Fri, September 11 2026

Director Mathimaran Pugazhendhi's Mandaadi, starring Soori, Suhas and Mahima Nambiar, is an interesting film centred on a sailboat race. The film tackles themes of friendship, mentorship, betrayal and second chances in life.

Actor Soori’s transformation from a comedian to a protagonist is a testament to his hard work, perseverance and resilience. If there’s one thing that deserves appreciation in this renewed journey, it’s his script choices. With Mandaadi, Soori has picked a story centred on a sailboat race, a sport rarely seen in films. The unusual setting gives the film a distinct identity from the outset. A young Maari (Mithun Jai Sankar), in the opening sequence of Mandaadi, almost kills antagonist Saatapuli (Suhas) and his son. A commotion at a local temple festival stops Maari from completing the murders. Saatapuli, an influential man who controls the sailboat business and racing team, is now hunting Maari. He escapes to Chennai and seeks help from Muthukaali (Soori), who works at a theme park in the city.

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Thu, September 10 2026

The film’s emotional stakes are so simplistic, it feels like it has picked the easier race to run—and is content with that victory

Bearded, unkempt, brash, and smoking, the Tamil film hero is no obvious object of desire—they get sloppy drunk; you see them waking up hungover; they romance reluctantly, and then recklessly; their lips are cracked, their skin discoloured; if you kiss them, your skin might scrape off; grooming is unbecoming. Charisma, then, is what elevates them to heroism, that ephemeral star quality of re-framing even bad breath as a sign of a night spent sleeping under the stars. The actor Soori, whose very visage is an image of innocence, stepping into this heroism in Mandaadi, plays this charismatic abrasiveness as sincere and patient—this is not collar-up coolness, but button-up kindness. Soori, after stepping away from comedic gaffes and supporting characters, has embraced being the central, impregnable presence in films like Viduthalai (2023-24), Kottukkaali (2024), and now Mandaadi.

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Thu, September 10 2026

Five quirky families in Chumbak Colony deal with chaotic conflicts and hilarious antics as neighbours. An elderly couple, Rajni and Kuku, decide to divorce, creating ripples through the neighbourhood. From court agreements and secret affairs to unexpected runaways, their everyday life becomes a series of crises as the couples confront challenges in their relationships. Neena Gupta and Sumeet Vyas keep the tone of their performances in check amidst the chaos. They don’t try to oversell the characters or the writing and manage to hold fort. Anant Joshi’s flair for humour comes to the fore occasionally, while Sandeepa Dhar, Amyra Dastur and Arjun Bijilani pass muster. Manasi Parekh is strictly okay. Helly Shah, Sumeet Raghavan, Delnaaz Irani and Deven Bhojani go quite overboard in shallow roles.

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Thu, September 10 2026

காவல் அதிகாரியாக இருக்கும் பபிதா சிங் (நிமிஷா சஜயன்) பணியிடத்தில் தன் நலனைப் பார்க்காமல், பிறருக்காகவே ஒவ்வொன்றையும் யோசிக்கிறார். இரண்டு வாரம் விடுமுறை கிடைத்தால், தன் கணவரின் சகோதரியின் வளைகாப்பு நிகழ்வுக்குச் சென்றுவிடலாம் எனத் திட்டமிடுகிறார். ஆனால், விடுப்பு கிடைப்பதிலும் சில சிக்கல்கள் எழுகின்றன. மற்றொரு காவல் அதிகாரி செய்த தவற்றைத் தன்னுடைய தவறென ஒப்புக்கொண்டு இரண்டு வாரம் சஸ்பெண்ட் ஆகிறார் பபிதா சிங். இந்த இடைவெளியில் கணவரின் சகோதரி வளைகாப்புக்காக ஊருக்குச் செல்கிறார் பபிதா சிங். ஆனால், அங்கு பபிதாவின் பள்ளிக்கால நெருங்கிய நண்பர் மர்மமான முறையில் மரணமடைகிறார். அவருடைய மரணத்துக்குப் பின்னிருக்கும் காரணங்களை பபிதா சிங் அலசுவதே இந்த பிரைம் வீடியோ படத்தின் கதை.

