Sun, March 1 2026

Wed, February 25 2026

It took three years for Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy to secure a release after its Cannes premiere, and that, too, on the D-list tier streaming service ZEE5. We discuss the film’s baffling narrative, vague rumination about corruption and power, and long stretches of inaction that don’t feel authentic to Kashyap. We also spend way too much time discussing the ill-fitting costumes of Rahul Bhat and the underused Sunny Leone, and end with unverified rumours about the movie’s long-delayed release. Hint: It had something to do with a certain ‘Bade Papa’.

Tue, February 24 2026

Sun, March 1 2026

What it does is demonstrate how not to do propaganda. If there is anything that it goes beyond, it is muckraking

Three M’s - Muslims, Malayalees and Meat - are what The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond tilts at with quixotic gusto. In the process, it goes completely overboard and loses its way. Propaganda demands no major creative acumen. All it calls for is a willingness to flow with the tide and pass off street-corner tittle-tattle as truth. That is all there is to this film. TKS2, heavy-handed and mealy-mouthed, would have been dismissed as the rant of a fevered mind had it not been so vituperative. The overcooked cinematic harangue proves that while it may be easy to profit monetarily from alarmist postulations, agenda-driven filmmaking can sink quickly and completely into inanity when not backed by solid research and rigour.

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Sun, March 1 2026

Sat, February 28 2026

Sat, February 28 2026

There’s nothing to write home about in 'The Bluff,' a middling 19th-century swashbuckler starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas as a former piratebluff-3

It takes a considerable amount of skill to make big-budget action movies — in this case, a period pirate swashbuckler — that are neither great nor terrible. How is it possible to be so safe when the scale is lavish and the stakes are high? How is it possible to be so deliberately sterile and precisely average when the resources are limitless? But one of the magic tricks of this decade has been the way streaming platforms have legitimised the middling-and-forgettable genre. Heck, it’s almost an art form. “Produced by the Russo brothers” is usually a tell, and The Bluff is another bullseye for ambient action (I vowed to get through this review without using the word “algorithmic”). The Bluff has some texture, a pinch of personality, bone-crunching violence and gore, a spirited lead even, yet I can’t remember a single moment right now. And it’s been only 8 minutes since the end credits rolled. I suppose that’s a win for the content ecosystem.

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Sat, February 28 2026

Priyanka Chopra Jonas stars in this revenge drama set that lacks the sweep of classic seafaring adventures

Set in 1846, at the ragged end of the pirate era in the Caribbean, The Bluff (Amazon Prime Video) pits a former pirate in hiding against a relentless hunter chasing stolen gold. Unlike most films in the genre, the action unfolds largely on dry land rather than on rolling decks and cannon-blasted ships. Piracy defines these characters’ past, but this story is about what happens when that past refuses to stay buried. On a quiet stretch of Cayman Brac, in a fishing community of white sands and shell-lined paths, the Bodden family awaits the return of Captain T.H. Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova). His wife, Ercell (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), keeps the household steady. Their young son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo), physically disabled but resolute, counts the days of his father’s absence. Aunt Lizzy (Safia Oakley-Green) has her own reasons for keeping an eye on the horizon. Life in this small British colony moves at an unhurried pace—until it doesn’t, because Ercell has a past she has carefully tried to outrun.

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Wed, February 25 2026

Despite its thrilling sequences and Priyanka's compelling performance, the film lacks depth in emotional storytelling and thematic exploration.

Within the first few minutes of The Bluff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas slices and dices, swoops down and slashes a bunch of buccaneers in a relentless, action-packed, adrenaline-pumping sequence. Except that her character is no ordinary damsel in distress and neither is this a regular home invasion. The men who break in aren’t your streetside thugs either. They are, in fact, tied inextricably to Ercell Bodden’s past (Priyanka) and now stand to threaten her future. For Ercell wasn’t always Ercell. Known as “Bloody Mary”, she grew up sailing the seven seas as a pirate but gave up her swashbuckling, edgy ways for a domesticated life in Cayman Brac. The invasion — in which Priyanka plunges into the blood and gore with both physical solidity and psychological grit — is just the beginning of the high-stakes action that defines this Frank E. Flowers-directed film.

