Fri, June 13 2025

If Ajay Devgn were to show up in the new Apple thriller to help out Sydney Sweeney and Julianne Moore, you wouldn't bat an eyelid.

The central thrust of the Drishyam movies relies on one basic truth: Ajay Devgn’s character will do just about anything to protect his family. Not only does he cover up a murder, he also concocts an intricate scheme to keep the cops off his scent. The Drishyam movies don’t realise this, but the protagonist is actually a psychopath in the guise of a protective family man. In the second movie, he even allows his teenage daughter to be manhandled by the police in order to keep up the charade. The Drishyam franchise holds some sort of record for having inspired the most remakes. And although it isn’t an official adaptation, the new Apple movie Echo Valley follows the exact same beats. It would’ve been one of the rare examples of Hollywood ripping off an Indian project had Drishyam itself not been a rip-off of a Japanese novel.

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Fri, June 13 2025

Director Michael Pearce's drama about the depth of a mother's love is convoluted throughout but sticks the landing.

At the heart of Echo Valley is the mother-daughter relationship between Julianne Moore’s Kate and Sydney Sweeney’s Claire that gets strained beyond belief. Writer Brad Ingelsby and director Michael Pearce throw the impossible at them, and viewers watch the chaos unfold. At times, the feature stretches incredulity. However, the one-hour and 45-minute film is saved by its clever and twisty ending that manages to tie up everything nearly into place. To say Kate (Moore) is having a hard time is an understatement. She is barely able to keep the farm where she boards horses afloat and needs to borrow money from her ex-husband Richard (Kyle MacLachlan). On top of that, she is grieving the loss of her wife, who died in an accident. Her daughter Claire (Sweeney), who struggles with drug addiction, adds to her worries. When Claire shows up at her door one night covered in someone else’s blood, Kate decides to get into action. However, the mother’s love for her child is tested when Claire’s dealer, Jackie Lyman (Domhnall Gleeson), pushes her to the limits.

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Fri, June 13 2025

Sense and sensibility is not why you watch the Housefull series, but this instalment is neither a 'killer' comedy nor a scary comedy

The more the merrier’ goes the saying. In the case of Housefull 5, a comedy franchise that refuses to end, it’s more the painful. The parrot shtick returns and it’s still agonisingly bad and unfunny. So is the gag with Akshay Kumar and monkeys indulging in a slapfest. The most distasteful bits though are when women’s bodies are fetishised upon—again and again—for cheap jokes. Again more embarrassing than rib-tickling. This time the gang of ludicrous men is on a cruise and there’s a killer on the loose. It’s dressed up in a silver Squid Game-like mask and has the slasher skills of the Scream killer. That alone, it appears, is reason enough to give the fifth instalment of Housefull a blood-soaked scary font. But Sajid Nadiadwala, who here apart from producer also gets story and screenplay credit, forgets the killer for significant chunks of this comedy, which runs far too long. The plot’s to do with who’s the real Jolly, the heir to a throne of billions. Is it Akshay Kumar’s Julius, Riteish Deshmukh’s Jallabuddin or Abhishek Bachchan’s Jalbhushan? The three men come aboard with their partners (Nargis Fakhri, Jacqueline Fernandez and Sonam Bajwa) in tow. It doesn’t take too long before there’s infidelity and lying and some old-fashioned tomfoolery.

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Mon, June 9 2025

Sat, June 7 2025

Tarun Mansukhani’s slapstick comedy is a confused, cluttered murder mystery

Fifteen years after the first Housefull movie hit screens in 2010, Housefull 5 arrives with the usual bluster and baloney—big stars, bigger sets, and a plot that makes no sense. In an unusual twist, the climax and the revelation of the killer aboard a luxury cruise liner differ depending on which version of director Tarun Mansukhani’s slapstick comedy you’re watching. But no matter which route you take, the destination remains the same: this film is a colossal waste of time and resources. This fifth instalment of the famously chaotic comedy franchise is louder, glossier, and stacked with an even larger ensemble. You might struggle to name or remember the female characters, but the men are hard to miss. Franchise regulars like Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Chunky Panday (as Aakhri Pasta), Johnny Lever (Batuk Patel), and Ranjeet return, joined by new entrants Fardeen Khan, Jackie Shroff, Nana Patekar, Abhishek Bachchan (previously in Housefull 3), and Sanjay Dutt.

