Fri, October 24 2025

Bhagwat might come across as a reiteration of familiar tropes in the digital space, but the film, within its finite runtime, treats them with care and proves to be no less effective than the rest.

Police Procedurals in Hindi films tend to follow a pattern. The gritty undersides of the crime are portrayed in alliance with the heroic arc of the law keeper. The more horrific the crime, the more elevated is the heroism of the officer. On paper, Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas is primed to be another reiteration. A troubled police officer is faced with an elusive killer as one case knots to another. Yet, Akshay Shere’s feature film sidesteps histrionics to unfold as a sobering depiction of society in tandem with the potency of law.

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Sat, October 18 2025

Akshay Shere’s police procedural stays busy and sociopolitically alive to the India we live in today.

Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas starts like any Indian crime drama that wants the best of both worlds. The story is “inspired by true events,” but just about fictional and legally coy enough to stage itself as a franchise about a police officer who solves one case per film/season. It’s the Delhi Crime template. The ‘Chapter One’ in the title is a clue. As is the self-reverential opening slate: “To keep the truth alive, you must tell its story”. And a corny closing slate about courage that ends with an exclamation mark (!). In between these two quotes, however, Bhagwat defies its familiar status to stay humble, metrical and consistently watchable. Akshay Shere’s two-hour film has more in common with another well-crafted Hindi series. It shares its real-world source material with Dahaad (2023), the 8-episode thriller about a cop who gets drawn into a case of multiple missing girls and a potential serial killer. Like the show, the film does well to excavate the social fabric of a place that often serves as a portal between predator and prey.

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Sat, October 18 2025

Arshad Warsi and Jitendra Kumar star in this thriller that doesn't do anything new or interesting with a story we've already seen

OTT lighting. Killer of scenes. Destroyer of aesthetic. The flat, boring, unengaged style that says, we know this looks terrible but no one expects better anymore.

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Thu, October 23 2025

Rumour has it that if Brad Pitt hadn’t thrown his weight behind F1 (read: put his movie star foot down), then the film would have bypassed the big screen and been a straight-to-streaming release. The high-octane film fittingly found a release in theatres in June, made pots of money and will arrive on Apple TV only in December. No such luck, however, for another Apple TV-backed project. After a limited release in theatres in the US, The Lost Bus found its way to the streaming service earlier this month.

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Fri, October 3 2025

Directed by Paul Greengrass, the survival drama is based on real events where 22 schoolchildren were trapped on on a bus.

Matthew McConaughey plays a down-on-his-luck bus driver who becomes a reluctant hero after evacuting schoolchildren in The Lost Bus. The Paul Greengrass film takes its time to establish McConaughey’s character and the growing disaster. Once the fire grows in the small town, the drama gets to the heart of the story as two individuals fight against the odds to make it. The tension is heightened in the second half to the right temperature as the odds become slim. The leads’ teamsmanship carries the film over the line.

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Wed, October 22 2025

It still feels like a balm for our cynical times

A lot of one’s experience of Aziz Ansari’s feature directorial debut, Good Fortune, might rest on what they think of him as a storyteller. A stand-up comedian/actor/writer/director for nearly two decades now, Ansari turned to direction with the Netflix series, Master of None, a semi-autobiographical take on his experience as a brown actor in America, as he goes through the typical ups and downs on both personal and professional fronts. Co-created with Alan Yang, Master of None, in my opinion, is a sublime meditation on modern American society, as we see it through the eyes of Dev (a fictitious version of Ansari himself), and its commentary on immigrant parents, dating culture, and thorny issues like sexual harassment on public transport or at the workplace – but they’re dealt with his customary light touch. Like most comedians working, Ansari has this tendency to bleed out the theatrics of the most unsettling moments in life – stressing on how most life-changing moments can seem mundane in real life. This gentle rebuke as a storytelling choice is instantly recognisable as something from Ansari’s canon.

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Sat, October 18 2025

Good Fortune is fun when Keanu Reeves turns earnestness and bad writing into an art form. But as a Barbie-styled comment on modern American society, it comes across as performative and dishonest.

Good Fortune plays out a bit like a smart-alecky Aziz Ansari comedy sketch. A skit-like one-liner — what if a well-meaning but incompetent “budget angel” body-swaps a wealthy white guy and a miserable brown guy? — is pan-fried with a series of thematic keywords: gig economy, American dream, immigrant struggle, racial biases, capitalist greed. It’s a deadpan spoof that counts on looking like a deadpan spoof; even the sincerity is supposed to sound designed and clunky. It has the narrative scale of a gag, too. As a film, it doesn’t know where to go after the social gimmick wears off; it just fizzles into the sort of artificial resolution that, if I didn’t know any better, passes off as image-renovating and self-righteous tripe. The film is fun when Keanu Reeves turns earnestness and bad writing into an art form. But as a Barbie-styled comment on modern American society, it comes across as performative and dishonest. Look Ma, (no) Wings!

