Sat, November 7 2026

In the breathless action on screen, there are very few scenes that are truly moving, laugh-out-loud funny, or even those that evoke a smile.

It’s hard to believe that this is only the second feature-length film on the beloved Dr Seuss character, and the first animation. It also means that Warner Bros Pictures and directors Alessandro Carloni and Erica Rivinoja have to work doubly hard to make The Cat in the Hat stand out from the current deluge. The effort shows, with the film a dizzying cornucopia of action and colours, with little of the unworldliness of the book and all the worldliness of a studio-backed venture, which also lets it be known that it is hoping to spin at least one more movie out of a character.

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Sat, November 7 2026

Joe Barton's dark spy dramedy about a secret organisation trying to infiltrate the British government faces a new threat.

The first season of Netflix’s Black Doves introduced a pair of spies who become friends while trying to survive assignment given out by their secret organisation. Two years later, the British spy drama is back with a new crisis for the duo as they face their biggest threat yet. Black Doves is led by Keira Knightley, Ben Whishaw and Sarah Lancashire, who become our anchors in this latest instalment as the entire organisation is targeted, leaving Knightley’s Helen and Whishaw’s Sam to make some risky moves. The six-part is a thrilling binge watch that sets up the next season nicely.

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Sat, November 7 2026

Created by Jason Keller, the sports comedy settles down by turning its attention on Owen Wilson's has-been golf hero and succeeds

In 2025, the Owen Wilson starrer Stick introduced an earnest sport series about a man redeeming himself by coaching a golf prodigy. As the Apple TV series returns for a second instalment, it smartly refocuses its attention on its smooth-talking hero, Pryce Cahill (Wilson), who finds a new purpose in his golfing journey. The result is a comedy series with renewed resolve to push its characters and the story. While the show does stick to usual tropes found in sports narratives, here in the series, it feels earned instead of clichéd. The addition of the winsome Emmy winner Rhea Seehorn and more screentime to Pryce’s old rival Clark Ross, played by Timothy Olyphant is another smart choice.

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Sat, November 7 2026

While Ullas Chemban's thriller has a handful of moments that hint at a more ambitious film, it relies a bit too heavily on swag to power over what it lacked in terms of real drama.

In an otherwise unwatchable thriller that prioritises swag over everything else, there’s a handful of moments with genuine spark which suggests a film with particularly idiosyncratic ambitions. One of these is an interrogation scene in which the character played by Gayathri Suresh negotiates with two nosy police officers. Just when you think of the need for this scene, the camera angle shifts downward to capture the top angle, drawing our attention to Gayathri’s naked legs. It’s staged awkwardly and one can make the case for it being her negotiation tactic. Linger a second longer and it’s just the film’s way to pay tribute to the infamous interrogation scene from Basic Instinct (1993) featuring Sharon Stone in similar predicament. After working overtime to build a world that’s part Guy Ritchie, part Latin American gang movie, it feels refreshing to see this hat-tip to classic 90’s Hollywood.

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Sat, November 7 2026

Thanks to an in-form Suriya, Naslen and Nazriya, director Jithu Madhavan dares to venture into territory that might seem too risky for a film with such serious undertones

Jithu Madhavan is a Malayalam director (Romancham, Aavesham) making his first Tamil film. But if there’s one sequence that needs to be studied to understand a Malayali’s undying love for Tamil cinema, it’s the one in the second half of Scene. At first glance, it might seem like another Easter egg referencing one of the many films that made Suriya the superstar he is today. But dig a little deeper, and it brings together two aspects of Tamil cinema that are particularly important to every Malayali cinephile: legendary composer Ilaiyaraaja and the films that Suriya made in the early 2000s.

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Sat, November 7 2026

‘Scene’, starring Suriya, Naslen and Nazriya Nazim, deconstructs masculinity and offers deft genre thrills

Jithu Madhavan’s Scene operates on symmetry. We get a psychopathic contract killer who commits patricide as a schoolboy and adopts a father figure as an accomplice in his adult life. On the other side is a brilliant police detective, an offspring of a forensic surgeon and criminal profiler, summoning his cuckoo-for-all-practical-purposes parents to aid in his unofficial investigation. The former is brilliant, uses science and his murders are more Rube Goldberg formations than gruesome set pieces. The latter seldom does fieldwork, solves crimes by using his head and going deeper into the details, and after much prodding, adopts crutches like a prodigious assistant in addition to the experienced parentage. They are two sides of the same coin, and this cat and mouse game is less of a chase and more of a chess maneuver. We know the killer. We know his chaser. Where is the fun? It is in the details.

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Sat, November 7 2026

The Jithu Madhavan directorial, starring Suriya, Nazriya and Naslen, is a serial killer film that is as funny and clever as it can get. While it starts on a subdued note, it blows your mind as it progresses.