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Sat, February 28 2026

A grimy, formally anarchic Tamil indie that rejects coherence for sensory overload, R Gowtham’s film turns death into spectacle and fragmentation into method

If the film’s story is a skull, Members of the Problematic Family, set in Red Hills, a suburb in North-West Chennai, smashes that skull, and trying to glue it back together, revels in its failure to do so. It is simply one of the most distinctive if disjunctive films to come out of India, filled with a fractured irreverence and putrefying rot, where scenes have the inertia of a hiccup and the texture of filth—liquor breath, burning vomit, spit, blood, and that eternal sheen of sweat. There is a funeral. There is the spectacle around it—which last year, Rohan Kanawade in Sabar Bonda imbued with gentle irony, which debutante R Gowtham here, instead, dials up by sticking microscopically close to the action, the dead body being passed around, held aloft, undressed and dressed, oiled, soiled with ash, garlanded, paraded, the nostrils being pressed close by a child, and eventually, caked in cow dung and hay, and even a smattering of alcohol, burnt to ash.

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Wed, February 25 2026

R Gowtham's film, which premiered at the 2026 Berlinale, is a raw, unflinching portrait of a family rationing grief and despair

A new dissenting voice emerges in Tamil cinema. R Gowtham’s debut Tamil feature, Members of the Problematic Family, premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival last week in the Forum section. Everything about this film is distinct yet unfamiliar, beginning with its title. The Tamil title, Sikkalana Kudumbathin Uruppinargal, a literal translation, rolls off the tongue. For decades we’ve had the word kudumbam (family) in Tamil film titles that have often alluded to the spotless, divine status accorded to the unit. But here is a film that makes no such promise. It invites you not to witness a few days in the life of irascible characters but just human beings who, as fate would have it, need to function as a society sanctioned order.

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Sat, February 28 2026

Twenty years after her parents’ love story began, Amrita faces a sudden family collapse. Following the tragic deaths of her mother, Vasudha, and her father, Neeraj, she must step up as the eldest sibling. Amidst overwhelming debt, legal crises and family grief, Amrita stops relying on her partner Aditya and takes over her father’s business to fight her battles alone.

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Fri, February 27 2026

The spinoff series from the film Godzilla (2014) delves into Titan lore and follows troubled family dynamics for the Randa family.

After two and a half years, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters returns with an answer to the cliffhanger ending of Season 1. Will Colonel Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) be rescued from Axis Mundi? Affirmative. Kurt and son Wyatt Rusell, who plays the younger version of Lee in the past, are back as the Monsterverse spinoff series adds yet another Titan to the mix and deals with the complicated Randa family relationships now that Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) has returned from the dead. Developed by Chris Black and Matt Fraction, the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters tries its hand at family conflict again.

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Fri, February 27 2026

The wildly addictive Regency romance series returns after a month to wrap up the love story between Benedict (Luke Thompson) and Sophie (Baek).

In the first half of Bridgerton Season 4, viewers were introduced to a magical Cinderella tale between second brother Bendect Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) and Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) as the mysterious Lady in Silver. And at the end of the fourth episode, Benedict proposed that Sophie become his mistress. The Netflix series returns to explore the fallout of the proposal, as Benedict must decide whether to defy society and his family for the sake of love. Furthermore, other younger Bridgertons have significant goings-on in their lives as the series sets up what’s next for seasons ahead.

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Fri, February 27 2026

Director Krishna Poluru’s buzzy screenplay cannot conceal its conservative outlook

We live in times when filmmakers are increasingly insecure about keeping restless viewers invested in a story. This has resulted in storytellers shaping narratives that frenetically jump from one sequence to another, without context or substance, so that distraction may not be an option. The characters do not talk; they shout. And the bombastic background score screams for attention. Every scene turns into a loud statement. ZEE5’s Telugu web series D/O Prasad Rao Kanabadutaledu (Prasad Rao’s daughter is missing), helmed by Krishna Poluru, takes this desperation to new heights. While leaving little to a viewer’s imagination right from its title, the show shifts between three timelines that influence the events in the life of a missing girl. The crime scene is visualised as a narrative hook to unpack discussions on conservative parenting, the dreams and aspirations of a girl child, intergenerational trauma and vigilante justice.