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Wed, September 2 2026

Unrest begins at home in Ambiecka Pandit's small-town crime film that doubles as a bleak social drama

A young woman is visiting her in-laws for the first time. She’s eager to impress them. She cooks, cleans, runs the house. She’s hurt by their jibes but tries not to show it. Her husband is mild-mannered but thin-skinned; she has to apologise for pulling his leg. Their lovemaking is awkward. She puts her interests on hold, but it isn’t enough. Slowly, she comes to a boil. She’s played by Nimisha Sajayan. The film is The Great Indian Kitchen. Or is it Babita Singh Reporting? It’s a little strange to watch Sajayan, one of the best actors in India today, undergo similar trials and humiliations to ones she endured five years ago, in her most celebrated role. Ambiecka Pandit’s Hindi film is a world removed from Jeo Baby’s Malayalam drama. But Sajayan’s Babita is a close cousin to her unnamed wife in that film, a silent sufferer until all the silence is wrung out of her.

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Mon, August 31 2026

Director Ambiecka Pandit mounts a small-town murder mystery which functions far more effectively as a breakdown of hypocrisy than as an unconventional procedural.

At a time when the diary of police procedurals is cluttered with gravity-defying cops and preachy social commentaries masquerading as investigative dramas, Babita Singh reports with a quiet yet telling subversion. The biting social critique tells us how our society tolerates a woman’s professional ambition only on the condition of absolute domestic continuity. Her career must remain invisible to the men of the house; it cannot cost them their hot meals or their sense of absolute supremacy. It captures how this cycle is policed not just by men, but by the matriarchs of the family, the mothers and sisters-in-law. Of course, there is a murder investigation as well, but it works as a narrative camouflage. The mystery lies in decoding the pervasive patriarchy.

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Wed, September 9 2026

Divyenndu's Munna makes a comeback to hog the limelight as Puneet Krishna's dialogues retain potential for yet again inspiring many a meme

If there was one show that was asking for a big screen treatment, it was Mirzapur. The desi hinterland iteration of The Godfather, with politics, violence, foul language, turf wars and dialogues that spread like wildfire on social media, drew an instant following. Season three was the weakest of the lot, so the makers knew what needed to be done to lure fans back. Cue: bring back Munna (Divyenndu). Set in 2018, in what would still be the first season, a chunk of Mirzapur: The Movie is devoted to establishing the characters and indulging in some world building for those unfamiliar with dirty politicking in Purvanchal Uttar Pradesh. But the movie invariably is a reminder as to how Munna is the lynchpin, with much of the limited winning, funny moments all belonging to Divyenndu.

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Tue, September 8 2026

Examining its ambitious leap from streaming to cinema, Pankaj Tripathi’s commanding performance, Rajasthan’s striking visual scale, and whether the franchise deserves a lasting theatrical future.

Few commodities have proved as bankable on celluloid as crime, and the enduring appetite for bloodshed, betrayal and underworld intrigue shows little sign of abating. It is perhaps no great surprise, then, that after three seasons of mayhem and moral disintegration on Prime Video, Mirzapur should make the leap from the streaming screen to the big screen. Mirzapur: The Movie reaches back to the world established in the first season in 2018, when Akhandanand Tripathi, better known as Kaleen Bhaiya (Pankaj Tripathi), presides over Mirzapur like its self-appointed monarch, controlling an intricate empire built on the twin pillars of drugs and firearms. Yet his seemingly impregnable dominion is already beginning to show fissures, as challenges emerge from within his family as well as from increasingly formidable adversaries beyond it.