There’s a special kind of high that only a really good film can give you. But when it comes from watching one of Tamil cinema’s favourite stars finally have the kind of year you’ve been rooting for, the excitement hits differently. And when that star is Suriya, in a film helmed by Aavesham director Jithu Madhavan, alongside Nazriya and Naslen, the joy is almost impossible to contain. Scene, Suriya’s latest film, delivers exactly that rush - the kind that makes you grin, cheer and walk out feeling like the star is finally back in his element.

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Sat, November 7 2026

Director Sundar C's film, starring Nayanthara, Duniya Vijay and Regena Cassandrra, is an outdated devotional drama devoid of any emotion or devotion.

Growing up in the 90s, devotional films were a staple on television. Audiences were introduced to several different Ammans (mother goddess), but they all had one duty: to protect the innocent and destroy evil. As cinema evolved, these devotional dramas gradually became passe. In 2020, RJ Balaji revived the genre with Mookuthi Amman, giving it a contemporary spin through political satire. Six years later, veteran filmmaker Sundar C takes the franchise forward with Mookuthi Amman 2, turning that political satire into a full-fledged devotional drama. Did the gamble work? The answer is a resounding no.

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Sat, November 7 2026

அசுரக் குலத்தை அடிமைகளாக நடத்தும் தேவர்கள், இலங்கையையும் பிடித்துக்கொள்ள, அங்கிருக்கும் ராணியின் (ஷோபனா) புதல்வன் ராவணன் (யஷ்) பிரம்மனை நோக்கி தவம் இருக்கிறான். மானுடனைத் தவிர எந்த வகையிலும் தனக்கு மரணம் நேராது என்ற வரத்தைப் பெற்று மூவுலகையும் தன் கட்டுக்குள் கொண்டு வருகிறான். அவனை அழிக்க விஷ்ணு, தசரதன் மைந்தன் ராமனாக (ரன்பீர் கபூர்) பிறக்கிறார். சீதையை (சாய் பல்லவி) திருமணம் செய்துகொள்ளும் மானுடன் ராமன், தன் பிறவிக்கான காரணத்தைக் கண்டறியும் பயணமே இந்த ராமாயணம் முதல் பாகத்தின் கதை.

தெரிந்த கதைதான். ஆனால் அதில் பிரமாண்டம் கூட்டி, செயற்கைத்தனங்கள் பெரிதும் இல்லாத கிராபிக்ஸையும் சாத்தியமாக்கி மிரட்டியிருக்கிறார் இயக்குநர் நிதேஷ் திவாரி. திரையில் அதிகம் சொல்லப்படாத பின்கதைகளையும் தொட்டு திரைக்கதைக்காகவும் பிரத்யேகமாக உழைத்திருக்கிறது நிதேஷ் திவாரி - ஸ்ரீதர் ராகவன் கூட்டணி. ராமனாக ரன்பீர் கபூர், அறத்தின் பக்கம் நிற்கும்போதும், வேறு வழியின்றி அழிவுக்கான போரைத் தொடங்கும்போதும் கம்பீரமாக மனதில் பதிகிறார். ஆனால், காதல் காட்சிகளிலும் சீரியஸ் முகம் காட்டுவது ஏனோ? சண்டைக் காட்சிகளுக்கான உழைப்பு, கதாபாத்திரத்துக்குத் தேவையான உடல்வாகு போன்றவற்றில் குறைகள் இல்லை. சீதையாக சாய் பல்லவி, நடிப்பில் அதற்கான நியாயம் சேர்க்கிறார். மற்ற ராமாயண திரை வார்ப்புகள் போலப் பயந்த சுபாவம் கொண்ட நாயகியாக நிற்காமல், அவரும் வாளேந்தி சண்டை புரிவது நல்லதொரு மாற்றம். ராமனுடனே பயணிக்கும் லக்ஷ்மணன் கதாபாத்திரத்தின் மூலமாக காமெடிக்கும் தோரணம் கட்டியது புத்திசாலித்தனமான முடிவு. கச்சிதமான துணைப் பாத்திரமாக அதைச் சரியாகச் செய்திருக்கிறார் ரவி தூபே.

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Fri, November 6 2026

In this Rs 4,000-crore bonanza, the makers cut no corners. The result is a marvel that scores on more than special effects

It’s a story that is in our collective DNA. Which one of us has not grown up with tales of Ram and Raavan, of good versus evil and the triumph of virtue over sin? Ramanand Sagar immortalised it with his legendary TV series ‘Ramayan’. Om Raut’s ‘Adipurush’ proved that even in a nation where faith is the driving force, ‘Ramayana’ is not the easiest story to tell. Clearly, producer Namit Malhotra and director Nitesh Tiwari had a lot to prove with the first instalment of their two-part ‘Ramayana’.

