Ayaan Paul Chowdhury
The Hindu
Disclosure Day
2026 · The Hindu
At 79, returning to stories of the Third Kind with Disclosure Day, Spielberg is still making films in an industry shaped by his own successes, but the remarkable thing is that this beloved unc has still got the sauce. Even now, he grasps that intangible something many contemporary event movies seem to have forgotten: that cinema is at its most powerful when a room full of strangers briefly share the same wide-eyed astonishment.
The Bride!
2026 · The Hindu
Yet, the experience of watching it involves a constant awareness of its fragility, because every new flourish is perched perilously on the edge of collapse, and the film repeatedly proves how difficult it is to sustain such a baroque assemblage without the seams giving way and the underlying machinery spilling into view. Despite these strengths, the film eventually becomes exhausting, partly because the script piles ideological declarations, grotesque violence, and flamboyant spectacle into a restless swirl that rarely clarifies its own intentions.
Project Hail Mary
2026 · The Hindu
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made another bright, buoyant, summer blockbuster that relishes in its nerdy delights and reminds us why going to the movies will always slap. Gosling understands this calibration instinctively, shaping Grace as a man devoid of any semblance of heroic resolve, defined instead by a series of small, often reluctant choices that accumulate into something resembling courage.
Mortal Kombat II
2026 · The Hindu
The problem is that the film keeps treating its enormous roster like unlockable skins. Several performances suffer because the film's fidelity to the game's dense lore makes a majority of the non-fights feel like skippable cutscenes. But the overall action produces mixed results despite finally delivering the tournament structure audiences expected five years ago.
Backrooms
2026 · The Hindu
What follows is one of the most persuasive acts of spatial horror I can remember seeing in years. Parsons and production designer Danny Vermette conceive the notoriously inconceivable Backrooms as a world assembled from half-remembered instructions about reality.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
2025 · The Hindu
Ben Hania makes sure of that. That tension is what makes The Voice of Hind Rajab such a ruthlessly effective piece of filmmaking. Far too much time and effort has been spent on filmmakers congratulating themselves for telling us stories about fictional suffering and fictional injustice to recognise the rarity of somebody forcing us to confront one of the most defining atrocities of our time.