Fri, May 22 2026

While the film boasts of good performances from the leads, the narrative fails to create a lasting impression

Things fall quite easily in the lap of public prosecutor Neha Rajvansh (Sonakshi Sinha) in Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s new film System. Neha may be working to get the underprivileged justice in the Delhi court as a public prosecutor, but she comes from a position of privilege. While she is out there to prove a point to her successful father, she is also aware of her limitations and thus takes the help of courtroom stenographer Satika Rawat (Jyotika). Two women headlining a courtroom drama in Bollywood is novel, even though the premise is a known one. But does Iyer Tiwari’s film deliver a sharp courtroom drama? Only in parts.

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Fri, May 22 2026

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s female-led drama revolves around a bond between a sheltered state prosecutor and a street-smart court stenographer

System stars Sonakshi Sinha as a privileged young professional who strives to shed the ‘nepo-baby’ tag by breaking free from the shadow of an influential father. The meta casting is a common Bollywood gimmick: a version of Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi playing the restless outsiders in Gehraiyaan. The context here supplies the characterisation. Sinha’s Neha Rajvansh might be the daughter of a big-shot lawyer, but her rite of passage includes a ‘lowly’ stint at the state prosecutor’s office. Her reel-clicking, selfie-taking and manicured fingers must toil in the trenches to earn her place in her father’s empire: a legal-world equivalent of industry kids landing jobs as assistant directors before they are launched in big-budget productions. Like her old man, Neha treats her career as a medium of winning, not a battle for justice. When he challenges her to win ten cases in a row, she gets cracking — with the help of the court stenographer, Sarika (Jyotika). All she cares about is the gold at the end of this rainbow.

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Fri, May 22 2026

यह कोई थ्रिलर फिल्म नहीं है जिस पर तर्कों की उंगलियां उठाई जाएं लेकिन यह बात तो लेखक-निर्देशक को समझनी चाहिए कि जब आप हमें थ्रिलर स्टाइल में कहानी परोस रहे हो तो उसमें लॉजिक का तड़का तो लगेगा ही न...!

‘किसी ने जुर्म किया है या नहीं, इस बात से कोई फर्क नहीं पड़ता। अगर वह जुर्म साबित किया जा सकता है तो वह दोषी है, वरना नहीं।’ इस संवाद के इर्दगिर्द बुनी गई इस फिल्म की कहानी दरअसल हमारे कानूनी सिस्टम के उन छेदों को दिखाने का काम करती है जिसमें कभी कोई बेकसूर शख्स इसलिए सज़ा पा लेता है क्योंकि सबूत उसके खिलाफ होते हैं, तो कभी कोई कसूरवार इसलिए छूट जाता है क्योंकि गवाह और सबूत उसके खिलाफ होते हैं। दिल्ली के नामी वकील रवि राजवंश बड़े-बड़े केस चुटकी बजाते जीत जाते हैं। उनकी बेटी नेहा राजवंश सरकारी वकील है और अक्सर हारती रहती है। पिता-बेटी में डील होती है कि नेहा लगातार दस केस जीते तो रवि उसे अपना पार्टनर बना लेगा। नेहा एक-एक कर नौ केस जीत भी लेती है। तभी आता है एक ऐसा हाई प्रोफाइल केस जिसमें उसे अपने पिता के खिलाफ ही खड़े होना है। क्या जीत पाएगी वह यह केस? और इससे भी बड़ा सवाल-जीतना ज़्यादा ज़रूरी है या इंसाफ दिलवाना?

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Fri, May 22 2026

Fri, May 22 2026

Fri, May 22 2026

A worthy continuation of Georgekutty’s journey. I can’t think of a greater compliment!

“I thought we agreed to put this behind us,” a character says, defeatedly, to another in Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam 3, the apparently concluding chapter of one of the most thoughtful trilogies (and remarkably consistent series of thrillers) to emerge from modern Indian cinema. With the smashing Drishyam 2, which released directly on streaming during the pandemic, Joseph evolved a clever, unputdownable thriller into a ghost story. That is to say, a story about the ghosts of the past and how they haunt us. It became a story about a life of fear, and the weight of guilt and trauma plaguing Georgekutty (Mohanlal continues to carefully craft one of Indian cinema’s most enjoyable recent creations), his wife Rani (Meena George), and his daughters Anu (Esther Anil) and Anju (Ansiba).

