Thu, April 10 2025

Thu, April 10 2025

Like Grey's Anatomy but worse, Netflix's new medical drama wants to be progressive, but finds itself resorting to regressive tropes with Ekta Kapoor-like discipline.

Contrary to what Hussain Dalal might have you believe, there is an art to writing bad television. A bad show owns its contrivances instead of making excuses for them; a bad show embraces its heightened drama without pretending that it wants to be taken seriously. It scoffs in the face of concepts such as internal logic and organic character development. It chooses twists over tact, and chaos over narrative control. But what makes a bad show good? It all boils down to an indescribable self-awareness. And while Netflix’s medical drama Pulse checks all the above boxes — it’s trash TV of the topmost order — it never fully commits to the cause. Pulse is bad in the traditional sense of the word, in that it’s utterly incoherent, laughably plotted, and contains such a shocking depiction of sexual harassment that you might momentarily be confused into thinking that Bollywood was somehow involved. Incidentally, Pulse happens to be star Willa Fitzgerald’s second anti-feminist project in a row, after the thriller film Strange Darling. Directed by JT Mollner, Strange Darling seemingly took offence at the indisputable fact that the serial killer genre is dominated by men. “Are you saying women can’t be serial killers?” the movie seemed to ask. “How dare you; now watch this.”

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Wed, April 9 2025

The White Lotus 3 crafts a haunting fable of modern morality, where the truest connection ends not in escape, but in sacrifice. In dying, they resist the façade of survival — and become unforgettable.

Over its three seasons, The White Lotus has become an American TV franchise that at once satirises the insularity of American affluence and the superiority complex of a social media generation that laps up the satire. Much of the show — its characters, reaction shots, music, monologues, conversations, scandals, twists, weekly episodes — is staged with a sense of the memes, hyper-aware humour and internet buzz it generates. The virality is an inextricable part of the design. It caters to — but also skewers — an average woke viewer’s desire to be seen as well as their disdain towards Western capitalism and anti-intellectualism. We are invited to laugh at rich and culturally oblivious vacationers dispensing the emptiest thought farts with the self-seriousness of 13-year-old cinephiles. Note, for instance, the gravity of the score almost mocks the levity of Sam Rockwell’s hysterically hollow monologue about his sexual awakening (if one can even call it that). But we are also lured into identifying with a couple of ‘outsiders’ — people who think they’re better than everyone else — in each of the seasons. In Season 1, it’s a Black teenager tagging along on a Hawaiian holiday with the wealthy white family of her best friend; it’s also a freelance culture writer who’s newly married into money. In Season 2, it’s a straight-laced lawyer who cringes at the superficiality of her husband’s friends; it’s also a frumpy young assistant of an eccentric heiress on a Sicilian holiday.

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Thu, April 3 2025

Not as notorious from the get-go as the previous seasons, but it is suspenseful, thrilling and an absolute wild ride, nonetheless

White Lotus is back with its signature theme – vacation gone awry. Unlikeable rich tourists and their penchant for seeking trouble head to a luxurious resort in Thailand and what unfolds is anything but relaxing. The 3rd instalment follows the series’ template in theme and storytelling. Nothing changes there as it stays true thematically to the previous seasons, but it puts the brakes on the pace a bit. Like its predecessors, this too begins with a mysterious crime and an air of suspicion looms in days that lead up to it. What also stays constant is the eccentricity, dark secrets and debauchery of the rich guests, whose biggest fear is poverty. There is also an amusing yet shocking sexcapade involving incest.