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Fri, June 13 2025

Good but not the best

Directed and acted in by Donnie Yen as the lead, the film explores the story based on real events. It follows a former cop who joins the department of justice (law) to ensure the criminals pay for their crimes and innocents walks free. His first case as a prosecutor tests him and the people around him as he goes against the department and he sets out to prove the accused in not guilty. The film begins with a celebrated cop on a trial with the state trying to prove the man they caught is the leader of a drug mafia. However, after several attempts and risking the lives of his own team, the criminal walks free. The incident leads him to retire as cop and put his next three years into becoming a lawyer and joining the department of justice. His experience as a celebrated cop does garner him much love and respect in the department, but it also adds to his loyalty for the job. In turn helping the people around him also learning about the same and dedicating their lives to the work and the wellbeing of the public.

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Thu, June 12 2025

Shockingly, Sunny Deol's Jaat is spectacular fun for over an hour. It's only natural that it nosedives in the second half, but that's only because Bollywood stars don't have a sense of humour.

The smartest thing that Himesh Reshammiya has probably done in his professional life, besides transitioning from composer to singer, is to embrace the inherent ridiculousness of his stage persona. For the longest time, he seemed entirely unaware. He’d perform bicep curls to his own love songs on Instagram, seemingly oblivious to how meme pages were responding. But something changed after Janhvi Kapoor went on Koffee with Karan and essentially pulled the curtain on what was maybe the greatest inside-joke of our times. Two years down the line, Reshammiya is starring in a movie called Badass Ravikumar and going on a ‘Cap Tour’ of sold-out live shows. It’s genius. If only Sunny Deol had the same self-awareness in Jaat.

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Sat, April 12 2025

Jaat leaves you with little time to pause and think and qualifies as a mass entertainer

“Yeh dhai kilo ka haath hai, is ki taakat North dekh chuka hai, ab South bhi dekhega.” The reference to Sunny Deol’s iconic dialogue is more than obvious, as is the North-South alchemy. ‘Jaat’ marks the Hindi film debut of Telugu director Gopichand Malineni and encashes upon Deol’s stardom in its inimitable southern style. Only, the actioner that builds on Deol’s ‘post Gadar 2’ starry status amplifies it many times over. Undeniably, Sunny Bhaji is once again a one-man army who can stop a vehicle with one hand and bash up dozens and dozens of muscle men; in short, do all things unimaginable, but very much possible in this Dharam-putar line of action. Instead of uprooting a hand-pump, pillars and fans become his weapons of mass destruction.

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Sat, April 12 2025

Thu, June 12 2025

Fri, May 2 2025

Tue, April 29 2025

Thudarum is a new Malayalam action thriller that starts off innocently enough, almost as a family dramedy, but soon becomes much, much darker. The film is a wild ride and throws surprises every now and then. Let’s explore in detail the plot of Thudarum, its ending, which is explained here, its cast, and more. The film features Malayalam superstar Mohanlal in the main role of Shanmugham, who is better known as Benz. The reason? It’s his car, and no, it’s not a Mercedes. In fact, it is a vintage Mark-I Ambassador that he loves more than anyone. Well, not really, as he also has a wife and two children, but you get the point. Until close to halfway mark, Thudarum remains the family movie that the director promised. After that… well, let’s leave for that later. This Malayalam thriller movie also features Shobhna as Shanmugham’s wife Lalitha. The plot kicks off when the said car is seized by the cops. It was at a mechanic’s workshop after being crashed by the friend of Shanmugham and Lalitha’s son, Pavi (Thomas Mathew). The mechanic was charged with possession of marijuana.

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Thu, June 12 2025

Set in the same twisty world of the M. Night Shyamalan classic Sixth Sense and Gothika, starring Halle Berry, but far inferior in terms of storytelling and character-building, Tyler Perry’s Straw, nevertheless, makes for a semi-engaging watch. Powered by a central act from Taraji P. Henson, whose character of an underprivileged single mother struggling to stay afloat in a world that is insensitive — and, more pathetically, blind — to her pain and plight, the 105-minute film touches upon some pertinent issues, even as it shows Janiyah’s (Henson) world unravelling in the course of a single day. Those familiar with Perry’s style of filmmaking would know that everything that the actor-director says is always on the nose. Racial discrimination, the trials of the working class, the problems that those who are failed by the system face on a daily basis… Straw touches upon all of them, but with the kind of heavy-handed treatment and dense literal rather than metaphorical depiction that we have seen in Perry’s previous overwrought dramas.

