Fri, March 6 2026

Directed by Hussai Sha Kiran, Mrithyunjay is an investigative thriller that relies on the intellect of the hero and villain. While there are interesting ideas in the script, the film fails to explore its full potential.

Investigative thrillers have been done to death in cinema. They hit screens every week, follow familiar beats, and more often than not, blur into each other. The rare ones that stand apart share one quality — they never take the audience for granted. They treat viewers as intelligent, engaged participants in the puzzle rather than passive observers waiting to be told the answer. The question Mrithyunjay raises from the outset is a simple one: does it earn its place among those films?

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Fri, March 6 2026

Vineet Kumar Singh is rightly the star of the show, even as his character keeps protesting against his face being the prime draw on posters, etc.

To be honest, I went into this show because of Vineet Kumar Singh, In and As Alakh Pandey, who is world-famous as Physics Wallah, the teacher whose one-point agenda was to teach, baaki sab baad mein. Directed by Pratish Mehta, and written by Abhishek Yadav, Vernaali, Sandeep Singh Rawat, Hello Bachchon puts its love for Physics front and centre. In these times, when the importance of scientific temperament itself is under such pressure, to have a series outline its beliefs so clearly is heartening.

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Fri, March 6 2026

Fri, March 6 2026

The TVF series flattens and buries the real-life story of a clutter-breaking Indian educator

Hello Bachhon (“Hello Children”) is the perfect example of how not to tell a real-life story. It’s also the perfect example of how not to tell a story. And how not to tell. And just how not to. Based on the life of Physics Wallah (PW) cofounder, YouTuber and EdTech star Alakh Pandey, the TVF-created series unfolds like a 5-episode-long corporate video that, at its best, becomes an unwitting Shark Tank parody. Why not just make a branded documentary with fictional recreations instead of a chatbot-coded dramatisation with zero curiosity and project-graded nuance? What is the point of using fiction when every line sounds like a motivational quote, every character sounds like a brown-washed hologram, every scene looks like a live-action brochure, every student storyline feels like a reality-show montage, every exchange has the depth of an Amar-Chitra-Katha-esque moral lesson, and every note looks designed to romanticise middle-Indian aspiration and the predatory education empire? I can safely say that the Hindi biographical drama has reached its nadir with Hello Bacchon, a series I could’ve watched on mute and been none the wiser. Sincerity has never felt so insincere.

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Fri, March 6 2026

After a gripping, vividly tense buildup, director Suresh Triveni resorts to familiar tropes of larger-than-life heroism, undermining the film’s grounded promise

The rank of Subedaar evokes humble authority in the Hindi heartland. As the army’s backbone, these quiet mainstays, often drawn from the subaltern classes, are more respected than idolised. Anil Kapoor’s status in Hindi cinema is similarly earned. The analogy finds shape in director Suresh Triveni’s emotionally charged action drama, with the repurposed folksy number “Balam Subedaar” underlining the title’s regional draw, where a culture of entitlement is pervasive.

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Fri, March 6 2026

Anil Kapoor shines in Subedaar, a film with uneven storytelling.

Suresh Triveni’s Subedaar is an odd film. The Amazon Prime Video film, starring Anil Kapoor, wants to be mass in the streets and class in the sheets. The result is a curious, uneven ride. You can see the vision behind Suresh’s film: to subvert, toy with, and use the packaging and trappings of masala action cinema to examine something more raw and primal. But the result risks being neither here nor there, an action drama that struggles to thrill nor mount a moody character study. Subedaar Arjun Maurya (a fierce Anil Kapoor) is a retired army officer who’s recently returned home to an unnamed North Indian town. Arjun is the gruff rebel desperately in search of a cause. The recent passing of his wife (Khushbu Sundar) forces Arjun into retirement after 25 years in the Army. It also forces him to find his footing with Shyama, the daughter he was barely around for (a solid Radhika Madan).

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Fri, March 6 2026

Suresh Triveni's ‘Subedaar’ stars Anil Kapoor as a former army man who takes on the sadistic sand mafia

Throughout Subedaar, various characters tell retired army man Arjun Maurya (Anil Kapoor) that he’s no longer on the border. Sometimes it’s a threat, sometimes a plea, but the implication is the same: there are rules to that kind of warfare, whereas the battles waged in his small north Indian hometown are cruel and illogical. “Forget you were in the army,” his friend Prabhakar (Saurabh Shukla) urges him. “Welcome to real life.” But Arjun is spiralling in his grief and spoiling for a fight. From the moment we lay eyes on Arjun’s shiny new red Gypsy, we know it’ll be John Wick’s dog. The car symbolises his memory of his wife, who died in an accident while he was away on duty. So, when bratty gangster Prince (Aditya Rawal) takes offense to the veteran’s gruff manner and gets his thugs to trash the vehicle, Arjun snaps. A lot of this is grief turned to rage, but there’s also some relief. The car is a reminder of how he neglected his family for years and wasn’t around for his wife’s final moments. Instead of mending relationships with his grieving, resentful daughter, Shyama (Radhika Madan), isn’t it easier to take on the local sand mafia?