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Mon, March 31 2025

Lust and pleasure, pain and meditation, West and East… can all these inhabit the same space? Well, in Mike White’s third season of ‘The White Lotus’, they do. Those familiar with his award-winning franchise and template are well aware that ‘White Lotus’ is a chain of luxury resorts where the super rich vacay in their quest for the elusive happiness. In the third season, the setting is Thailand, perhaps the perfect place to train the camera on the beauteous and to ask some existential questions too. There are many strands in the story… a seemingly perfect family of five, three childhood friends reuniting, an ageing balding man with a young woman and yet another couple of a similar variant. What they are seeking in this mental wellness resort depends entirely on how you see them and how they see themselves. Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) is catching up with his unburied traumas of the past, young daughter Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine) of the seemingly perfect affluent Ratliff family is here to find purpose in Buddhism. Her sex-obsessed brother Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) is only looking for bodily fulfilment. Where this pursuit will take him is the most revelatory and shocking part of the series and is certainly meant to rattle.

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Wed, April 9 2025

layed by Junaid Khan, the male protagonist of Loveyapa seems to be bizarrely obsessed about the 'purity' of his girlfriend, played by Khushi Kapoor.

If Bollywood were any more exploitative than it already is, it would’ve got the struggling Dibakar Banerjee to direct Loveyapa as a gun-for-hire. But then, it wouldn’t have been the same garbage movie. Banerjee would’ve spotted the inherent toxicity of its protagonists — played by two-time offenders Khushi Kapoor and Junaid Khan — and attempted to unpack the patriarchal systems that made them this way. Had Banerjee directed this movie, Khan would’ve almost certainly become a mascot for toxic masculinity at just two films old. The only difference is that Maharaj, his debut film, had no idea that his character was a terrible person. Loveyapa, on the other hand, appears to at least recognise his ‘flaws’, but expects you to root for him regardless.

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Sat, February 15 2025

यह जेन ज़ी की फिल्म है। जेन ज़ी बोले तो 21वीं सदी के पहले दशक में जन्मी वह पीढ़ी जिसने पैदा होते ही मोबाइल देखा और इस यंत्र को इस कदर अपना लिया कि अपने दोस्तों, परिवार वालों से ज़्यादा यारी इससे कर ली। इस यंत्र में इन्होंने इतना कुछ भर लिया कि उसे अपनों से ही छुपाने की नौबत आ गई और यही कारण है कि इस जेनरेशन का शायद ही कोई शख्स होगा जिसके मोबाइल में ताला न लगा हो। यह फिल्म उसी ताले के पीछे छुपे राज़ सामने लाकर इस पीढ़ी के रिश्तों के खोखलेपन का दीदार कराती है। बानी और गौरव आपस में प्यार करते हैं। बानी के पिता इन दोनों के सामने शर्त रखते हैं कि तुम दोनों एक दिन के लिए अपने-अपने मोबाइल फोन एक-दूसरे को दे दो। इसके बाद इनके जो राज़ खुलने लगते हैं उससे इनके रिश्ते की दरारों के साथ-साथ इनकी और इनके आसपास के लोगों की ज़िंदगियों का खोखलापन भी दिखने लगता है।

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Sun, February 9 2025

Mon, April 7 2025

Early on in Harshad Nalawade’s Follower, we see its central character, Raghvendra “Raghu” Pawar (Raghu Prakash), commuting to work one morning. It’s an innocuous little routine—a man rides through town on his motorbike. The passing scenery is reminiscent of any tier-2 Indian city: dusty cricket grounds, petrol pumps, bus stops, a giant clock, a flyover under construction, a bridge. A closer look, however, reveals that the streets simmer with unresolved frictions and resolute fictions. Garlanded statues of fabled kings compete for attention with garlanded statues of fabled queens. Flags of clashing political parties and communities dot the statues and bus stops. A lone church shies away in the background. Raghu has the stoic manner of a combatant weaving through the debris of a decades-long dispute. We soon learn that this town, Belgaum, is a war zone of identity.

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Sun, March 30 2025

Harshad Nalawade's film tracks the senseless way social media trolls operate, fuelled by the misguided notion that unquestionable obedience is their greatest calling. Follower is about followers.

