Ayaan Paul Chowdhury
The Hindu
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
2026 · The Hindu
With Spider-Man: Brand New Day, helmed by Short Term 12 and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton, the studio finally seems to have come to terms with the exhaustion from multiversal slop. Holland delivers his richest performance since joining the MCU because the writing finally retires Peter from his long-running side hustle as Kevin Feige's most reliable diplomatic envoy between competing corners of the Marvel Universe, and restores him to the centre of his own story. That alone feels refreshingly old-fashioned.
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.
Evil Dead Burn
2026 · The Hindu
Vaniček's filmmaking nevertheless delivers several fantastic sequences that immediately justify why this franchise remains a proving ground for ambitious horror directors... But for reasons unknown, Jane O'Kane builds all these elaborate prosthetics and practical effects only for the colour grade to file them under fifty shades of damp concrete. Several digital effects during the closing confrontation similarly robs us of those previous tactile pleasures.
The Odyssey
2026 · The Hindu
it is difficult to imagine a filmmaker better equipped to shoulder Homer's poem into the 21st century. But his adaptation of the age-old homecoming epic does something almost perverse for his most loyal bhakts, peeling away much of the conceptual self-regard that has defined most of his work and discovering a version of himself that feels calmer, more reflective and surprisingly modest.
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.
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.
Insidious: Out of the Further
2026 · The Hindu · Aug 2026
Despite the Blumhouse-Atomic Monster pedigree, you probably shouldn't be walking into the sixth Insidious expecting something as finely calibrated as Obsession or Backrooms. Much of the film is drenched in that familiar silver-blue grading and persistent 'Further Fog', flattening every frame with the same refrigerated gloom.
The End of Oak Street
2026 · The Hindu · Aug 2026
Bloody, goofy, nostalgic and gloriously ridiculous, The End of Oak Street knows that the cinema can still be a place where hundreds of strangers collectively lose their minds over a dinosaur eating someone. It's a fitting way to close out the summer.