Thu, November 5 2026

Like me, if you are of a certain vintage, then Sunday mornings in the ’80s would carry one defining image — the family huddled together in front of the television, taking in every bit, beat and burst of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan. Modern lore stands testament to the fact that streets went empty and shops remained closed on 78 successive Sundays, with Ramayan notching a mammoth 82 per cent viewership that included a whopping 650 million overall eyeballs. If we have to put the numbers in context, the eight seasons of Game of Thrones — a globally-acclaimed small screen-big scale TV experience — have a total audience which is tangibly lesser, even with the advantage of being available for posterity, enabling it to be seen by fresh and repeat audiences alike even as you read this. A rerun of Ramayan aired during the Covid-19 lockdown brought in a wave of nostalgia, but also curious new viewers, with a particular episode reportedly garnering 77 million views alone. For many, it was a throwback to a time when simple storytelling and emotional resonance reigned supreme. For us, Ramayan was not a part of childhood; it was our childhood.

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Thu, November 5 2026

The unfortunate thing about this sprawling, synthetic epic is that it isn’t all that exciting to talk about

t’s no surprise that Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana (also known as ‘Namit Malhotra’s Ramayana’, if you’re interested in monstrously insecure territory-marking) lives entirely in service of its bigness and digital shininess. But perhaps the most unfortunate thing about Tiwari’s sprawling, synthetic epic is that it isn’t all that exciting to talk about. Even bad films, middling films, noble misfires and ugly cash grabs offer something to hold onto and engage with. But when the act of discussion itself feels unexciting, it’s never a good sign. There’s little here that surprises or stands out, let alone thrills or delights.

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Thu, November 5 2026

A grand, visually rich and emotionally engaging retelling of one of India's greatest epics. Nitesh Tiwari takes on an almost impossible challenge and largely pulls it off — spectacle, emotion and storytelling in near-perfect balance.

There are few stories as extraordinary, timeless and deeply rooted in Indian culture as the Ramayana. Bringing an epic of this scale to the big screen is no small task, especially when millions of people have their own emotional and spiritual connection with its characters. Director Nitesh Tiwari takes on that challenge with a film that is visually spectacular, emotionally engaging and technically accomplished. The first thing that strikes you about Ramayana is its sheer scale. With the visual effects expertise of the artists who have worked on films like The Odyssey, Dune and Interstellar, expectations are naturally high. Thankfully, the film delivers on that front. Forests, kingdoms, animals, gods, demons, rakshasas, mythical creatures and massive battle sequences come alive through some impressive visual effects. The world-building is ambitious, colourful and immersive. You can see the enormous effort that has gone into creating this cinematic universe.

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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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Sat, October 31 2026

This over-the-top comedy about a sexist playboy who pretends to be a woman to aid his love story is a red flag pretending to be a green flag

Think of the hundred ways in which a story about the transformation of a small-town playboy can happen. Think of the hundred ways in which the sexist hero learns his lesson. Love? Heartbreak? Big city humbling? Grief? Falling for a feminist? Falling for a gangster? Falling for Ravi Kishan reels? Trust Bollywood, however, to find the 101st way. Trust mainstream Hindi cinema to come up with a gimmick that pretends to be entertaining and edgy and self-aware but is unwittingly creepy and regressive. Trust it to provide an answer to a question nobody asked: What if Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi and Dream Girl had a baby that grew up to become a Tanu Weds Manu fan stumbling out of the bar?

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Sat, October 31 2026

Dharamshala Film Festival 2026 | Roshan Mathew and Divya Prabha front a delightfully unbound drama shuttling through films, their makers and characters

Meta movies are tricky. The balance between sincerity and showiness is a constant negotiation. To what point can the filmmaker hold up to view the skeins of their work? When does this authorial mischief skid over into an unanchored experiment? Among India’s most consistently surprising, striking filmmakers working today, Don Palathara’s latest, Ekadesham (The Uncertainty Principle), is a vivid, scrambled drama, flitting between the folds of life, art, ambition, wishfulness and failure. Celebrating its Asia premiere at the Dharamshala Film Festival, the film doesn’t always stay grounded but remains curious, exploratory and eager to gauge its ruptures. Movies charged by a spirit to peck at their own edges are always an exciting proposition. Even their shortcomings reflect daring.

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Sat, October 31 2026

More than two centuries after Jane Austen’s novel appeared, the Dashwood sisters, now essayed by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, remain the quintessential play of opposites—passion and reason

Jane Austen continues to speak vividly to our times. Her 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility met a brilliant, beloved match in Ang Lee’s 1995 benchmark adaptation with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. The challenge Georgia Oakley must have experienced while mounting her new adaptation is immense. But, for the most part, she conjures a drama of such freshness, buoyancy and emotional churn you can overlook the minor bumps, few jarring choices.

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Fri, October 30 2026

Georgia Oakley's Sense and Sensibility follows Elinor and Marianne Dashwood through love and loss. The adaptation finds fresh warmth in patient romance, familial bonds and Austen's humour.