An angry mob vandalises a public space. The premise is ransacked, chairs are upturned, and threats are issued: “Every action has a reaction”. They are seething over a remark made by a comedian about their political leader, standing in that place. Soon, social media is crammed with more threats and conspiracy theories, each linking the said comedian to extremists and sources of his funding to illegal sponsorship; he is tipped to be the unofficial spokesperson of the rival party. As days pass, speculations get rife; one party worker comes to a news channel and says he regrets nothing. “There should be a limit to humour”. Harshad Nalawade’s Follower is about that person. This might be technically misleading, but it is spiritually accurate. Nalawade’s astute and timely film is about the faceless trolls that appear to self-multiply and clog every pore of social media. His debut film tracks the senseless way they operate, fuelled by the misguided notion that unquestionable obedience is their greatest calling. Follower is about followers.

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Fri, March 21 2025

When the line between his professional and personal life starts blurring, Raghu, a radicalised journalist, is faced with some inconvenient truths. But he chooses to be in denial and acts impulsively.

The Maharashtra-Karnataka border dispute is largely centered around the city of Belagavi, aka Belgaum. While the city is in Karnataka, for years, allegations of suppression of the large Marathi-speaking population there have been doing the rounds. This issue forms one of the cruxes of Harshad Nalawade’s debut feature Follower. However, the larger part of the film, which premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2023, revolves around a disillusioned and disgruntled youngster, who joins a small media company that works to further a local politician’s agenda via social media. Raghavendra Pawar (Raghu Basarimarad), a well-educated Marathi-speaking resident of Belagavi, quits his job at a college after he’s allegedly sidelined by the Kannada-speaking authorities and denied a promotion. While searching for another job, he takes over his father’s gift shop after his father dies in an accident. Unemployed and constantly looked down upon by people around him, Raghavendra blames the socio-political scenario for his plight, villainising all Kannada-speaking people, including his friend Sachin (Harshad Nalawade), a YouTuber. He is eventually influenced by the local politician’s ‘fight’ for the Marathi-speaking community in the area and takes up a job that he believes he’s doing for the service of his community, thanks to the polarising words of the politician he idolises. But influenced and unthought decisions often have a way of rebounding, which is exactly what happens with Raghavendra. What, how and why are questions that Follower aims to address.

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Mon, April 7 2025

Sashikanth’s Netflix film is a flawed thriller, but a compelling sports drama.

S. Sashikanth’s Test is yet another story about a celebrity feeling the rage of a common man. It follows Arjun Venkataraman (Siddharth), a legendary Indian cricketer thrown into a crisis. The crisis is manufactured by a bitter scientist, Saravanan (R. Madhavan), who needs money to fend off loan sharks, pay for his wife’s IVF treatment and, most importantly, float a revolutionary hydro-fuel project. The twists are corny and implausible. The Netflix-thriller template flattens the initial promise. There are too many loose ends, abrupt transformations, unnecessary characters, over-the-top performances (Madhavan’s villain era — or Maddy’s baddie era — is just not it), and lazy resolutions. In short, Test is not a great film.

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Sun, April 6 2025

Test explores ambition, obsession, and morality—but in its struggle to create emotional intimacy, it leaves us at a distance. This is a film rich in ideas, but curiously hollow in feeling

It’s a character’s private world, their unspoken thoughts, the bulk of what makes their personality, what gives them life. When there is interiority, you begin to understand a character—truly. Their thoughts, their motivations; you begin to get them in theory first, but slowly, you begin to sync with them. This isn’t necessarily about attachment—it’s about emotional union, even with those whose decisions you might never make or agree with. I fear Test, for all its ambition, for all its commentary on obsession, for all its felt performances, still struggles to generate this crucial interiority. Perhaps that’s why Arjun, a fading superstar cricketer played by Siddharth, feels so unchanged, so incomprehensibly still—despite the storm around him. There’s a moment where he does something unthinkable, something deeply against his grain, and yet, the moment drifts past us. We don’t sit with his internal struggle, we don’t feel the weight of it. We don’t quite see him shake under it.