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Fri, May 22 2026

Love stories must return to Bollywood. In an era of toxic masculinity and mind-numbing violence that dominate the box office today, the soothing familiarity of the romantic films of the late ’90s and early 2000s seems like an inviting proposition. Additionally, a millennial like me would want Dharma Productions to support this cause along with Yash Raj Films for simply having set romance ideals through their films. I could sense that from my smile when the opening credits of Chand Mera Dil flashed Karan Johar’s name. The floodgates of movie memories opened until the last slate revealed the director’s name: Vivek Soni. Could he do a decent romance, never mind cult-worthy?

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Fri, May 22 2026

Writer-director Vivek Soni balances real-world accountability with the traditional, sweeping magic of young romance.

At a time when mainstream romance usually oscillates between airbrushed fantasy and comedy, with a dash of toxic masculinity, Vivek Soni’s Chand Mera Dil arrives as a grounded, mature counter-narrative. It subverts the grammar of a Bollywood musical melodrama, or what we call the Dharma production tropes, to deliver a sharp dissection of modern intimacy with a melancholic flourish. After a long time, a love story doesn’t dump career and bread and butter issues. Aarav (Lakshya) and Chandni (Ananya Panday) are not flaky cardboards. Besides the raging hormones, they come across as believable engineering students facing rigorous academic pressures. They do not drop out when life gets messy. The writing (Vivek, Tushar Paranjpe, and Akshat Ghildiyal) respects their intellect and ambition, showing that pursuing career ambitions isn’t an alternative to a love story, or vice versa. It is a heavy framework within which the love story must exist, and Ananya Panday and Lakshya strike a delicate equilibrium to anchor the film’s transition from a lyrical college romance into a stark, mature reality. They establish an effortless physical and emotional intimacy early on, making the eventual fracture sting all the more.

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Fri, May 22 2026

Fri, May 22 2026

Rami Malek’s Jimmy may remind you of his Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. Malek won an Oscar then, and I won’t be surprised if this turn garners him more prizes.

he 80s in NYC was a scene, man. If you’re of a certain vintage, you may have actually heard this line — from the know-it-all seniors when you arrived in any liberal arts college in Delhi University as a newbie, those exalted beings who smoked Charminars and wore drainpipe jeans and floppy hair and big Beatles glasses who were, in hindsight, probably spouting received wisdom. There are no such gaps between perception and knowing in Ira Sachs’ marvellous re-creation of that very specific Reagan era in ‘The Man I Love’, which brings alive the sights and sounds of the city with the kind of pulsating energy that can come only from someone who has lived through it.

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Fri, May 22 2026

What could be thornier than when children are the at the centre of the conflict, with the family unit up against the might of the state?

When a bunch of kids are greeted by a school principal saying jovially, no Draculas here, you are meant to surmise a few things. That the children have a connection with Romania, and that this remote Norwegian town with a fjord on one side and mountains on the other, is a new experience for them. Turns out that The Gheorghiu family, with a Romanian father and Norwegian mother, and their five children — two teenagers, two younger ones, and the fifth, a babe in arms, have relocated from Romania and come to live in Norway. Mihai (Sebastian Stan) is an IT expert, and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) who works in medicine are here for fresh prospects and fresh air, both of which seems to be in ample supply in this snowy, windy place, which turns out to be not as welcoming, leaving the new entrants facing an uncertain future.

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Fri, May 22 2026

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's deeply observant style suits the central thrust of the film, which is mainly set in a home for the elderly, where the big themes accompanying end-of-life scenarios are a natural outcome.

To say that Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘All Of A Sudden’ (Cannes competition) is a long film – it weighs in at a solid 3.15 hours – is stating the obvious. The Japanese auteur doesn’t do sudden – the title is a nice little touch of unintentional irony; a leisurely unfolding of events is much more his thing. In fact, he doesn’t do events either; capturing moments like no one’s looking is more like it. Here, his deeply observant style suits the central thrust of the film, which is mainly set in a home for the elderly, where the big themes accompanying end-of-life scenarios are a natural outcome.

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Fri, May 22 2026

Acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film Sheep in the Box, which revolves around a young boy and his humanoid siblings, earned a four-minute ovation from the audience at Cannes 2026.jpg

There cannot be anything more timely than the premise of Hirokazu Koreeda’s Cannes Competition entry, ‘Sheep In The Box’, which deals with the evolving nature of grief in the age of AI: a couple who’ve lost their young son bring home a humanoid android, who looks and sounds exactly like their boy. It is when Kakeru ( Rimu Kuwaki) begins to show signs of thinking like their son that Otone ( Ayase Haruka) and Kensuke ( Daigo Yamamoto) start wondering about the larger implications of their actions. The question- does a machine have a soul– has been at the heart of such discussions for a long time.