In a world where dating apps, situationships and the dreaded “what are we?” conversation have become part of the romantic vocabulary, Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility feels like a gentle reminder that love can be beautiful when it takes its time. But this Jane Austen adaptation is not just about making yearning romantic again. It is also about sisterhood, the absurdities of society, the courage to feel deeply and the sheer joy of getting lost in a beautifully told story. Based on Austen’s beloved novel, the film follows Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esm Creed-Miles, two sisters who approach life and love rather differently. While Elinor keeps her emotions firmly in check, Marianne wears her heart on her sleeve. Their differences make for some amusing exchanges, but it is their bond that gives the story its warmth.

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Fri, October 30 2026

Director Georgia Oakley refuses to romanticise Regency era in this grounded, subdued take on Austen.

The new adaptation of Sense & Sensibility offers a gloomier, grimmer take on Jane Austen’s classic tale of two sisters, their contrasting perspectives on love and heartbreak, and their struggle to navigate life, financial uncertainty and rigid social hierarchies in 19th-century England. It is fascinating to see how two sisters perceive love in their own distinct ways. One believes in restraint, the other in revelation. “We have neither of us anything to tell; you, because you do not communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing.” The older Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and younger Marianne Dashwood (Esmé Creed-Miles) embody the central philosophical conflict between Sense (rationality and restraint) and Sensibility (emotion and openness). Their contrasting attitudes towards emotional reserve, understanding and the expression of love shape their individual journeys, their sisterly bond and Austen’s larger commentary on women’s survival in a society that leaves them with little agency.

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Sat, October 31 2026

Trivikram revisits familiar territory with a story built around Venkatesh’s family-man image, delivering entertaining twists before the narrative loses its way

In the Telugu film Aadarsha Kutumbam: House No. 47, the leading man (Venkatesh) acknowledges the age gap, in fact a generational gap, between him and his wife (Srinidhi Shetty). It is more than a passing reference, with several dialogues returning to the subject. Some of Venkatesh’s recent films have also acknowledged the age difference between him and his leading ladies, even if only in passing. What sets this film apart, marking his reunion with writer-director Trivikram Srinivas after more than two decades, is a later reveal that puts their relationship in context, explaining how the two characters crossed paths. It gives the audience just enough to draw their own conclusions while keeping them entertained with the comedy and suspense.

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Sat, October 31 2026

Meethe Mein Kya Hai's pursuit of happiness and finding joy in the little things exudes the emotionality of a greeting card, not life.

You know how the Hallmark holiday movies are designed to fill its target audience of sentimental fools with a warm fuzzy feeling? Meethe Mein Kya Hai is a bit like that. Set against the backdrop of Diwali, its slice-of-life enthusiasm aims for a low key charm. The problem is, only the low key bit registers. First-time director Radhika Bansal’s drama, centred around a family reunion, is about nothing in particular except follies and foibles of its folk unraveling against the festival of lights. Hosting this annual gathering at her sprawling Lucknow bungalow is the head of the Rastogi family (Rohini Hattangadi) even as her children, their partners and grandchildren lounge about devouring mathris with pickle, dissing pesky uncles and aunts while platters full of samosa, kachori and chai are slipped into the frames to lay bare its snack over storytelling momentum.

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Fri, October 30 2026

दिवाली के त्योहार को केंद्र में रखकर बुनी यह हल्की-फुल्की फिल्म खोने के दर्द, अपनों के साथ और परिवार की अहमियत पर जोर देती है।

वो कहावत है न कि सुख-दुख में परिवार और अपने ही साथ देते हैं। लेखिका-निर्देशिका राधिका बंसल की डेब्यू फिल्म ‘मीठे में क्या है’ इसी एहसास को और पुख्ता करती है। दिवाली के त्योहार को केंद्र में रखकर बुनी यह हल्की-फुल्की फिल्म खोने के दर्द, अपनों के साथ और परिवार की अहमियत पर जोर देती है। कहानी जय (ऋ‍त्विक भौमिक) और उसकी हंसती-खेलती फैमिली की है। जय दो साल पहले गुजर चुकी पत्नी तारा (कनिका कपूर) को खोने के गम से उबर नहीं पा रहा है। वह सब कुछ बेचकर विदेश में बसने जा रहा है, पर तभी उसकी बहन सना (दलाई) बिना किसी को कुछ बताए करम (विक्रम बख्शी) से शादी कर लेती है। इसलिए, उसे दिवाली पर अपनी नानी (रोहिणी हट्टंगड़ी) के घर लखनऊ आना पड़ता है, जहां पूरा परिवार इकट्ठा है। अब दिवाली का त्‍योहार है। परिवार का री-यूनियन है। सना की शादी का सरप्राइज है। लेकिन बड़ा सवाल ये है कि पूरा घर इस पर कैसे रिएक्ट करता है? जय इन सबके बीच अपने दर्द से कैसे उबरता है? परिवार की इसी हल्की-फुल्की मस्ती, नोकझोंक, प्यार और अपनेपन को एकसाथ सजाकर परोसती है यह फिल्म।

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Fri, October 30 2026

Netflix's three-part documentary retraces Matthew Perry's life through family, friends and colleagues. Their memories reveal the private struggles behind his celebrated portrayal of Chandler Bing.

There is something particularly cruel about being remembered for making people laugh when your own life is anything but funny. Matthew Perry knew that contradiction all too well. For 10 years, as Chandler Bing on Friends, he made awkwardness charming, sarcasm endearing and vulnerability funny. Behind the character we continue to adore, however, was a man battling demons that fame, fortune and the love of millions could not defeat.

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