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Sat, April 5 2025

S. Sashikanth's ‘Test’ remains unsatisfying, both as sports drama and thriller

S. Sashikanth, a former architect turned film producer, takes on the role of co-writer and director of Test (Netflix), a drama that unfolds against the backdrop of cricket, unrealised dreams, sacrifice, and obsessions. The resolve and ethics of three principal characters are tested to the limit in this unimaginatively directed film, co-written by Suman Kumar (The Family Man, Farzi). Test shifts from a sports drama to a thriller, verging on horror, particularly with R. Madhavan’s character’s transformation. Much of the action unfolds in the build-up to a cricket match between India and Pakistan, set in Chennai. A fading cricketer is desperate for a swansong. Little does he know that out on the pitch during this critical test match, he will face far more harrowing challenges. Arjun’s world intersects with that of Kumudha, a school teacher obsessed with motherhood, who is married to Saravanan, a struggling scientist clinging to his passion project.

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Sat, April 5 2025

In his approximately 35-year career, director Steven Soderbergh has made more than a handful of remarkable films. Although he occasionally takes breaks, but he still remains a highly prolific filmmaker. This year, he has two new releases: Black Bag and Presence, the latter is a horror film and both are written by David Koepp. Black Bag is a gripping and entertaining spy thriller that showcases Soderbergh’s distinctive style. The film features an exceptional lead duo, Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, who portray a married couple, George and Kathryn. Both work for the British intelligence agency and appear to be deeply in love—until complications arise. As a spy thriller, “Black Bag” combines the intellectual depth of a John Le Carré novel with the romantic tension characteristic of a Hitchcock film, a director not typically associated with romance. The film successfully balances style and substance, a rarity in cinema these days.

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Mon, March 31 2025

The film is a beginning game of possibilities, with all manner of permutations and combinations

While watching Black Bag – Steven Soderbergh’s latest film – I was reminded of Sriram Raghavan more than once. After all, both Raghavan and Soderbergh operate in hardened, grown-up genres. They’re both cinephiles, and therefore well-versed in the unwritten ‘contract’ between a genre and its aficionados, along with being crafty enough to flip the switch on the staples, time and again. They also seem to shoot their films in a non-pompous manner, whose grounded style doesn’t necessarily mean it lacks flavour. Helming thriftily-produced films that make dialogue sound like a martial arts sequence, both filmmakers might make cynical films about dark human impulses, but a deeper examination of their works prove they’re inherently idealists.

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Sat, March 29 2025

In Soderbergh's London-set spy thriller, the very concept of espionage becomes a parable for the devaluation of trust in modern-day relationships.

Some of the sexiest thrillers aren’t about the plot. They invite the viewer to slice through a perfectly sculpted body—not murderously, of course—and try to find a tiny, beating heart within. The sleekness of the body matters. And perhaps no contemporary filmmaker encourages such surgical eroticism more than Steven Soderbergh. His movies are so wildly watchable — even when they’re not great — because the style itself is the substance. Black Bag is perhaps his most complete work in a decade; it’s a London-set spy thriller where the very concept of espionage becomes a parable for the devaluation of trust in modern-day relationships. Soderbergh and writer David Koepp don’t come at it from a nostalgic back-in-our-day space. If anything, they fetishise what it takes to keep a tradition alive in an institution that’s rigged against the anatomy of faith. The framework is clever. The film revolves around a cold-blooded British intelligence agent, George (Michael Fassbender), who must investigate a top-secret leak and find the traitor among his colleagues. The details are not important; let’s just say there’s the standard threat of a nuclear meltdown and dissolved governments. One of the five suspects, however, is Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), his wife and fellow intelligence agent. George and Kathryn are kind of an urban legend in the spy world — not because they’re excellent at what they do, but because they’re married and intensely committed to each other in a vocation that requires duplicity, roleplay and moral ambiguity. They’re a social anomaly, so much so that a dinner invite to their home feels like a “visit to our parents”. It’s a marriage so solid that when George goes up to Kathryn’s floor, everyone in her meeting (including her superior) automatically pauses — you can almost hear the mental eyerolls in the room. They’re used to it.

