Sat, July 11 2026

Akhil Akkineni and Bhagyashri Borse impress in an ambitious tale of love, betrayal and revenge that is undone by too many twists

Lenin, the Telugu film written and directed by Murali Kishor Abburu, opens with the assertion that no war is more violent than love — a nod to stories from Greek and Indian mythology. Marking Akhil Akkineni’s return to the screen after three years, the film aims to tell an epic love story. At its core, it is a tale of friendship, love, deceit and revenge, layered with references to the Mahabharata and Ramayana. It unfolds against the backdrop of Bharatham Mitta, a cultural festival celebrating Draupadi in a fictional village in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district. The rustic world is rendered with attention to detail, and the screenplay attempts to spring surprises at several turns. But the film falters at its core: the love story never quite makes the audience root wholeheartedly for its characters. The story had immense potential to build on love and pathos, which it does not fully achieve.

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Sat, July 11 2026

Directed by Thomas Kail and starring Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams, Jemaine Clement and Catherine Laga'aia, Moana is handsomely mounted, competently acted and perfectly watchable. Its greatest flaw is its overwhelming redundancy. It offers audiences little that they have not already experienced.

Every successful franchise eventually reaches the point where artistic inspiration begins to resemble a financial reflex — another sequel, another remake, another reassuring reminder to studio executives that nostalgia remains a dependable currency. Unless a fresh perspective reshapes the narrative or the story boldly charts unfamiliar waters, these revisits often feel less like cinematic adventures and more like corporate accounting exercises with a generous visual-effects budget. Disney’s Moana (2026), the live-action adaptation of its beloved 2016 animated classic and the third instalment in the franchise, sails directly into this familiar predicament. Directed by Thomas Kail in his feature-film debut from a screenplay by Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller, the film reunites Dwayne Johnson with his larger-than-life role as the swaggering demigod Maui while introducing Catherine Laga’aia as the spirited Moana. Produced by Johnson alongside Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia, Beau Flynn and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the production possesses all the ingredients of a prestige Disney spectacle. Yet, despite its glittering credentials, it struggles to justify its own existence. Competently assembled though it is, the film rarely inspires wonder, and its visual splendour, while undeniably polished, seldom evokes genuine amazement. It is less a voyage of discovery than an expensive exercise in déjà vu.

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Fri, July 10 2026

Fri, July 10 2026

How do you know you’re special? Sometimes, destiny first speaks through the pulse within. One such prodigy is Moana from Motunui. The future chief of her beautiful island, she knew from day one that she was born to do big things. The spirited teen girl was the chosen one to restore the heart of the goddess of nature, Te Fiti, and save her island from perishing. It’s a story we’ve seen before in 2016, and I’ll happily watch the young Polynesian girl’s journey to greatness another time every decade. That said, the question remains: will the little warrior’s courage and sweet-natured plot be enough to pull it through?

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Fri, July 10 2026

Fri, July 10 2026

Starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, The Invite is an astute dissection of long-term relationships.

After succumbing to the sophomore slump a few years ago with the dreadfully dull psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling (2022), Olivia Wilde has reaffirmed herself as a phenomenally talented filmmaker with her third feature, The Invite. It is as astute a dissection of long-term relationships as this year’s The Drama was of the honeymoon phase. Wilde stars as an anxious woman named Angela, who secretly invites her new neighbours for a casual get-together in a naked attempt to impress them. However, she neglects to run this by her husband Joe, a failed musician-turned-teacher played by Seth Rogen. He isn’t into it one bit. Joe has an axe to grind against the neighbours, because their love-making has kept him awake for weeks. He doesn’t know whether to be angry or jealous, but he most certainly isn’t going to be rolling out the red carpet for them. Played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, the neighbours are the perfect foils to utterly bored Angela and Joe. Even before the chic couple from next door arrives, the two are at each other’s throats about everything from back posture to charcuterie boards.

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Fri, July 10 2026

Pina could easily be insufferable, particularly in the ease with which she dispenses advice, from perimenopause to desire. However, Penélope Cruz injects warmth and charm to make Pina a guest you want to host – and impress.