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Mon, June 9 2025

Writer and director Rushikesh Gupte made his feature film debut with the Marathi film Dil Dimaag Aur Batti, which was a spoof of the formulaic commercial Hindi films of the yesteryears. But his next release titled Jarann (his second movie Hazaar Vela Sholay Pahilela Manus hasn’t released yet) falls in the diametrically opposite genre of a psychological cum supernatural thriller. Jarann revolves around Radha (Amruta Subhash), who stays with her daughter Saie (Avanee Joshi) in a bungalow in a city in Maharashtra. Her husband Shekhar (Vikram Gaikwad) is abroad for work since a year. Radha and Saie once visit the former’s family’s wada (ancestral house) in a village in the state. The house is about to be sold, so this is Radha’s last chance to visit it and enjoy a get together with her parents and relatives.

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Sat, June 7 2025

‘Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali’ falters when it generalises a few instances of women misusing Section 498A, while closing its eyes to the numerous cases of domestic abuse and dowry harassment and deaths of women which necessitated the framing of such a law

The way a filmmaker conceives a single sequence can sometimes reveal the entire thought process behind the film. This is especially true of single-agenda films like Aabhyanthara Kuttavaali, the debut directorial of Sethunath Padmakumar. Sahadevan (Asif Ali), the protagonist who is facing a case under Section 498A over dowry harassment and domestic abuse, is shown returning to his wife’s family the 100 sovereigns of gold that he got as a “gift”, a modern-day euphemism for dowry. A sentimental background score accompanies this sequence which is framed fully from the man’s perspective, although he was earlier shown to have denied his wife’s demand for a part of the gold to fund her higher education. Even this demand on her part appears unjust by the way the film looks at it.

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Sat, June 7 2025

From Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, the HBO movie follows four technocrats on a secluded weekend getaway while the world outside, including India, descends into chaos.

When Nikhil Kamath interviewed Ranbir Kapoor on his podcast, he admitted that he hasn’t quite figured out the art of detachment like Marcus Aurelius. “You like Marcus’ writing?” Kapoor asked. “Yes, I like a couple of his books,” Kamath said. This bizarre exchange deserves to be unpacked in a separate article, but, for the purposes of this one, let’s focus on two things. One, the Zerodha founder reads the work of a Roman emperor in his spare time, and two, the star of Jagga Jasoos probably thinks they were talking about someone who wrote a self-help bestseller. Several conversations of this nature unfold in Mountainhead, the new film from Jesse Armstrong, creator of HBO’s Succession. Marcus Aurelius is invoked as well; in fact, so are Mark Antony and other great historical figures. Streaming in India on JioHotstar, the movie follows four men — three billionaires and one millionaire — who get together in a snowy mountain retreat for a weekend getaway, while the ‘outside world’ descends into chaos. “No deals, no meals, no women in heels,” is the motto of the get-together, which seems like something of a tradition. Steve Carell plays a veteran named Randall, who has just received a disheartening cancer diagnosis. Corey Michael Smith, who was so good in May December and Saturday Night, plays Ven, the owner of a Twitter-like social media app. He’s the richest man in the room. Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, whose company is making waves in the field of artificial intelligence, and Jason Schwartzman plays Souper, who feels insecure about being the only person whose net worth hasn’t hit a billion yet.

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Sat, June 7 2025

A soap opera for boys, Tom Hardy's gangster drama is derivative but decidedly entertaining. While Hardy mumbles his way through the narrative, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren chew more scenery than they can digest.