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Sat, April 5 2025

What can be more fascinating than a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes in the Punjabi music industry? Invariably reverberating with rocking beats, it has deep fault lines that are exposed every now and then. So, can a series helmed by Rohit Jugraj, director of Punjabi films like ‘Sardarji’, its sequel and ‘Jatt James Bond’, truly offer us an expose? Or deep insight? Well, the series, the first season of which dropped in 2023, may not be an unsettling reflection of its grim side, but has its strengths. Before we fault the musical series for unspooling like a thriller in its concluding part, we also need to understand that violence has marred Punjab’s irrepressible musical heart time and again. Thus, this one-of-its-kind musical series fictionalises the brutal killing of Amar Singh Chamkila and moves forward from there. It has violence and revenge running as a recurring thread, not too far away from the truth of the musical world where extortion calls are a norm and gun culture not uncommon.

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Fri, April 4 2025

Rohit Jugraj’s riff on the Amar Singh Chamkila legacy is long, restless and disjointed.

I admire ambition. But ambition without direction can be like an ice cream cone without the ice cream: hollow, weird, tasteless and sad. Sorry for the analogy, but I was left with a sticky cone in my hand after my ice cream scoop met the footpath last week and I’m still salty (not sugary) about it. It wasn’t even a waffle cone. Coming back to Chamak, rarely has so much ambition resulted in so little. It’s a miracle that this musical drama manages to be 12 episodes long without making a Punjab-sized dent in the OTT landscape. The series is disjointed and distracted, but it generously allows the viewer to be just as distracted. I found myself doing some chores, learning of Hollywood star Val Kilmer’s death, watching Real Madrid highlights and reading about the IPL — all of this while six episodes of Chamak: The Conclusion (the first 6 dropped in 2023) played in the background. But the empty cone, in this case, elicits sympathy. It’s a lot of production, money, writing, acting, culture, songs, sound. It’s hard not to feel for a show that works so hard to tell a story.

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Fri, April 4 2025

Creator Rohit Jugraj’s musical drama has a bloodier but overstuffed return as more secrets threaten to take over.

A year and a half later, we pick up back where Canada returned Kaala left viewers after being arrested in the Season 1 finale. Paramvir Singh Cheema’s Kaala has new innings and a new mission to accomplish in this musical revenge saga. While certain narratives from Season 1 move forward, others take you back as the series adds more unnecessary drama to the proceedings. The SonyLIV series, Chamak-The Conclusion, suffers from wanting to do too much but not knowing where to trim down the sprawling saga. Unpredictable singer Kaala (Cheema) reconciles with music label owner Pratap Singh Deol (Manoj Pahwa) after it is revealed he is Tara Singh’s (Gippy Grewal) son. As they prepare to take Teeja Sur to newer heights, internal conflicts and past histories threaten to derail everything. By the end of the six episodes, mostly all the characters have a rise and fall, not all of them satisfactory.

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Sat, April 5 2025

Prasad, father to teenagers Jyothi and Srikanth, runs a small-time photo studio in a quaint town in Telangana, struggling to make ends meet. Yet, he does it all without complaints, helped significantly by his homemaker wife Devi. While Srikanth wants to work in films, Prasad is adamant about sending him to the US. In contrast, Jyothi wants to study further, but her parents try to get her married. The casting, while familiar, still evokes some freshness with the pairing of Rajeev Kanakala and Jhansi. As expected of him, Rajeev Kanakala fits the part of the seemingly tough dad with a heart of gold and delivers a warm, affecting performance with a good sense of humour and use of body language. Jhansi is as expressive as ever, acing the Telangana slang like a queen without missing the core emotion of the character.