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Mon, September 7 2026

‘Mirzapur: The Movie’ is both cinema and marketing, designed to reward those who love the show, but also a feature film with a story to tell

Mirzapur: The Movie has the peculiar challenge of starting in the middle of a story, a set of relationships and a world that its audience already knows intimately. There are no introductions, no explanations, no time wasted telling us who these people are, what they want and what they mean to each other. They arrive on the big screen with histories, grudges, loyalties and complicated equations that audiences have watched unfold over three seasons of Mirzapur. During the movie’s 197-minute running time, writer Puneet Krishna’s screenplay begins to introduce a new plot and new players, and what initially seems like an elaborate exercise in fan service gradually finds a life of its own.

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Wed, September 9 2026

It is unlikely to send you into raptures even if you manage to sit through it without taking anything resembling a breather.

Irrespective of one’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the least you expect from Fauda, the Netflix series co-created by and starring former IDF soldier Lior Raz, are dramatic flair, technical finesse and solid performances. Season 5 of the Israeli series delivers all these in ample measure. But no matter what it throws into its “Shin Bet agents fighting Hamas terror masterminds” construct, the show struggles to ward off a degree of been-there-done-that kind of fatigue. “To hell with this world,” says one female operative in Marseille, France, where she is close to busting a terror module. The lady has reason to be peeved. Three rogue agents have embarked on an unapproved personal revenge mission that threatens to scuttle her plans.

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Tue, September 8 2026

Instead of a gritty, remorseful gangster saga, Toxic is an exhausting 194-minute ego trip for its lead star, Yash. We discuss the clash of visions between director Geetu Mohandas’s attempt at an emotional father-son remorse drama and Yash’s demand for high-octane KGF-style star worship. Naturally, the film collapses under the weight of its conflicting ambitions. We also talk about the baffling visual language, its performative gender dynamics, and the claustrophobic close-ups that make a ₹500 crore budget look like cheap AI slop.

Mon, August 31 2026

What might happen when a woman filmmaker gets the opportunity to make a film about violence and sex? What might happen when she gets access to all the familiar toys of the male-star vehicle: the punch dialogues, the star, the swagger, the slow-motion sequences, the sex, the violence… What might she bring to this cinema that we don’t generally get? As it turns out… quite a lot. First, she refuses to see the protagonist, Raya, as a ‘hero’. Quite the opposite, in fact. The film isn’t interested in hero-villain demarcations, right-wrong judgments. Raya (Yash) himself says as much at one point. When you are in pain, morality stops seeming important. The film, in fact, has a lot to say about the nature of pain, about what happens when you live with it for so long that you begin to fall in love with it, when it begins to feel more like home than any real home ever could, ever did. There’s a fantastic song in the Tamil version, ‘Vittupogaadha Yen Vali’, that speaks of this dichotomy. “Vittupoiduma en vali, poi vidaadhe en vali…”

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Sun, August 30 2026

Three years after being announced, Toxic has reached theatres with its gangster world intact, but its women viewed largely through Raya. The central disappointment is that the promised female gaze never meaningfully shapes the film's perspective.

Three years after Yash and Geetu Mohandas announced Toxic, the film is finally in theatres. And after all the waiting, the anticipation and the speculation, one question remains stubbornly unanswered: where is the female gaze Geetu promised? In a throwback interview, Geetu described Toxic as a “gangster film”. She said, “It’s a gangster genre with a female gaze. How about that?” When the teaser dropped in July, that was the question everyone asked. Now, after three hours of Toxic, a more pointed one takes its place: does the film ever really see its women at all? Rewind to 2023. When Yash and Geetu Mohandas announced their collaboration, eyebrows went up. Here was a star coming off the monumental success of the KGF franchise, joining forces with a filmmaker known for her distinct, uncompromising voice. Would these two very different cinematic worlds click, or would the pairing end up a spectacular miss? There seemed to be little room for anything in between.

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Mon, September 7 2026

If the first half is a wildly original re-imagination of a film like 'Idle Hands', the second half is a cop-out based around broader aspects of SS Rajamouli’s 'Eega'.