Wholly unoriginal yet embarrassingly addictive, MobLand can best be described as a soap opera for boys. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the gangster drama (briefly) unseated Taylor Sheridan’s blockbusters off the viewership charts — Sheridan has built a literal empire on the back of expensive sagas aimed at men, like Yellowstone. MobLand combines his signature brand of family drama with gruff machismo of a Bollywood potboiler; it’s an experience so Ajay Devgn-coded that Tom Hardy’s protagonist could have just as easily been introduced with a packet of Vimal in his hands, and we’d have been none the wiser. He may as well be chewing ‘elaichi’ in his scenes, going by his line delivery. Hardy can be magnificently theatrical when he wants — “let’s not stand on ceremony here!” — but he’s made a name for himself as one of the great mumblers of his generation. That’s exactly what he does as Harry Da Souza in MobLand. Harry is a fixer of sorts, torn between his two families — the real one, with wife Jan and teenage daughter Gina; and the one that he has been adopted into, the Harrigans. Like Tom Hagen from The Godfather, Harry is the brain and brawn behind the Harrigans’ criminal empire, led by the psychotic patriarch Conrad, played by Pierce Brosnan.

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Sun, March 30 2025

Created by Top Boy's Ronan Bennett, the slow-moving gangster saga puts Tom Hardy in the middle of an impending war between two crime families.

The new crime drama, MobLand, directed by Guy Ritchie, holds all the hallmarks of the filmmaker. And yet there is something distinctive missing from the gritty gangster saga as Tom Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, a fixer left to clean up the many messes of the Harrigan family. So far, the nine-episode London-set series is keeping a cliffhanger for each chapter in trying to raise the tension. Ronan Bennett’s series has had a slow-moving start, but it needs to amp things up to match the intensity of Ritchie’s other projects. Hardy’s Harry has been loyally serving Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) for a long time now. The fixer saves the old crime lord and every member of his family whenever they get in a bind. But we join the story at a bit of a power struggle between the Harrigans and their rivals, the Stevensons, before erupting into an all out war. As Harry tries to smoothen things over, his family life suffers as well. Who will be left standing at the end when the lines are all drawn out against family loyalties?

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Sat, June 7 2025

Adarsh Gourav stars as a filmmaker caught in an ideological battle with censors in Varun Grover's 15-minute act of cinematic empathy.

Comedian-writer-lyricist Varun Grover’s directorial debut, Kiss, contains multitudes. The ideas that it is preoccupied by can be upsetting, even terrifying. But, made by someone who has clearly benefited from therapy, the movie is able to comprehend, contest, and communicate these preoccupations with a necessary calm. Kiss was finally released for public viewing on MUBI recently, a full three years after its festival run first began. It isn’t at all like Grover’s feature-length debut All India Rank, although both projects are marked by a decency that seems altogether absent from our culture these days. Fascinated by the idea of cinema as a therapeutic medium, the 15-minute short stars Adarsh Gourav as Sam, a young filmmaker who finds himself in a rather awkward ideological stand-off with a couple of men after the dreaded ‘censor board’ screening of his latest movie. The two men are played by Swanand Kirkire and Ashwath Bhatt; they’re meant to represent this unnamed censor board, but they may as well be the moral police that sends filmmakers to prison in Iran, the settlers who drive people out of their homes in Palestine, or the Romeo squads that torment young lovers in India. Kiss could be set in the distant future, for all we know. There is a certain dystopian quality to the movie.

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Sat, June 7 2025

Directed by Mani Ratnam, 'Thug Life', starring Kamal Haasan and Silambarasan, is a gangster drama with emotional beats. While the film had a great set-up pre-interval, it falls into a deep pit in the second half and there is no turning back – even for a legend like Mani Ratnam.

“You saved me from death. From now on, you and me are one,” says Kamal Haasan in one of the most strikingly shot scenes from Mani Ratnam’s ‘Thug Life’. The dialogue, albeit simple, has a profound touch to it. As the story progresses, you realise he meant what he said. Kamal Haasan’s Rangaraya Sakthivel and Silambarasan’s Amar are indeed one. But, what causes a rift between them in this world of thugs? Mani Ratnam’s ‘Thug Life’ aims to present a full-blown gangster drama rooted in this very question. Rangaraya Sakthivel (Kamal Haasan) is a gangster in New Delhi and has a bunch of trusted aides, all recruited and raised by Manikkam (Nasser). An encounter leads to the death of a local newspaper vendor. Sakthivel, who is deeply disturbed to see the newspaper vendor’s son, Amar, takes him and raises him as his own son (Silambarasan) along with his wife Jeeva (Abhirami).

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Sat, June 7 2025

In 1987, the collaboration between Mani Ratnam and Kamal Hassan resulted in Nayakan, which continues to be regarded as the benchmark for gangster films in India and has influenced numerous subsequent films in that genre.

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Sat, June 7 2025