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Fri, April 4 2025

The film begins with a quick narration by Steve, his motivation and reason for being the lead in the Minecraft movie. Steve was also interested in mining, but as a kid, he wasn’t allowed to go near mines. After being chased away, he the a terrible thing that he shouldn’t have, he grew up. Like it often happens with adulting, though his clothes and hair remained the same, he was left soulless. But one day he rediscovered his passion for the mines, and as an adult, he was no longer chased away from the mines. He finally decides to fulfill his wishes and goes to the town’s mine and mines to his heart’s content until he finds two glowing cubes. The cubes then lead him to the Overworld, a place filled with creativity. Steve spends a year with his wolf, Dennis, in the Overworld building new places, mining and gathering things. When he finds another Orb, it leads him to the Netherworld ruled by a dark lord who only wants gold and mines to take over the Overworld as well. In an attempt to his the Orb from her, Steve sends Dennis to the real world to hide the Orb. It eventually lands in the hands of a teenager and a failing arcade owner.

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Fri, April 4 2025

Fri, April 4 2025

Deva, a remake of the Malayalam film Mumbai Police, features Shahid Kapoor as a rogue cop trying to solve a murder case and identify a mole in his department. However, the film's new ending reveals a problematic mindset, equating queerness to betrayal.

Deva is like one of those movies that Mahesh Bhatt would ‘direct’ over the phone in the 90s. It has all the ingredients — a brutish hero with a heart of gold, plenty of flimsy female characters that exist purely to serve him, and plotting that relies almost entirely on contrivances and clichés. The only thing it doesn’t have is Avtar Gill in a supporting role, but guess what, Upendra Limaye more than makes up for it. Starring Shahid Kapoor, Deva is directed by Rosshan Andrrews; it’s a remake of his Malayalam-language original, titled Mumbai Police. They downplayed the remake angle during the promotions, to the point that it almost felt like they were pretending that Deva was an original. And then, news began to spread about Andrrews having shot three different climaxes for the movie, perhaps in an effort to throw audiences off, or — and this is more likely — to lure them into theatres with the tease of something new.

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Sun, February 2 2025

Fri, April 4 2025

The most misogynistic piece of mainstream Indian cinema since the Kamal Haasan-starrer Vikram, the police procedural Officer on Duty joins the recent Marco in pushing Malayalam cinema in the wrong direction.

Movies like Officer on Duty make it difficult for you to give Indian filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. How could the widely celebrated writer Shahi Kabir, who broke out with the excellent Malayalam-language procedural Nayattu some years ago, produce something as misguided as Officer on Duty? Now out on Netflix after a successful theatrical run, the police thriller lacks everything that made Nayattu such a memorable pandemic-era experience; little attention is paid to the cultural specificities, the writing prioritises plot over characters, and unlike the rather progressive themes that Nayattu niftily wove into its riveting narrative, the politics in Officer on Duty are highly objectionable.

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Fri, February 21 2025

The screenwriter brings into play his own insights as a former police officer to the way the force functions. The tension is dialled up quite a bit in the initial half, leaving the viewer hardly any space to breathe

Till a few years ago, one really had to struggle to pick out a flaw, personal or professional, in the police officers in Malayalam cinema. Right now, it would be hard to find an on-screen police officer without some baggage from the past, which gets almost as much focus as the investigation that the officer is pursuing. The picture is no different in Jithu Ashraf’s debut film Officer On Duty, but for a change, circle inspector Harishankar (Kunchacko Boban)‘s troubled history does not seem forced but something which organically gels in with the rest of the plot. The man comes across as borderline repulsive in his introduction scene, barking at his subordinates and violently attacking women suspects, so much so that we are more intrigued by the officer’s behaviour and are curious about his past than the minor crime regarding a fake gold chain that he is after. The screenplay works its magic in upsetting our initial assumptions, regarding both the protagonist and the case that he is pursuing.

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