Perhaps nothing spoils a meal faster than bad company. Scratch that. It takes bad company trying to put on a happy face to make it really stink. And, Angela (Olivia Wilde) is trying hard, really hard. Why she is, is evident to us by and by as layers are peeled off the resentment and bitterness that have built up between her and husband Joe (Seth Rogen). The guests for whom Angela plans a spread, from an elaborate charcuterie board to a from-the-recipe-book soufflé, are their upstairs neighbours. Pina is Spanish and “beautiful” and “cool” and “has presence” (an effortlessly posh, and aware of it, Penélope Cruz). Angela clearly is taken in by her and, if not that, with the clearly loud sex-filled relationship she has with boyfriend Hawk (Edward Norton).

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Fri, July 10 2026

Moana is more a self-conscious teen than a carefree spirit. Laga'aia, making her debut, also struggles to hit the right note of chutzpah that marked her animated version. Her eager-to-please smile is the biggest detractor.

In the long list of prequels, sequels, three-quels etc etc, Disney’s contribution has been live action remakes of its popular animation films. Moana, which is still very much alive and rolling out in surfeit animated forms, is the latest. This is as sadly cynical as it gets because Moana stood out for being a departure from the usual Disney heroines – she was dusky, pudgy, a little stout, with no romance on the vast horizon that she conquers. Played by Catherine Laga’aia in the live action version, Moana is more a self-conscious teen than a carefree spirit. Laga’aia, making her debut, also struggles to hit the right note of chutzpah that marked Moana’s animated version. Her eager-to-please smile is the biggest detractor, for one.

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Sat, November 30 2024

Auliʻi Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson’s latest outing, ‘Moana 2’, with its underwhelming story and lack of emotional punch, puts itself several nautical miles behind its much-celebrated predecessor

Moana is back for another adventure! Whether that’s even necessary is a different question considering the first film, which came out eight years ago, was one of Walt Disney Animation films’ best outings of all time and a well-rounded product on its own. Our titular hero became a wayfinder, turned buddies with the demigod Maui by retrieving his fishhook and in due course, took her fellow Motunui people back into the sea as voyagers like how their ancestors once were. Moana 2 puts our heroes back in the open ocean on a new adventure that makes us wonder what’s the sea creature equivalent of a cash cow.

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Fri, July 10 2026

Technically, the film is on par with some of the best works from Malayalam cinema in recent years, with slick, thoughtful framing and editing

How far would a fallen man go for redemption? If one were to ask Rajeevan (Prithviraj Sukumaran), the protagonist of Nissam Basheer’s, I, Nobody, he would probably say: from one extreme, reckless act to another. Consequently, the film also takes one on a rollercoaster series of events, which are intriguing and unconventional up to a point until they turn chaotic misfires. For that matter, almost every other character in I, Nobody appears to believe that their redemption arc lies in jumping into an even bigger problem than the one which they are already entangled in, almost as if they gained some pleasure from further tightening the noose around their neck. These are the kind of men who would bring an earth mover to pick a dry leaf which had fallen on their front yard. But then, we need people like that to create uncommon cinematic situations, which are aplenty in I, Nobody.

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Thu, July 9 2026

Director Nisam Basheer's I, Nobody, starring Prithviraj Sukumaran, Parvathy Thiruvothu and Vijayaraghavan, is a heist thriller that doubles up as a social commentary. While the premise and its treatment warrant your attention, the story is dragged well beyond its potential.

The world always teaches you that you are a nobody in the larger scheme of things. Prithviraj Sukumaran and Parvathy’s I, Nobody explores a similar theme, but goes one step ahead to ask a much-needed question: What does a nobody have to do to get justice? In one of the film’s crucial scenes, a police official explains to Prithviraj’s Rajeevan the concept of the food chain – but with a twist. The grasshopper, at the bottom of the pyramid, should not just eat grass. It should eat the frog that preys on it. That’s how cut-throat the world is.

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Thu, July 9 2026

Huma Qureshi, however, has gone out on a limb and brought this film to life.