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Fri, November 6 2026

Lankesh gets fair treatment while Rama sticks to tradition as Nitesh Tiwari turns the epic into an action-adventure where technology takes a leap of faith but lands somewhere between spectacle and soul. It holds your gaze but doesn’t travel further.

Long before the code of machines, there breathed a timeless rhythm, a song of righteousness written by a sage in the heart of India. Nitesh Tiwari’s ambitious two-part adaptation, Ramayana, is a cinematic leap of faith, seeking to bridge the infinite horizon of modern technology with the quiet, unyielding weight of human devotion. It feels ironic that a classic story meant to teach us the destruction of ego (ahamkara) is being delivered via a medium that demands we bow down to the vanity of technological scale. The Ramayana is fundamentally a story of subtraction. It is about a prince who willingly gives up a throne, walks barefoot into the wilderness, strips himself of material comfort, and defeats a scholar king whose fatal flaw was his insatiable obsession with his own grandeur, which hollowed out his intellect. By filtering this narrative through a modern global cinematic lens, the DNEG-backed version fundamentally reverses those values, replacing spiritual subtraction with digital multiplication.

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Tue, November 3 2026

A moving portrait of an elderly Kumaoni couple confronting loneliness, migration and abandonment, where the Himalayan landscape becomes a silent witness to a vanishing rural world and forgotten lives.

Set in a picturesque yet increasingly desolate hamlet in Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region, Vinod Kapri’s Pyre is a quietly devastating meditation on old age, abandonment, loneliness and the inexorable erosion of rural life. The two-hour Hindi-language film centres on Tulsi (Hira Devi) and Padam (Padam Singh), an elderly goat-herding couple who have been married for over six decades. Their only son, Harish, migrated to Mumbai many years ago and has never returned. As their neighbours gradually desert their crumbling ancestral homes, the couple find themselves among the last remaining inhabitants of what is fast becoming a ghost village.

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Sat, October 31 2026

While director Vinod Kapri evocatively captures the painful desolation of Uttarakhand’s ghost villages through raw, life-like performances, its cinematic grammar occasionally feels deliberately engineered for a global festival gaze

High in the Himalayas, where the wind murmurs through timber and stone, sits a village that time forgot and the world walked away from. This is the stage for Vinod Kapri’s Pyre(Chita), an elegy carved in the lines of timeworn faces and the vast, aching silence of mountains. It is a story born of memories from Uttarakhand’s ghost villages, where the young have shifted to the heartless cities, leaving only the old to watch over a crumbling community. At its heart, Pyre is a poem to the endurance of love. It follows an elderly couple bound by shared devotion and bickering, and the tenuous hope of their son’s return. With the patience of a documentary and the soul of a tragedy, Kapri creates a meditative piece of minimalist cinema where soaring peaks serve as both a majestic sanctuary and an indifferent prison.

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Fri, October 30 2026

Vinod Kapri's Pyre follows an elderly couple growing old in an emptying Uttarakhand village. Their tender bond exposes the isolation, migration and hardships shaping life in remote communities.

What does growing old look like when the world around you is slowly disappearing? When your children are too far away, your village is emptying out, and even visiting a doctor becomes a challenge? Vinod Kapri’s Pyre explores these realities through an elderly couple in the mountains of Uttarakhand. Beneath its story of loneliness, migration and old age lies a more intimate question: who will hold your hand when life gets difficult? If there is one thing this film makes you want, it is someone to grow old with.

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Sun, November 1 2026

Created by Rowan Joffé, the crime thriller features Adolescence star Stephen Graham as a manipulative serial killer who enjoys baiting his victims.

In Apple TV’s Nocturne, Stephen Graham plays a sadistic serial killer, Jurek Walter, who holds an entire town on edge, looking for a missing young girl. The criminal enjoys riling up the entire police force and the FBI, who are on the hunt, while also digging up additional clues. Nocturne is based on a Scandinavian thriller, The Sandman, by Lars Kepler, and moves the Nordic setting to a quiet Pennsylvania town surrounded by woods. The makers build up the tension and dread about Walter’s games and who he might go after next, but the narrative’s slow pace hinders. However, the performances by the Nocturne cast keep you invested.

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Sun, November 1 2026

This drama series, starring Keerthy Suresh and Radhika Apte, turns the patriarchal order on its head, but its promise is only partly realised

An ambitious premise, an elaborate period setting and a struggle for power between two women give Akka plenty to work with. Set in the imagined kingdom of Pernuru, where women have ruled for generations, the story moves back and forth from ancient times through British rule till the mid 1980s. Pernuru is divided into three powerful houses which fiercely guard their positions. But when a young woman arrives from Mumbai, bent on revenge, the fine balance of this matriarchal society is threatened.

