Debanjan Dhar

What does it take to plough on even in the face of overwhelming opposition? In Ben Rekhi’s Last Man In Tower, the retired schoolteacher, Yogesh Mishra/Masterji (Manoj Bajpayee), finds himself sanded into a corner. He had supporters but the small number dwindled. This adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s eponymous 2011 novel spins around Mumbai’s Vishram apartment block. It’s one of the many old buildings that real-estate hawks have their eyes on as redevelopment razes the country. Masterji is the polar opposite of the smarmy builder, Dharmen Shah (Boman Irani), who insists everything in Mumbai is for sale. There are still some who fight tooth and nail to preserve those places that are receptacles of their memories, a record of their lives’ intimate tapestries.

It’s a given that Mirzapur: The Movie would be held up against the eponymous series for comparison. The judgement is inevitable. A movie foray promises scale and spectacle. Director Gurmmeet Singh, who has helmed several episodes of the show, directs with efficiency and Puneet Krishna’s screenplay keeps the action buzzing. The crime drama branches out from the Uttar Pradesh terrain, stretching into Jaisalmer’s sands. A new rival to Mirzapur’s king, Kaleen Bhaiya (Pankaj Tripathi), intrudes. As Kaleen himself confesses in the opening, whoever occupies the throne gets locked into a constant relationship with death. Power operates through fear. The film is slashed open with Kaleen held captive. It then unravels to show how he got to that point. It must be noted, though, that this film is situated at a moment in the franchise far preceding the slew of major deaths.

Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups stomps to theatres with a busload of expectations and curiosity. The pairing of a distinctive filmmaker like Geetu Mohandas, who can twist and interrogate genres as she did in the wrenching Moothon (2019), and a superstar, Yash, is one of the most provocative bets to have surfaced in mainstream Indian cinema. It’s a great pity then Mohandas’ voice gets sanded under the crushing, loud antics of this blood-soaked saga around men, guns and guilt. There are stray glimpses that the filmmaker wants to say something about the nihilism of the violence that carry on from one generation to the next in a tired, self-defeating cycle. In a departure from genre staples, Mohandas also seeks to voice the intense self-loathing hidden underneath men on bloodthirsty rampages. However, Ujwal Kulkarni’s scattershot, frenzied edit constantly drains both poignance and any sustained mood.

Strange River is a rare gift of a film. This might be the closest cinema has come to approximating the unique headrush of queer teenage discovery. In his feature debut, Catalan writer-director Jaume Claret Muxart goes spare on dialogue and evokes patterns of thought, imaginative vision and tender melancholy. There’s a deep fragility so central to puberty which the director has precisely gauged. It’s that phase when feelings and fancies can shape up to be seismic. Everything feels bottomless, churning. The film maps this intensity against a drifting slipstream of recognition, denial and growth. Pain is inescapable as the callow heart seeks to scamper away and forge its own detour. Strange River builds an emotional, internal space by its own dream logic and lures you in without presupposing cues or needless connective filaments. Here’s a filmmaker inviting you to be one with his work’s peculiar, subliminal impulses even while it constantly evades a firm grasp.

The End Of Oak Street is the most fun I’ve had in a theatre this year. David Robert Mitchell’s dino fare brings ample suspense and heart into the vestiges of blockbuster commercial cinema trappings. It’s strewn with sequences that set my pulse racing and had me almost on the brink of whistles. Honestly, I have to scratch my memory real hard to even recall when a mainstream film got me jiving to its wavelength from the get go and refused to loosen the shackles. The End Of Oak Street is the definition of a proper, thrilling communal experience to get a film that exults in splendidly orchestrated moments. My regret is the theatre was much too empty to feel the ripples bounce across the breadth of the audience. Where are the moviegoers? You have been summoned.

Premiering in main competition at the Locarno Film Festival 2026, Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho’s The Riverbank (A Margem do Rio) pulses with dark, tropical atmosphere, a heated, shivering bundle of racy desire and cavernous menace. It buzzes with this strange, scary, sinister and sensuous personality of its own, aware of the subterranean networks of power undergirding desire. The filmmakers thrust us in Brazil’s Recife, a city recently on vivid display in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes winner and Oscar-nominated breakout, The Secret Agent. Farias himself co-edited the Wagner Moura starrer that took a heady dive into Recife’s past. The Riverbank situates Recife in a stealthy stream of intrigue, deception and intoxicating seduction.

In Homi Adajania’s Cocktail 2, Shahid Kapoor’s loyal, nice Kunal falls into the snare his long-term partner, Diya (Rashmika Mandanna) sets. It got on her nerves when he joked with their friends that she would never be able to find out if he cheated on her. This lodges in her head and she cannot shake it off, in spite of his reassurances. She gets paranoid about his infidelity which is telegraphed in a distasteful montage designed to be comic. When the couple arrives in Sicily for a vacation, an opportunity presents itself. Diya’s school friend, Ally (Kriti Sanon), a wild spirit, blasts in as a gale through the tameness, force of habit which Diya and Kunal’s relationship had sloughed into. She has no boundaries, which the couple dutifully sticks to.