The title for Nachiket Samant’s film is at first perplexing. But then, once I saw what they were trying to do, I smirked. An English transliteration of the protagonist’s name, Baby Karmarkar — how amused one might be by the pun might dictate how much they end up enjoying Samant’s film – because it’s full of dour, made-in-Mumbai humour. Baby (Huma Qureshi, also producer with brother/actor Saqib Saleem) is a deaf/mute female assassin, whose umbrella doubles up as a sneaky pistol. Exploiting Mumbai’s crowded spaces, Baby slips in, kills her target, and slips out. Thanks to the blinders that Mumbai residents have put on, it takes a while for most people to realise there’s a corpse next to them. It’s a smooth, nifty way to get the job done. In the film’s first scene, the makers introduce Baby’s modus operandi inside a Mumbai local.

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Sat, July 4 2026

‘Baby Do Die Do’, starring Huma Qureshi, throws together noir, graphic novel aesthetics, Mumbai life, romance, real estate politics and revenge drama

There’s a genuinely interesting film hidden inside Baby Do Die Do. It just takes far too long to reveal itself, and even then, it refuses to answer the questions that matter. The film opens with a fractured family: a deceased father, an emotionally volatile mother, twin girls, one of whom is deaf and mute. A late-night adventure results in tragedy leaving Baby alone and vengeful. Right away the questions start building—how did the girls suddenly pick up a puppy in an abandoned hotel? It’s the first of many questions the film, co-written by director Nachiket Samant with Jasmeet K Reen and Parveez Shaikh, never answers.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Mon, July 6 2026

Does a really good job of keeping the laughs coming, even if there are intermittent scenes where your eyes roll to the back of your head

Camouflage. It is always interesting to see how women empowerment films play out in Tamil cinema. Quite often, the makers try to mount a ‘male saviour’ film masquerading as a ‘women empowerment’ film. But smarter filmmakers know that the audience might see through this bluff, and they have started packaging it better. One such film was Chella Ayyavu’s Gatta Kusthi (2022), a seemingly entertaining ride about the ill effects of misogyny and the inherent need for women’s empowerment in society. On paper, it was empowering, but compromises were made to make it seem more ‘palatable’. Interestingly, in Gatta Kusthi 2, Chella doesn’t play the camouflage game. He throws caution to the wind, and goes all out to give us a battle of the sexes that tilts the scales clearly in favour of the man, but not without having him point out why women must be empowered. Basically, Chella and Vishnuu have the cake, and this time, they eat it, too.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Director Chella Ayyavu's Gatta Kusthi 2, starring Vishnu Vishal and Aishwarya Lekshmi, is a family entertainer with a wrestling backdrop. The film's lopsided take on gender politics and comedy that never lands make it a sequel that could have been done away with.

In a span of two months, we saw Samantha, Preity Mukundhan and Abhirami ace action like no one in Maa Inti Bangaaram and Blast. But Aishwarya Lekshmi did it back in 2022 when she wrestled her way into the hearts of audiences with her role in Gatta Kusthi. Four years later, the team reunites for a sequel that promises to delve deep into the lives of Veera, Keerthi and their daughter, Mathi Malar.

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Sun, July 5 2026

Miranda Priestly probably wouldn’t tolerate Angelina Jolie’s character from Couture, a new drama set in the world of high fashion that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025. Jolie plays Maxine, an indie filmmaker who’s been hired to bring her brand of transgressive edginess to a promotional short for Paris Fashion Week. With neither the patience nor the experience for promotional work, Maxine can barely mask her contempt for her new gig — and that’s before a call from her doctor flips her world upside down. Couture couldn’t be further removed from the glossy world of this summer’s fashion world-set blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada 2. And while that movie makes excuses for the same industry that Couture wants to dress down, director Alice Winocour’s attempt to offer a ground-level perspective of an industry that has been glamorized for far too long turns out dull, directionless, and mildly delusional.

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Sat, July 4 2026

Despite capable performances, Pritam and Pedro struggles with predictable writing, muted emotional impact, and storytelling that never rises above polished mediocrity.