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Wed, October 22 2025

Mari Selvaraj’s film has the familiar beats of a sports biopic but doesn’t go much beyond it

Since his directorial debut with Pariyerum Perumal (2018), it’s been well-established that Mari Selvaraj’s primary weapons as a storyteller have been his singular point-of-view and guttural intensity. Whether it’s the symbolisation of Karuppi (a dog painted in blue) in his debut, or that interval-block from Karnan (2021), when the protagonist (Dhanush) destroys a public bus. Careful to not end up advocating for mob violence through the scene, Selvaraj uses Santosh Narayanan’s score to build up to the violence as an act of desperate assertion, rather than an accomplishment. In his latest, Bison Kaalamaadan, I kept waiting for a similarly sublime flourish, which arrived in the film’s final moments. Based on the struggles of a Kabaddi player, it’s in the final moments that Selvaraj zooms into what makes Kittan (Dhruv Vikram) such a potent athlete. For the first time in the 160-minute film, we see Kittan’s guile as a kabaddi player, deceiving his opponent by moving sideways and forward faster than his opponents can think. When he’s grabbed by an opponent – instead of trying to free himself, he grabs the opponent back, and spins both bodies around. A couple of twirls later, he’s back on his side of the pitch.

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Mon, October 20 2025

Sat, October 18 2025

'Bison' is among the best films to have been released this year and among the absolute best sports dramas to have emerged from Tamil cinema.

Several aspects of Bison will urge you to keep rewatching the film, but if there’s one that kept surprising me, it was its editing. More than a smooth linear edit, Sakthi Thiru builds up scenes like he’s stacking Jenga blocks. Just when you feel too overwhelmed to absorb the layers playing out in one scene fully, he chooses to insert that with a tiny reaction shot or a cutaway that will immediately take you through the entire magnitude of Kittan’s (played by Dhruv Vikram) journey and how much he’s had to go through to get where he has.

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Mon, October 20 2025

Sat, October 18 2025

Pradeep Ranganathan’s 'Dude' wants to be a self-aware satire about love, ego and liberation, but its loud tone, chaotic twists and overcooked emotions leave you more exhausted than entertained.

There’s an argument to be made about the cleverness of the opening sequence of Pradeep Ranganathan’s third outing as hero, Dude. Not only does he deserve an introduction befitting a rising star, but he’s also not at the level where he can save an entire village — at least, not yet. So instead of a grand hero’s entry, what he gets is the absolute definition of a zero entry.

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Sat, October 18 2025

Sun, October 19 2025

In recent years, Malayalam cinema has produced several police stories that look beyond their heroic surface. From the era of Suresh Gopi’s Bharath Chandran IPS, the template has shifted to more grounded portrayals, with filmmakers exploring the brutal, vulnerable, and helpless sides of police officers. Ratheena’s Paathirathri belongs to this newer breed, focusing equally on the personal lives of its cops. Set in Anakkara, a village in Kerala’s Idukki district, the film revolves around an unforeseen event that takes place at midnight.

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Sat, October 18 2025

In following a genre by the book, Ratheena’s sophomore film ‘Paathirathri’fails to bring any novelty to the table or inject excitement to the proceedings

One of the surest bets for audience appreciation in the current purple patch of Malayalam cinema has been realistic police procedurals. An intriguing screenplay bringing out all the crucial little details of the investigation and a fairly surprising twist in the tale could turn a film into a box office winner. But this trend is now slowly turning into a formula, with makers at times mechanically repeating all the familiar beats of the genre.

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Sun, October 19 2025

The patron saints of the silly join Twinkle Khanna and Kajol on their new talk show.

One of the strange symptoms of our current climate is an inability to distinguish between ironic and unironic love. When I ask friends who have paid for and partaken in Himesh Reshammiya’s Cap Mania concert, if they are enjoying the music or the performance of a collective exercise in irony, the answers confuse me, because the distinction seems hard to make. The question of what to do with celebrities of irony is itching, because they are people who become known for their upfront, unapologetic silliness. We enjoy their audacity. We cringe at the expression of it. Why do we love Rakhi Sawant? Urvashi Rautela? What primal instinct for trash do they accomplish? Perhaps, trash has a street credit that Satyajit Ray simply cannot compete with, a counter-canon kind of joy that insists on and prides itself in being outside of what is considered tasteful and tactful.

