.

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Sun, January 18 2026

Nia DaCosta's graphic, exhausting but also ambitious sequel continues Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's zombie series

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is an unsettling, often punishing sequel that connects directly and deliberately to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025), while escalating the franchise’s visual and thematic intensity. Where Boyle’s film found terror in suggestion and absence (screams heard but not seen, horror registered in the faces of those left behind) director Nia DaCosta brings that terror into full view. Violence is explicit, gore is confrontational and discomfort is sustained rather than fleeting.

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Sat, January 17 2026

Sat, January 17 2026

Sat, January 17 2026

Sreeleela, in her first Tamil film, plays the male protagonist's romantic interest and not much else

In her fifth outing and first collaboration with actor Sivakarthikeyan, director Sudha Kongara crafts a relevant but way less than scintillating Tamil period drama that, notwithstanding the numerous censorial excisions it has suffered, makes full use of all the ingredients one expects from a star vehicle targeted at a mass audience. The balancing act is by no means easy and Parasakthi frequently teeters on the edge of a pulpy precipice. To her credit, the director, who is also the film’s co-writer with Arjun Nadesan, does not let the commercial aims of the project overly blunt the edges that the emotive subject matter imparts to it.

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Sat, January 17 2026

Starring Emraan Hashmi, the Neeraj Pandey-helmed series falls into old habits despite exploring uncharted territory.

A Neeraj Pandey-created film or series comes with a specific aesthetic: neither television plus nor streaming pulp. Or perhaps both at once. To be fair, this treatment has remained consistent over the years. You know what to expect from the filmmaking: physical momentum is used to manufacture the illusion of narrative intellect. There are those long tracking shots of characters walking importantly from one space to another and one mood to another. The camera and background score move faster than the plot; they work overtime to defeat inertia and convey a sense of coolth and cleverness. Even if people are merely looking at one another, the lens rotates around their bodies in circles and sometimes follows their gaze as if there’s a reveal of Big Foot at the end of every shot. There’s the fake-flashback formula; an incomplete scene or conversation plays out at first only for the story to later show the full scene/conversation that conveniently omitted the twist. And there’s the ‘cultural’ colour-grading: the Middle East is yellow-sepia, Europe is blue, India is yellow-blue, Africa is green, the sky changes tones like an errant disco ball rather than AQI markers.

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Sat, January 17 2026

Emraan Hashmi leads Neeraj Pandey’s thriller that trades explosive momentum for nuanced depictions of smuggling and the personal cost of integrity

Neeraj Pandey has this knack for taking us to those forbidden spaces where offenders and upholders of the law become two sides of the same coin. He teases you with dribs and drabs of information, making us guess which side his characters would flip. This week, with Taskaree, the coin is golden, and the field of special ops is Mumbai International Airport. Celebrating the unsung heroes of India’s customs department, the series portrays their battles against organised crime with limited firepower.

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Sat, January 17 2026

Taskaree begins as a smart, textured look at the hidden machinery of smuggling, but its compulsion to outwit the viewer ultimately turns ingenuity into excess.

Neeraj Pandey’s latest Netflix series, Taskaree: The Smuggler’s Web, rests on ingenuity. It foregrounds a world that is mostly wrapped in intrigue and focuses on a group of people who aren’t necessarily under the spotlight. In a streaming landscape crowded with an assembly line of thrillers, even an inventive premise counts a great deal, and Pandey offers it in plenty. His latest show is concerned with the machinery of customs and widespread smuggling syndicates that continue to bypass them — a swing that pays off till it does not.

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Sat, January 17 2026

Director Nalan Kumarasamy and Karthi's film doesn't do enough with its several fascinating ideas and premise

Among the many clever ideas that make Nalan Kumarasamy’s Vaa Vaathiyar a peculiar beast is how the first half both begins and ends with death. The film opens on December 24, 1987, the very day MGR passed away. We see crosscuts of a pregnant mother being taken to the hospital, when a group of the idol’s die-hard fans force the local theatre to play the print of an old MGR classic. They’re worried about their idol’s health who is being treated in the US and try to pacify themselves by re-watching the same film, arguably for the 100th time. The moment news of MGR’s death arrives, we see the first cries of a baby boy taking over the screen. He even has a mole under his right foot, just like MGR did. It’s a mass movie miracle, reminding one of how KGF opens with the discovery of gold, just as Rocky is born. Nalan doesn’t just want to make a tried-and-tested star vehicle…. he also wants to remix the formula upon which the biggest-ever star was created.

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Sat, January 17 2026

Karthi nearly carries the film by himself, most notably in his measured, non-mimetic portrayal of MG

Apart from moral ambivalence, the commonality of all Nalan Kumarasamy’s feature film protagonists is that they are aware of being so. Daas of Soodhu Kavvum can’t resist being a kidnapper. He understands the risks and therefore adopts a ‘middle path’ by finding non-violent ways to go about his business. Ka Ka Po’s Kathiravan is a paper tiger who has served time for crimes he never committed. He strives hard to let go of his past, which is not even his.

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Sat, January 17 2026

Nalan Kumaraswamy weaponises the idea of MGR, the screen hero, staging a pulpy vigilante drama that is as much about cinema’s myths as it is about the state’s abuse of power.

Nalan Kumaraswamy has been around Tamil cinema forever now. Yet the first winner of Naalaya Iyakkunar, the programme that gave us a handful of new-age filmmakers still working today, has only made three films. It’s surprising, considering the prolific output of his contemporaries and the value of the singular voice he brings to cinema. Thirteen years after his debut, his third film, Vaa Vaathiyaar, finally made it to theatres this week. The one quality that stands out in Nalan’s work is the postmodernism that permeates his characters and extends beyond mere window dressing in his frames. It is present in entirety of Soodhu Kavvum (2013) and very much central to his script contributions in Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s Super Deluxe (2019). Funnily enough, his sophomore film Kadhalum Kadanthu Pogum (2016) is far from cynical and serves as one of the best romantic films from Tamil in the past two decades. Vaa Vaathiyaar is marketed as a masala or commercial fare from Nalan, and it is easy to see why.

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