There are certain names in cinema that arrive long before the credits roll. They carry with them not merely recognition but a formidable burden of expectation—a promise of excellence painstakingly accumulated over decades. Rajkumar Hirani belongs comfortably to that rarefied league. His films have consistently blended humour with humanity, wit with wisdom, and entertainment with emotion, creating stories that linger long after the curtains have fallen. From the irrepressibly charming Munna Bhai series to the socially resonant 3 Idiots, the delightfully irreverent PK, and the emotionally layered Sanju, Hirani has fashioned a cinematic identity that is at once distinctive and deeply endearing.

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Sat, July 4 2026

Bringing his magical touch to long-form storytelling, Rajkumar Hirani turns a cold, clinical cyber-thriller into a heartwarming buddy-cop comedy where old-school muscle beautifully collides with modern computer code.

Moving past a heavy-handed Dunki, Rajkumar Hirani finds his deft touch, imbuing a warm soul into the Over-The-Top streaming space where even empathy feels algorithmic these days. Instead of adding to our daily anxiety, Hirani, who works as a series creator, along with director Avinash Arun, takes the clinical world of cybercrime and wraps it in an engrossing buddy-cop comedy that educates and comforts the audience. Reflecting the anxiety of the times when a single digital mistake can ruin a life, the series effectively uses the theme of forgiveness to heal people and relationships. Led by Arshad Warsi, who balances his signature effortless humour with a tougher tone, and debutant Vir Hirani as his father’s creative voice of the outsider who questions the absurd rules of the world, the narrative finds its sweet spot when the points of view of Pedro, an old school policeman nursing a young wound and Pritam, a modern hacker, living with his grandfather under an assumed identity, collide.

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Fri, July 3 2026

'Pritam and Pedro' has no granularity. It is cybercrime explained at the level of a school assembly

Rajkumar Hirani has spent two decades turning simple ideas into big, feel-good hits. The six-episode JioHotstar series is directed by Avinash Arun Dharware, the filmmaker behind Killa, Paatal Lok, and Three of Us. It’s an odd pairing on paper. Hirani makes cheerful, sanded-down cinema. Arun makes moody, textured, specific work. None of that specificity survives here. The show looks and moves like a generic OTT product. Pedro (Arshad Warsi) is a Crime Branch cop in Goa, punished for a colleague’s mistake and shunted off to the Cyber Crime Cell. To him, typing a password already counts as hard labour. Pritam (Vir Hirani) is a young ‘cyber genius’ who actually sells vacuum cleaners for a living. When a politician’s son goes missing, the two team up: Pedro needs the case solved to earn his old job back, while Pritam wants help recovering his grandfather’s stolen tape recorder, which holds an old recording of his late grandmother’s voice.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Directed by Mallik Ram, Netflix’s first Telugu original series turns a familiar conversation on sex education into an engaging rural dramedy

The more we assume things have changed, the more they probably have not, at least not for everyone. While some urban homes and schools have moved beyond awkward ‘birds and bees’ conversations to adopt a more pragmatic approach to sex education, the subject remains taboo in many households. In a remote village, those conversations become even harder. Super Subbu, Netflix’s first Telugu original series, directed by Mallik Ram and starring Sundeep Kishan in the title role, builds an engaging drama around this premise. Some of the early scenes evoke school days when teachers would skip sex education lessons to avoid uncomfortable giggles in the classroom. They also reveal the unease many educators themselves feel around the subject.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Director Mallik Ram's Super Subbu, Netflix's first Telugu original series, stars Sundeep Kishan as a sex education officer posted to a remote Telangana village. The seven-episode drama is funny, warm and says something real - until the second half starts asking questions it has no intention of answering.

There are very few mainstream Indian shows willing to build an entire story around sex education without reducing it to awkward jokes or moral sermons. Super Subbu, Netflix’s first Telugu original series, deserves credit for attempting exactly that. Directed by Mallik Ram, the seven-episode dramedy takes an inherently uncomfortable subject and wraps it in humour, family dynamics and small-town eccentricities. For a while, it works beautifully. But just when it seems ready to say something meaningful, the series retreats into safe territory, leaving several of its strongest ideas hanging.