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Fri, May 22 2026

Created by Tom Clancy, the character played by John Krasinski returns for a streaming feature that digs up old secrets and reunites Jack with his old friends

Three years after the Amazon Prime Video series on Jack Ryan ended, the character and actor John Krasinski are back by this time with a condensed version where the former CIA analyst slips briefly into civilian life. He’s pulled back into the spy world again with an adventure that takes him from Dubai to London, England. Of course the stakes are too high for Jack Ryan to walk away once more; Krasinski has co-written a thriller that feels familiar but doesn’t attempt anything radical. Directed by Andrew Bernstein, the spy drama Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War has a heart-pounding car chase in the middle of London that brings the thrills.

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Sun, May 17 2026

RJ Balaji’s ‘Karuppu’, starring Suriya and Trisha Krishnan, is a chaotic failure of storytelling and technique

The opening sequence of RJ Balaji’s Karuppu is all sparks and embers in a bichrome backdrop of red and black. It’s a nightmare in which a man gets assaulted by unknown assailants and a majestic rageful God descends to save him. The man, played by Indrans, jolts up in a train and looks at his daughter Binu (Anagha Ravi). The Malayali father and daughter are in Chennai for Binu’s surgery and are soon mugged on the road and stripped of their mode of payment for her treatment—jewelry. After this clear establishment of geography, Karuppu eschews all locational specifics to build a world where folk mythology clashes with a land of comical lawlessness. Only we aren’t sure if the exaggeration is intentional or otherwise.

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Sat, May 16 2026

If 'Mookuthi Amman' spoke about the scams of Godmen and their quasi-religious organisations, 'Karuppu' invokes another God to expose the scams within India’s judiciary.

Something about Karuppu tells me that something changed within RJ Balaji when he watched the first 20 minutes of Atlee’s Jawan. It’s the larger-than-life portion of the film in which a bandaged, mummified SRK emerges out of flames to reveal himself as God, nonetheless to a village that’s in desperate need of a saviour. GV Vishnu, who shot Jawan and Karuppu, has worked overtime to see if he can extend this vision through a full-length feature movie. Along with RJ Balaji and his team of writers, they’ve cracked open an idea that must have begun with this question: what if we transplant the mythical powers of a folk deity onto a modern-day superhero and see where it goes?

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Sat, May 16 2026

Sun, May 17 2026

Director Sameer Tewari’s Baapya is about the acceptance of an individual who undergoes a sex change surgery. The story revolves around Anil Borkar aka Anya (Girish Kulkarni), who is a fisherman residing in a village in the Konkan region. It has been 10 years since his divorce from Shailaja (Rajshri Deshpande), who now stays in Mumbai. Anya currently lives with his second wife Vishakha (Devika Daftardar), his son Sanjay aka Sanju (Aaryan Menghji) from his first marriage and two little daughters from his second. Vishakha loves Sanju as her own son. There comes a situation where Anya and Shailaja need to sign a few papers together regarding a property they co-owned before their divorce. For this, Shailaja needs to visit the village registrar office. When Shailaja arrives at the office on the given day, Anya, Sanju and others get the shock of their lives when they realize that she has undergone a sex change surgery and has now become Dr. Shailesh.

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Sat, May 16 2026

Sameer Tewari’s Marathi-language film stars Rajshri Deshpande as a trans man who visits his hometown years after a gender-affirming surgery

Baapya opens normally enough. A small Konkani village. A boisterous fisherman (Girish Kulkarni as Anya) is in debt. His teenage son (Aaryan Menghji as Sanju) is infatuated with a classmate. Anya’s lawyer proposes a land deal to fix the crisis. The catch: he needs the signature of his ex-wife, Shailaja (Rajshri Deshpande), who left the family years ago. His second wife and kids could do with the money. Both father and son do not look forward to seeing the woman who ‘deserted’ them, but they must. And at the half-hour mark of Baapya, they do. Except they don’t. Shailaja returns as a doctor, but also as a man. A gender reassignment surgery means that Shailaja is now Shailesh (Rajshri Deshpande), a trans man who was once a reluctant wife and mother. What follows is a bittersweet week in a community that grapples with the ‘stigma’ of this transition, even as Anya and his son resist their new reality on the conveyor belt to acceptance.

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Sat, May 16 2026

While Saif Ali Khan stands out with his compelling performance as Pawan, the film itself presents familiar narratives seen in other media portrayals.

