Poulomi Das
TheFederal
Backrooms
2026 · TheFederal
Kane Parsons builds the year's most convincing horror maze. The 20-year-old behind the viral YouTube series turns his liminal-space nightmare into a feature that is cannier and lonelier than its origins.
The Odyssey
2026 · TheFederal
Not everything holds. There are a few mythological set pieces that arrive compressed to the point of feeling like footnotes and a couple of stretches do feel inert. In fact, the modern, unadorned dialogue is bound to garner split reactions.
Main Vaapas Aaunga
2026 · TheFederal
Diljit Dosanjh and Naseeruddin Shah lead this bittersweet study of displacement. There is no nation here, only people. So the violence arrives not from one community but from history behaving like an uncontrollable force.
One Night Only
2026 · TheFederal
Will Gluck's film imagines an America where premarital sex has been outlawed, except for a government-sanctioned 12-hour window once a year. But its strangest choice is not that it imagines a prudish America — it's that Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro's chemistry has nowhere to go in this setup.
Babita Singh Reporting
2026 · TheFederal
Babita Singh Reporting is both an anomaly and a new direction forward for police procedurals, which have come to follow a formulaic pattern. The film serves as an effective character study of female subservience within the system.