Nahas Hidhayath, both writer and director of I’m Game, does something clever by setting his second film in Hyderabad. When looked at purely as a business proposition, it makes sense given the stardom Dulquer Salmaan enjoys in the two Telugu-speaking states. From a narrative lens, the Hyderabad setting complements the film’s larger-than-life aspirations and the audacity with which it navigates a particularly improbable plotline. But instead of settling for this alien setting alone, it adds Tamil characters to its core. The film doesn’t even make a big deal of this, choosing instead to play this lack of specificity as something very natural to the film’s urban setting. What these choices do is prepare us for a film that feels like it was not made in Malayalam. But there are advantages to this too. Instead of looking for realism or the crutch of logic to enter its crazy world, we’re already there about 10 minutes into the film. This creates a distance, as though this story is happening somewhere else, but it also sets the stage for the film to take a wild swing at almost anything, as long as it entertains.

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Sun, September 6 2026

Nahas Hidhayath and Dulquer Salmaan aim big, but beyond its rich production values, the film remains stuck between a peculiar body-horror thriller and a template revenge drama

I’m Game is essentially the story of two men. On one hand (pun intended), we have Dan John (Dulquer Salmaan), a compulsive gambler, and on the other, Vicky (Antony Varghese Pepe), a passionate cricketer. It so happens that their lives get ‘accidentally’ intertwined by a sheer twist of fate, leading to plenty of confusion, drama, realisation and eventually, resolution. Nahas Hidhayath’s story may not be entirely fresh, with many films in the past, including in Malayalam, exploring similar territories, but the material is still pulpy enough for a commercial potboiler. If you think of it, the director’s debut, RDX, a smashing hit, also had a generic storyline, but the execution was right on the money for an action-heavy entertainer. With I’m Game, the young filmmaker aims really big. Bigger stars, better production values, broader themes, but the ambitious vision is spoilt by some mediocre writing and shoddy execution, resulting in a mishmash of a genre hybrid film that’s stuck somewhere between a promising body-horror thriller and a template revenge drama.

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Sat, September 5 2026

The plot of I'm Game, in which a transplanted hand with a mind of its own uses the protagonist to seek revenge, is reminiscent of the Tamil film Maaveeran and Japanese anime Parasyte, but lacks both the depth and inventiveness of the other two.

Raghava Lawrence cracked a great template for making an easy, mindless entertainer by blending horror and comedy with a revenge drama. The story goes something like this: a scared hero meets a gory ghost. The gory ghost possesses the scared hero for a secret mission. The hero rebels. Then the ghost tells a sad backstory. The sympathetic hero relents. The ghost gets its revenge. Now, replace the ghost with a transplanted hand, and that is pretty much what I’m Game is. Dulquer Salmaan plays Dan John, a rich businessman with a gambling problem. He is a spoilt brat who wants to make a point to his father, mother and the world in general, but only ends up losing money in cricket league betting. While escaping gangster moneylenders, he meets with an accident, loses his hand and gets it transplanted from an anonymous donor. Once his transplanted hand starts to function, it starts operating on its own.

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Sun, September 6 2026

As much as it’s tightly acted, I got a sense that Furious is also a writer’s show

At the height of the #MeToo movement in 2018, something I read seared itself into my brain. “Men should be grateful that women are asking for equality. Not revenge.” For all the patronising tone at home, casual sexism at the workplace, catcalling on the street, groping in public transport, full-blown sexual assaults/attempts in most known/unknown corners of the city, the isolation and gaslighting that takes root after – I’ve often wondered why women still speak to men. In fact, why don’t they start their day by attacking the first man they meet? It’s an urge buried deep within Elizabeth Merriweather’s Furious – a first-rate serial killer mystery, which reveals itself as a reckoning of female rage at its most unvarnished, unbridled and intricate.