Pulkit ventures into familiar territory — casteism in the hinterland, corruption in the system and a lone wolf battling it all — in his latest film Kartavya. The filmmaker, who prefers to remain mononymous, has touched upon all the above themes in his much-acclaimed 2024 film Bhakshak, one which had Bhumi Pednekar fighting against all odds as an intrepid journalist in small-town India who takes on the powers-that-be to uncover a girl trafficking racket. Bhakshak, which was clearly based on the Muzaffarpur shelter case, was backed by Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, as is Kartavya. Both are on Netflix.

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Sat, May 16 2026

Saif Ali Khan makes it easy to overlook the rough edges

Writer-director Pulkit has quietly become one of the most prolific filmmakers strutting around Hindi cinema these days. Red Chillies Entertainment’s blue-eyed boy has had four releases in the last two years, with two more currently in production. His finest work to date is his previous team-up with Netflix—2024’s Bhumi Pednekar-starrer Bhakshak. His latest, Kartavya, is a cousin of that film. Kartavya is not quite as concentrated, focused, and hardhitting as Bhakshak, but wrestles with similar themes of lone heroes taking a stand against injustice, systemic corruption, and the power structures that allow those at the top to prey on children.

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Sat, May 16 2026

Kartavya might have made more sense as a limited series, if it took its time with the characters. The world itself is ripe enough for exploration, and there’s just no doubt that Pulkit assembles a fascinating group of actors, willing to go that extra mile.

While watching Kartavya, one can spot a pattern in the films Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment (RCE) wants to champion. After Atul Sabharwal’s Class of 83 (2020), Shanker Raman’s Love Hostel (2021), Pulkit’s own debut, Bhakshak (2024) comes the upstart director’s latest release – a cop procedural set in a faux-Haryana town called Jhamli, centered around a notorious Godman, a murder and the village elders set on avenging their humiliation with corpses. Given how the space for the political film has been severely curtailed in the last few years, RCE’s films seem built around the socially vulnerable: orphaned girls, runaway lovers, kids imprisoned in service of Godmen. In a time when the studio could be making anything, props to RCE for picking these grim subjects and lending adequate gravitas to them.

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Sat, May 16 2026

दिसंबर, 2019 में आई मुदस्सर अज़ीज़ की ‘पति पत्नी और वो’ असल में 1978 में आई दिग्गज निर्देशक बी.आर. चोपड़ा की फिल्म ’पति पत्नी और वो’ का रीमेक थी। मूल फिल्म में संजीव कुमार, विद्या सिन्हा और रंजीता थे जबकि 2019 वाली फिल्म में कानपुर में सरकारी नौकरी कर रहा इंजीनियर कार्तिक आर्यन अपनी पत्नी भूमि पेढनेकर से छुपा कर अनन्या पांडेय से अफेयर कर रहा था। यह रीमेक ओरिजनल फिल्म की तरह क्लासिक भले ही नहीं थी लेकिन मसालेदार थी, सो कामयाब भी हुई। उस फिल्म के रिव्यू में मैंने लिखा था कि अब क्लासिक फिल्में किसे चाहिएं? जब दर्शक जंक-फूड से खुश हों तो फिल्म वाले भी क्यों ज़ोर लगाएं।

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Sat, May 16 2026

Hindi cinema still struggles to imagine emotional intimacy without romantic suspicion or possessiveness creeping in

Pati Patni Aur Woh Do belongs to that familiar subgenre of Hindi comedy where men create catastrophes through lies and cowardice, then expect applause for surviving the consequences. Ayushmann Khurrana plays Prajapati Pandey, a forest ranger introduced with the kind of exaggerated masculinity the film both mocks and indulges. When on a mission to trap a roaming leopard in Prayagraj, where Mudassar Aziz locates the chaos, Prajapati is described as a “leopard Casanova.”

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Fri, May 15 2026

Ayushmann Khurrana hams it up as a forest guard trapped in a fake-cheating tangle involving three women, one man and one clueless wolf

As a child, I used to enjoy flipping through pages of the Limca Book of Records. There were the weirdest categories: longest moustaches, walking on hands, typing with noses. I always imagined that I could some day qualify by doing an outlandish feat that nobody else thought of. You must be wondering where this is going; who starts a review like this? Wonder no further (like the film at hand). The closest I’ve gotten to being in that book is today. The feat: watching a two-hour “laugh riot” without a single expression on my face. Forget chuckling, I think I anti-chuckled: minus-humour, if that’s a thing. Which surely must be some kind of record. The problem is I’m not the only participant. From the reactions in a cinema hall every other Friday, there’s plenty of competition. And there are sub-categories: watching a comedy without watching it (eyes glued to the phone), maximum yawns in a screening, most planted viewers to elicit reactions. I don’t know if I’ll win. As a film critic, though, I’m a strong contender.

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