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Sat, October 31 2026

This game of revenge might tantalise to begin with but is finally unsatisfying

It’s the usual game of cloak and dagger, blood and gore, only cloaked under the garb of a matrilineal society. In the very first episode, we go back to the history of these fictional places where women once ruled. In post-Independence India, they still call the shots, literally and metaphorically. Lineage runs from mother to daughter, marriage is forbidden and men are at best companions and at worst, wimps. On the face of it, what can be more progressive and delectable than women being hailed as Akka? Men here are no more than superfluous appendages. Keerthy Suresh is Bhavani, who straddles this world and your screens with indomitable strides of strength. For those who dare to cross her path, she does not squirm away from resorting to killing in a brutal fashion.

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Sat, October 31 2026

Sun, November 1 2026

In the end, Udta Teer is a frustrating case of what could have been. It possesses sparks of genuine literary flair and brilliant satirical bite, only to abandon them to toe a safer, more conventional line. It is funny in parts, certainly, but it ultimately forgets which direction it was headed mid-flight.

There is a distinct moment in Aakash Kaushik’s Udta Teer where the film, much like its titular airborne projectile, loses its trajectory entirely. It begins with the intoxicating promise of a high-wire act. A sharp, irreverent subversion of the subcontinental spy thriller. The premise itself is delightfully absurd. Bilal (Ayushmann Khurrana), an undercover Pakistani mole embedded deep within India’s counter-terrorism service under the alias Vikrant, suffers a convenient bout of amnesia. He wakes up thoroughly convinced that he is a hyper-patriotic, flag-waving Indian counter-intelligence officer. What follows is a comedy of profound errors as a man who is supposed to sabotage the nation becomes its most zealous, unpredictable protector, leaving both sides of the border thoroughly bewildered.

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Tue, October 27 2026

Directed by writer-turned-director Akash Kaushik, Udta Teer wants to be a Dhurandhar when it comes to patriotism but a comedy when it comes to everything else. The result is a film caught between two incompatible impulses. One moment, it is a straight-faced spy thriller invoking desh bhakti with songs like Jai Hind gaaye; the next, it breaks into comedy, as if it cannot bear to take itself seriously for too long. While some of the humour lands, the patriotism is largely performative, playing to the gallery without making much of an impact.

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Mon, October 26 2026

Aakash A. Kaushik's ‘Udta Teer’, starring Ayushmann Khurrana, takes the temperature of Indo-Pak relations down several notches, but can't sustain the charm

Of the many musical gags in Udta Teer, one made me surprisingly wistful. Agent Vikrant (Ayushmann Khurrana) watching the video for A.R. Rahman’s ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’ and becoming emotional is intended as parodic patriotism. But it reminded me of when this version of ‘Vande Mataram’ came out in 1997 and was received as a dynamic reworking, not an imposition. It’s also hard not to think of ‘Gurus of Peace’, a Rahman-Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan track on the same album, especially when Udta Teer reminds us, with a cover of ‘Dum Mast Qalandar’ playing over a shootout, how Pakistan’s music is still a presence in our films but not Pakistani artists.

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Sat, October 31 2026

Body, a Hindi film, takes place after the COVID-19 pandemic and revolves around a group of friends, who are actors. These include Manoj (Manoj Sharma), Khushboo (Khushboo Upadhyay), Amol (Amol Deshmukh), Jatin (Jatin Negi) and Shivam (Shivam Parekh). Once the four men from the group are having a swim in a lake during their trip outside Mumbai. After the swim, Manoj’s clothes are snatched from him during an episode of drunken fun, headed by Amol, and he is left stark naked. The incident triggers such profound trauma in Manoj that he randomly starts getting fully naked at various public places. Khushboo, who is also Manoj’s girlfriend, Amol, Jatin and Shivam are deeply concerned about his state with their theatre performance being around the corner.

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Tue, December 17 2024

Abhijit Mazumdar’s troubled-actor drama is in the International Competition section of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK)

Once adulthood sets in, and once we’ve accumulated enough years, most of us have two types of recurring dreams (and nightmares). One revolves around the terror of remembering that the exam is tomorrow and we haven’t touched the school syllabus. The other is shaped by the horror of finding ourselves naked in routine situations, while being totally helpless about it. Both of these are trauma responses to our fraught relationship with society. Both feature a link between social conditioning and shame, but Abhijit Muzumdar’s Body confronts the steeper task of exploring the second dream. It’s a testing watch, but ultimately quite a rewarding one.

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