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Fri, March 6 2026

Nivedhithaa Sathish holds it all in place as the guilt-ridden protagonist, struggling to deal with multiple heartbreaks.

There are a hundred metaphors to choose from in Oh Butterfly; even the “butterfly” in the film’s title is open to multiple interpretations. For one, you may think of Gowri (Nivedhithaa Sathish) as the titular butterfly as she struggles through the fag end of her metamorphosis. Her cocoon is a trap laid out by her mind because she believes she was responsible for her husband’s death. She lives in perennial guilt, fuelled by intrusive thoughts when we meet her for the first time. Right from a tennis ball to a kitchen knife, everyday household objects have the power to trigger something catastrophic in her. As the movie progresses, what we could be seeing in Gowri slowly emerges from this trap as she finally finds a way to fly away, primarily from her old self.

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Fri, March 6 2026

Varalaxmi Sarathkumar, in her directorial debut, falls short both as an actor and a storyteller

It is not often that women-led mainstream films find their way into theatres in Telugu cinema. When they do, they are mostly directed by men and turn out to be cautionary statements about social ills women confront on a daily basis. Though this is understandable given the crime rate against women and children, it also indicates how such films become a limiting portrait of the lives of women and seldom tap into the essence of their lives beyond victimhood. S Saraswathi, which marks actress Varalaxmi Sarathkumar’s directorial debut and is produced by her sister Pooja Sarathkumar, falls prey to this very trope where a woman’s story is largely equated with her suffering. Charting the journey of Lakshmi (Varalaxmi), who works as a nurse in a metropolis, the film is a thriller drama with a non-linear screenplay and the story nearly makes a case for revenge as a necessity.

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Fri, March 6 2026

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feminist reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein is both powerful and radical, though its ambition veers towards narrative incoherence.

It’s the season of gothic romance and yet another Frankenstein’s Monster adaptation, but this one occupies a space closer to Joker: Folie à Deux. Like Joker and Harley Quinn, it centres on two damaged beings who find solace in each other as they take on the world with vengeance. While this film echoes the tempo of Joker, themes of deep-seated trauma, male loneliness, and the muzzling of the female voice within a patriarchal society lie at the heart of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s bold and provocative universe. Feminist, punk, gothic, and violent yet deeply empathetic, the Bride mirrors the Joker’s anarchic spirit but carries a sharper, more self-aware edge. While the Joaquin Phoenix-Lady Gaga film leaned into shared madness through its operatic psychology, the Bride surpasses it in imaginative scope and theatrical boldness, embracing a more expansive, Broadway-infused narrative style.

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Fri, March 6 2026

Created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, the ensemble comedy led by Steve Carell is wickedly funny

After leaving The Office, Steve Carell has branched out as an actor with diverse projects such as Foxcatcher, The Morning Show, The Patient, and Four Seasons. His latest comedy series, Rooster, co-created by Shrinking and Ted Lasso’s Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, features the faculty and students of Ludlow College behaving very badly indeed, much to the amusement of audiences. The cringeworthy comedy will remind fans of Michael Scott, though this current character is more endearing. The original HBO series centers around an author, Greg Russo (Carell), who comes back into his daughter Katie’s life during a difficult period.

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Fri, March 6 2026

The fictional but thrilling origin story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes goes back in time to explore his early days and relationship with his complicated family.

After The Gentlemen and MobLand, Guy Ritchie turns his attention to Sherlock Holmes. The filmmaker has already directed two features on the Arthur Conan Doyle character with Robert Downey Jr as the Baker Street detective. Ritchie returns to Victorian England as the Amazon Prime Video series Young Sherlock looks at the origin story of Sherlock, with Hero Fiennes Tiffin playing the 19-year-old investigator. The web series is a mixture of Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes book series and the original Doyle detective. The result is an engaging, twisty mystery series about the young Sherlock that goes around the world to reveal how he got his start. The mostly British cast has a roaring good time, peeling back the layers of the murder at Oxford University, and viewers will have plenty of sleuthing to uncover as the series unveils some major shockers.

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Fri, March 6 2026

Saurabh Shukla’s sweet film stars Pankaj Kapur and Dimple Kapadia as an old couple going through a crisis of trust.

It’s comforting to watch something like Jab Khuli Khitaab. It’s a bit like going to a small circus in the age of curated theme parks. It’s clumsy at times, you can see the strings, some of the treatment is dated, but there’s an old-fashioned goodness seeping through its veins. Based on his play of the same name, Saurabh Shukla’s film opens with a 70-something man, Gopal Nautiyal (Pankaj Kapur), going about his morning routine with his wife Anusuya (Dimple Kapadia). He catches her up on the news, helps her get dressed, jokes around, and discusses their adult children who are now visiting them at their family home in the mountains. They’ve been together for ages. Except this is a one-way conversation: Anusuya has been in a coma for two years. He misses her; all she can do is listen. The story kicks into gear when Anusuya suddenly wakes up from her coma, and her husband’s unconditional care guilts her into confessing to an affair 50 years ago. The rest revolves around a mopey Gopal wanting a divorce, Anusuya resisting, even as they try to keep their ‘spat’ a secret in the busy household.