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Sat, October 18 2025

'Diesel' is a film that keeps growing in size without really asking, what is it really that is expanding—the stakes or the world?

With big, puppy dog eyes and an angular nose that could crater dimples into cheeks, facial hair that hoods over his lips, nimble legs that slip into skinny pants, a bicep wide enough to hold a strange tattoo of his dead mother as a mermaid, and a mop of hair so thick and wild, it requires its own continuity supervisor, actor Harish Kalyan finds the pitch of his character in Diesel, Vasu or Diesel Vasu, somewhere between the charming boy from a romantic film and the vengeful hero from an action one, between the lithe dance movements of Vijay and the handsome, brooding anger of Surya, not quite either, not quite both.

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Fri, October 17 2025

Director Shanumugam Muthusamy 'Diesel', starring Harish Kalyan, Vinay Rai and Athulya Ravi, is a film that aims to tell the story of a fisher folk in the problems in the world of crude oil. The film lacks originality despite its length to mount the film on a huge canvas.

Director Shanmugam Muthusamy’s ‘Diesel’, starring Harish Kalyan, Vinay Rai, and Athulya Ravi, attempts to tell the story of fisherfolk caught in the world of crude oil smuggling. Despite its ambitious canvas, the film lacks originality and crumbles under derivative storytelling and technical incompetence. ‘Diesel’ opens with promise. Director Vetri Maaran’s commanding voice-over—reminiscent of his ‘Vada Chennai’—sets up a compelling premise about fishermen protesting a 17-kilometre crude oil pipeline installation on the shore, protests that end in tragedy and bloodshed. It’s the kind of socially conscious setup that suggests substance. But that’s where the promise ends.

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Sat, October 18 2025

The screenplay draws on some of the generic elements from comic capers with several parallel events and quirky characters. But, barring some, quite a few characters do not even register due to inadequacies in writing

A kidnapped girl, a missing dog, exotic fishes that get stolen, a feared Mexican mafia don and a couple of smaller dons, a psychopath, a bumbling policeman, and a pet detective. One would need this basic checklist to keep track of the numerous subplots that are cramped into The Pet Detective, directed by debutant Praneesh Vijayan The writers appear to be aware of this rather confusing mix that they get one of the characters to periodically narrate the series of events till then, just so that no one gets lost. But then, it is sometimes a pleasure to get lost in a world in which things do not get serious beyond a point, just like in comics. Clearly, this is the space that the makers are aiming for, where even a Mafia don does not look too dangerous, but at times ends up as a laughing stock. In its staging, editing patterns and over-the-top performances, the film attempts to capture this comic energy. Yet, for a film of this nature, the jokes that land well are just about a handful.

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Sat, October 18 2025

Imagine two women in a lonely house with a large yard that benefits no one else. Would the authorities care about their two votes? In Sajin Baabu’s abstractly titled Theatre: The Myth of Reality, this is how a discussion unfolds among locals in Kerala’s backwaters as they talk about the isolated lives of a spinster named Meera (Rima Kallingal) and her mother Sharadamma (Sarasa Balussery). Their lifestyle is peculiar and far removed from the mainland. In the agriculture-based ecosystem they’ve built for themselves, the duo is surrounded by a serpent temple (kaavu) where a prayer must be performed every day.

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Fri, October 17 2025

The Diplomat season 3 on Netflix ramps up the tension with a missing Russian submarine carrying the doomsday-capable Poseidon torpedo and shocking betrayals that could upend global diplomacy. Oh, it could also destroy and Kate and Hal’s already fragile marriage.

It’s fitting that The Diplomat on Netflix ends its third season not with an explosion, but with something quieter, and infinitely more dangerous. A silence loaded with betrayal. For a show built on diplomatic finesse and political tension, The Diplomat season 3 brings its most devastating twist yet: the realisation that even love, loyalty, and diplomacy are just different dialects of manipulation. Let’s dive into The Diplomat season 3 story and ending, explained here, cast, and more.

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Fri, October 17 2025

A complex story of modern relationships that fails to move beyond showing its female protagonists their place, seen through a distinctly male gaze

In an early scene from director Neerraja Kona’s Telugu romance drama Telusu Kada (loosely translated as You know it, right?), chef-restaurateur Varun (Siddhu Jonnalagadda) berates his staff for failing to meet his exacting standards. His friend and moral compass (Harsha Chemmudu) reminds him to see things more practically: for Varun, a loner, the restaurant is his world; for his staff, it is just a job.

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