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Wed, February 25 2026

It represents the ‘i’ in irony and the ‘OG’ in hagiography

Very little of Aashish Mall’s Shatak looks real. I’m not talking just historical authenticity here, or the conspicuous name-dropping of ‘leftist’ freedom fighters (all of them, obviously in awe of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the RSS). Most of Mall’s film looks enhanced like the tacky green-screens on primetime news. Most characters wander around like AI slop, speaking with pauses – without showing the slightest bits of humanity. Walking out of Mall’s film, one of my thoughts was if the film was an exhibit for the India AI Impact Summit held in Delhi. If that was the case, what fresh hell it would mean for the nation already grappling with a dozen controversies brewing because of the event. Would Sam Altman have felt pressured to give it a standing ovation, seeing the Indian Prime Minister sitting adjacent to him, if the film screened there? Mall’s film feels like a 112-minute reel created using AI, chronicling the good/better/best anecdotes of the far-right organisation – without the slightest hint of curiosity. The aim is not to find out about how the RSS came into being, as much as kissing the feet of its founding fathers.

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Tue, February 24 2026

Mon, February 23 2026

Assi is not Sinha’s finest hour as a director, but the lack of sophistication might be necessary to reach an audience that otherwise laps up mean-spirited propaganda.

At one point in Anubhav Sinha’s Assi, a father (Manoj Pahwa) and his son (Abhishant Rana) are devouring a plate of chhole bhature. The father says, “Your mother is an excellent cook, but the chhole bhature she makes is… okay. No shame in eating outside once in a while. You can get a plate like this for Rs 60, maybe Momos for Rs 90,” he says, going on to add – “but a man never brings these home.” Only towards the end, does a woman overhearing the conversation realise that the duo aren’t talking about her food. The son is shown to be an accomplice in a rape, a few scenes earlier. I can see why co-writers Sinha and Gaurav Solanki [the duo had also earlier written Article 15] might lean on the wryness of a scene like this to explain a perpetrator’s mindset. But the scene feels too satisfied with its oversimplified metaphors for deep-seated dishonesty and compartmentalisation that the (primarily) male, urban population is capable of.

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Sun, February 22 2026

There is no gentle way to say this—Anubhav Sinha’s Assi hits you hard. It is, at times, an uneasy watch—and therefore, a very good film. To be clear, the unease does not come from graphic visuals; it comes from statistics read aloud by a lawyer, from stark statements that linger long after they are spoken. If merely listening to these details causes discomfort, one can only imagine the horrors endured by the victims. Sinha not only stabs us in the heart; he twists the knife—quietly, deliberately.

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Sun, February 22 2026

Keeps rising and falling, and this constant crest and trough robs much of the film’s urgency, which was unhurried to begin with.

For better or worse, the intensity of love stories is understood in terms of conflict. The bigger the conflict, the more sweeping is the love. Pop culture has routinely peddled this notion, embellishing it till this has become the norm. Ravi Udyawar’s Do Deewane Seher Mein poses a challenge to the discourse by designing a low-stakes love story, but across its runtime, the film squanders all its potential, proving in culmination that prototypes are effective for a reason. Levity aside, this is a pity because Udyawar’s film starts off almost disarmingly. Boy and girl are forced to meet. Shashank (Siddhant Chaturvedi), a marketing guy, is arranged by his parents to meet Roshni (Mrunal Thakur), a content creator for a fashion label. No sparks fly, but it rains. They are on the terrace, and the dry clothes risk getting wet. He helps her with it, and in the act, falls a little. When asked, Shashank says yes, but Roshni says no.

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Sat, February 21 2026

Siddhant Chaturvedi and Mrunal Thakur fail to rise above flimsy conflicts in this plodding romantic drama, devoid of passion

When the trailer of Ravi Udaywar’s romantic drama Do Deewane Seher Mein surfaced online, one was hooked to the tune of Gulzar’s melancholic Do Deewane (Gharaonda), searching for home and sustenance all over again. The haunting voice of Bhupinder Singh and the melody in Runa Laila’s timbre continue to capture the dreams, hope, and loneliness that lovebirds face in big cities. However, it turns out that old gold is being refashioned to win over a new audience, but the carat is compromised in the process.

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Fri, February 20 2026

Siddhant Chaturvedi, Mrunal Thakur film makes you wonder how how can you expect passion in a film where the censors have excised ridiculous numbers of words from the mouths of adults?

To judge by appearance is a bad thing. This single line premise is stretched out over two and a half hours, leading to a film where you are left counting the moments where two people spark. The only nice thing about Do Deewane Seher Mein– please note, not Shehar–is that for a change a Hindi film doesn’t make you feel as if Shashank (Sidhant Chaturvedi) and Roshni (Mrunal Thakur) could be brother and sister. There is attraction, and they do act upon it, bringing their faces close enough for their lips to touch. Small mercies.

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