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Thu, July 2 2026

It is but a coincidence that Super Subbu has released a day before Pritam and Pedro. Besides the fact that the titles of the two series are based on the names of their protagonists, Super Subbu takes a leaf out of the Rajkumar Hirani (who makes his digital debut as producer with Pritam and Pedro) book of mirth-meets-message, camouflaging bitter truths and taboo life lessons with humour, managing to pack in some succinct social commentary along the way.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Satya Dev delivers a career-best performance as director Venkatesh Maha experiments with magical realism and an edgy narrative that offers plenty to unpack

The final stretch of Rao Bahadur is an absolute riot. The carefully constructed drama gives way to a series of delightful twists that are both entertaining and thought-provoking. It is here that director Venkatesh Maha gently pulls the rug from under the audience, forcing them to view the entire film from a fresh perspective. Telugu cinema lovers may remember a similar narrative flourish in his debut indie film, Care of Kancharapalem. While that film offered a deeply realistic portrait of a neighbourhood grappling with questions of gender sensitivity and social hierarchy, Rao Bahadur ventures into fantasy, lacing its psychological drama with touches of magical realism.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Director Maha's Rao Bahadur, starring Satyadev, Vikas Muppala and Deepa Thomas, is a psychological drama that talks about lineage, prejudice and skin colour obsession. The film, built on a theatrical setup, takes a while to warm up but leaves you with plenty of afterthoughts.

In 2018, director Venkatesh Maha waltzed into Telugu cinema with the path-breaking C/o Kancharapalem, one of the industry’s finest films of the decade. After Uma Maheswara Ugra Roopasya and an episode in Modern Love Hyderabad, the filmmaker is back with Rao Bahadur – a film that Mahesh Babu and Namrata Shirodkar saw enough potential in to present. It hit theatres on July 3.

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Fri, July 3 2026

Not all movies ought to be dignified with a review. Yet here we are…. reviewing Welcome to the Jungle. Everyone is in this film. And I do mean everyone. There isn’t a face you won’t recognize. From Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Raveena Tandon, Disha Patani and Jacqueline Fernandez to Paresh Rawal, Kiran Kumar, Farida Jalal, Zakir Hussain, Krushna Abhishek and Kiku Sharda it’s a literal stampede of familiar faces and proven talent. What should have been a comic goldmine becomes a traffic jam of characters, each written with roughly the same attention to detail usually reserved for out-of-focus background dancers. You could swap one actor with another and absolutely nothing would change.

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Mon, June 29 2026

A promising satirical premise buried beneath bloated storytelling, shrill humour, uneven performances, and exhausting excess, resulting in a deeply disappointing cinematic experience.

Reality, on rare occasions, possesses an uncanny habit of imitating fiction—not deliberately, but with an irony so exquisite that it borders on poetic justice. One suspects that director Ahmed Khan had little inkling that his latest spectacle, Welcome to the Jungle, would ultimately become the most eloquent metaphor for its own creative bankruptcy. Conceived as a madcap satire on the film industry and the absurd economics of blockbuster filmmaking, the film instead collapses under the crushing weight of the very mediocrity it seeks to lampoon. The result is not a parody of commercial cinema but an inadvertent specimen of everything that has gone catastrophically wrong with it.

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Sun, June 28 2026

The basic premise of Welcome To The Jungle instantly reminds you of Farah Khan’s Tees Maar Khan (2010), which also starred Akshay Kumar in the lead. The main difference is that he played the director in that movie. But the difference that matters the most is that WTTJ is better than the 2010 flick, although the latter had its moments here and there. It is anybody’s guess that one needs to keep logic and reasoning miles away while watching such movies. But this is worth only when we get non-stop entertainment in return. That is what happens with Welcome To The Jungle. The basic plot of a wealthy business wanting to make a flop film itself is funny and interesting. It is also something that used to happen during the olden days. The screenplay gives you no time to breathe. There are plenty of bizarre happenings, both during the film shoot and the second half when the terrorism angle takes over. But, again, the fast pace and the fact that the film is honest in what it is trying to do ensures that you don’t mind that much.

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