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Fri, March 6 2026

Most of us prefer to view great art as an act of magic: unexplainable, beyond the realms of reason, otherworldly, divine. We often speak of a landscape-altering movie or book like it’s conjured from nothing but fateful creativity and limitless vision. We perceive their creators as those who create; as those blessed with a little extra, almost as if they see worlds that we cannot. It’s not dissimilar from how we think of top athletes as supernatural beings. Terms like “gifted” and “immortal” are freely employed to describe record-breaking feats. Reframing talent as a cosmic value is the most traditional way of preserving the sanctity of ordinariness. We see them as extraordinary because it not only gives us something higher to trust in, it also absolves us from the complexities of being human. It’s easier to believe that they’re built superior so that we can reckon with our own regularity.

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Tue, March 3 2026

Chloé Zhao's ‘Hamnet’, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, is a tasteful but tentative study in grief

I first heard it about 15 minutes into the film, when Agnes tells the village tutor whom she likes, and who’s crazy for her, that she can read landscapes on his hand. “You saw a landscape?” he asks with a smile. “Mm hmm,” she replies. Later on, the tutor tells Agnes, whom he’s now married and has three children with, that he’s acquiring a house in Stratford for them. To this also she says, “Mm hmm.” Hamnet wants Shakespeare as a hook to hang its tragic story on. It wants a few details of his life. It wants a smattering of the plays. But it wants nothing to do with the language. I don’t know if they said ‘mm hmm’ in 16th century England; for all I know they said ‘uh oh’ and ‘uh uh’. But it feels inadequate. It’s a strange impulse, to want to make a film about someone who changed the way people speak, yet have barely any of that speech coursing through it.

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Sat, February 28 2026

Thu, March 5 2026

Accused, the tone-deaf “feminist” film on Netflix, is the equivalent of Neha Dhupia going “It’s her choice” on Roadies. We discuss the film’s utterly misguided defence of a serial harasser, groomer, and all-around toxic human being, and its baffling attempts to pass her off as “ambitious”. We also question the film’s understanding of sexual harassment as a concept, and disapprove of anybody trying to make a movie about false allegations in a post-#MeToo world. Additionally, we poke holes in the film’s central mystery, the decision to have not one but two eccentric detectives, and an irrational villain reveal that disregards the laws of the genre.

Mon, March 2 2026

Accused, the tone-deaf “feminist” film on Netflix, is the equivalent of Neha Dhupia going “It’s her choice” on Roadies. We discuss the film’s utterly misguided defence of a serial harasser, groomer, and all-around toxic human being, and its baffling attempts to pass her off as “ambitious”. We also question the film’s understanding of sexual harassment as a concept, and disapprove of anybody trying to make a movie about false allegations in a post-#MeToo world. Additionally, we poke holes in the film’s central mystery, the decision to have not one but two eccentric detectives, and an irrational villain reveal that disregards the laws of the genre.

Sun, March 1 2026

Days before Anubhuti Kashyap’s Accused dropped on Netflix, the director admitted that the film was made keeping in mind the audience and algorithm. Her words were a radical confession, one that freely used the “A” word and distilled an aesthetic that is increasingly becoming a norm in the streaming landscape. Algorithm filmmaking, bent on holding the audience’s attention hostage, has diverse symptoms, ranging from using stark colours, recurring expositions and, as Kashayap shared, the dire need to sustain tension (“I kept taking very specific notes and showing the film at different stages to different people — asking, were you feeling relaxed here? Were you getting out of the film at this point?” she told The Hollywood Reporter). Such interventions can result in assembly-line products, and Accused is the recent casualty.

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Thu, March 5 2026

Once again, we find ourselves watching a Kartik Aaryan movie and wondering why… We discuss Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri’s pointless travel vlog first half, which unexpectedly transforms into a combination of Baghban and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. We also discuss the film’s awkward projection of seemingly progressive values, which happens to be filtered through a deeply regressive lens. We conclude by wondering if Croatia even knows what it has gotten itself into by inviting the Kartik Aaryans of the world to visit.

Wed, February 25 2026

Once again, we find ourselves watching a Kartik Aaryan movie and wondering why… We discuss Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri’s pointless travel vlog first half, which unexpectedly transforms into a combination of Baghban and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. We also discuss the film’s awkward projection of seemingly progressive values, which happens to be filtered through a deeply regressive lens. We conclude by wondering if Croatia even knows what it has gotten itself into by inviting the Kartik Aaryans of the world to visit.

Sun, December 28 2025

Directed by Sameer Vidwans, the film Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri is proof that a film and it’s title can be overwhelmingly long. The title itself gives us adequate warning and feels like an endurance test, and the film faithfully lives up to it. By the midpoint, which feels like an eternity, one realizes that only half of the title has been addressed.

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