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Sat, September 5 2026

This over-stretched comedy stars Arshad Warsi as a debt-riddled husband who fakes his own death to secure a fat life-insurance cheque

Jeevan Ya Bheema Con? is what happens when Delhi Belly tries (but fails) to be a Kunal Kemmu comedy from the 2010s. It’s the sort of chaotic middle-class gag that occasionally remembers that it’s a movie. It begins with the title itself: a play on the name of the government life-insurance scheme (Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojna), where the premise features broke characters called Jeevan, Yojana and Bheema stumbling through a last-ditch insurance con. Unfortunately, there’s nobody named Pradhan, Mantri and Jyoti — why stop halfway?

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Fri, September 4 2026

Sat, September 5 2026

The Gentlemen season 2 finds Guy Ritchie leaning harder into his enduring theme: men who mistake owning something with being someone. This season, Eddie (Theo James) leans into this even harder than ever. Among other things, he spends this run muscling into Italian mafia territory, even as he is chasing a seat in the House of Lords. And at the same time, the Netflix series, which is a spinoff of 2019’s action comedy movie of the same name, drops the zany energy that made season 1 so much fun. It’s a riskier season than the first. It is also colder and darker and, for my money, it is a better one, even when its reach outpaces its grip.

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Fri, September 4 2026

Theo James is back as the Duke of Halstead in Guy Ritchie's entertaining crime thriller as Edward Horniman tries to reclaim his legacy.

Created by Guy Ritchie, Netflix’s crime drama The Gentlemen is back for a darker and more serious second season. Eddie Horniman (Theo James) and Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) have even more ambitious plans for their illegal drug business that face several obstacles. With several returning and new characters popping up in the gangster thriller, the Netflix series takes an unexpected twist at the halfway mark of Season 2, leaving audiences gasping with every twist and betrayal depicted in eight episodes. Written by Ritchie and Matthew Read, The Gentlemen Season 2 is more about purpose as Eddie and Susie try to break out from the expectations set upon them by others. Bold and ambitious, the second season does not repeat any formulas of previous Ritchie productions.

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Fri, September 4 2026

Co-directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the period comedy plays off Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh's odd couple energy.

The filmmakers behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, bring a Cold War comedy that is far more entertaining than it looks on paper. Ryan Reynolds plays an American pilot who crash lands in enemy territory, aka the former USSR, during a covert mission, while Kenneth Branagh plays his new Russian friend, a former KGB agent, who is his only way out. With great Top Gun (1986) references and gasp-inducing action sequences, the streaming entertainer ideally deserved a big-screen outing.

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Fri, September 4 2026

A downed American pilot and a former KGB officer discover that they have been told lies about each other’s countries all their lives, in this film set in the height of the US-Soviet Cold War years.

Ryan Reynolds repurposes his Deadpool routine in Mayday, the new Apple TV action-comedy film, in which he plays a downed American pilot during the height of the Cold War. With the blockbuster Deadpool and Wolverine (2024) having proven that his fast-talking, quip-based acting style works only in short doses and when it’s offset by an on-screen foil, Reynolds is made to team up in Mayday with Kenneth Branagh, who plays a stoic former agent of the KGB (Soviet intelligence and internal security agency), having a crisis of conscience. Together, they make a bid for freedom in a stylishly made, briskly paced and surprisingly sensitive entertainer that has no business being this good.

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Fri, September 4 2026

Andrew Garfield just tries too hard to be a cute hapless man-child. Claire Foy is a joy, especially when she is around the family.

On paper, this should come easy to screenwriter Simon Farnaby, with the Paddington movies and Wonka behind him, and Enid Blyton’s beloved The Magic Faraway Tree book series the source. But magic is hardly as easy as a fruit picked off a tree. It is either there, or it is not. And the more this film juggles its many British thespians, two known faces in Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy, and a very modern message about a childhood lost to electronic devices, the less and less it seems magical.

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