Category: Movie Review

Jathi Ratnalu director KV Anudeep’s latest film, Funky, is set in a bubble—the Telugu film industry, a world the filmmaker has immediate access to. The premise itself—where an emerging director falls for the daughter of an eminent producer—is a fictional take on the love story of industry couple, director Nag Ashwin and producer Priyanka Dutt (who are often referenced in the film).

The meta-backdrop provides the storyteller with a convenient excuse to drop truth bombs about the industry in the trademark sardonic humour he’s known for. Every second sequence in Funky is either populated by cameos—from producers Dil Raju to Naga Vamsi and director Harish Shankar—or filled with jargon specific to showbiz: pre-release events, location scouting, on-set drama, and gossip.

Komal (Vishwak Sen), a new director, is deemed a recipe for trouble on a film set. The budget of his film (also titled Funky) multiplies manifold over time, much to the stress of veteran producer Sudarshan (Naresh). When things spiral out of control, his daughter Chitra (Kayadu Lohar) steps in to salvage the project. After initial friction, Komal and Chitra fall for each other, though the romance is far from conventional.

Apart from the love story on set, subplots involving a goon-like financier, GK (Sampath), and Komal’s family (comprising his mother and a soon-to-be-married sister) keep the narrative busy. Funky tries to play with the common man’s curiosity regarding how the film industry operates, but Anudeep struggles to offer a fresh perspective or keep the narrative engaging.

When Komal’s film is on the verge of being shelved, he makes a ludicrous offer to Chitra: ‘Either fund the project or fall in love with me.’ The banner is named Manchi Productions, simply to further the pun of the producer always making ‘good’ (manchi) films. In another instance, a financier is so desperate to meet Jr NTR that he takes his family to a promotional event, packing a box of savouries and snacks for the star.

As the producer asks Komal to complete the final chunk of the film within one crore (rather than four crores), he assembles his resources to finish the work with minimal expense. He asks Chitra to share her costumes with the heroine, gets the producer to play a gangster, and ropes in his childhood friends as junior artistes. However, the screenplay runs out of ideas quickly and the comic punches become tiring.

There’s hardly any flow to the proceedings and the entire film plays out like an industry insider’s indulgent joke, denying the viewer any chance to relate to the backdrop. Chitra lacks even an ounce of personality; it is hard to understand why a woman of power would put up with a prankster like Komal. Even Komal’s character is derivative, modelled on the director’s off-screen persona and the leads of his previous films.

Surprisingly, in the film’s second hour, the narrative gathers brief momentum when the story sidesteps the industry drama to focus on Komal’s oddities in a domestic setup. The thread involving his sister’s marriage is particularly effective in its commentary on social obligations at events and provides a strong context for Komal’s vulnerabilities in expressing himself.

The film should have ideally centred on Chitra’s need for a partner who cares for his family and heeds their concerns. Komal is far more relatable as a family man dealing with two-faced relatives and naysayers during the marriage sequences than he is as a director. Funky’s most poignant scene is one where Komal bothers to explain to his mother how he is wired differently, yet means well.

The subplot involving the financier GK is the only segment that delivers bang for its buck, largely due to Sampath’s conviction and effective delivery. Otherwise, Vishwak Sen’s awkwardness in bringing meaning to a confused character is palpable. As the comedy runs out of fuel—which happens quite early—he looks largely clueless, barring that brief stretch in the second half.

Kayadu Lohar is denied anything substantial, reduced to a character with the soul of a fashion parade. Easwari Rao, despite a brief role, excels with her comic timing and brings reasonable emotional depth to her performance. Naresh is in crackling form, though his talents are underutilised. Jai Krishna, Pammi Sai, and Muralidhar Goud fail to register a strong impact.

The film offers no respite with Bheems Ceciroleo’s music; the flavourless songs are shabbily dropped in, appearing as temporary distractions from the emptiness of the plot. The background score is equally clumsy. The narrative is far from cohesive; most scenes lack continuity and appear to have been randomly strung together. Needless to say, every problem in the film boils down to bland, lazy writing.

It is high time Anudeep stopped placing the same bunch of goofy characters in different situations across all his films and made a genuine effort to deliver something fresh. While his previous release Prince (which misfired at the box office) was a fairly watchable fare, Funky is his weakest work to date. It is simply too laidback to even try.

Published – February 13, 2026 04:14 pm IST

In the middle of ‘O Romeo, Afshan, the revenge-filled girl from a rich music background, tells Ustara, the razor-wielding contract killer of the Mumbai underworld, that she is from Muzaffarnagar, but her gharana is Gwalior. Ustara responds as if his home is Lucknow, but his gharana is Mumbai. The conversation is writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj’s way of reminding us that his home is Bollywood street, but his gharana is Shakespearana.

Imagine the doomed passion and fatal devotion of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet were stripped of Verona’s balconies and transplanted into the blood-soaked shores of Mumbai’s underworld, with our Romeo dancing to Gulzar’s lines ‘Neeche Paan Ki Dukan Upar Julie ka Makaan’ and slashing like a product of Quentin Tarantino.

O’ Romeo isn’t a literal adaptation of the Bard. Instead, it borrows the emotional architecture – the helpless surrender to love amid inevitable destruction. It grafts it onto the saga of gangster Hussain Ustara (a volatile, charismatic anti-hero played by Shahid Kapur), drawn from a chapter in Hussain Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai.

What promises to be a gritty crime thriller gradually reveals itself as Bhardwaj’s personal excavation of the twin impulses he has grappled with throughout his career: incandescent love and unflinching violence.

A womaniser, Romeo has no shortage of shapely bodies, but he falls head over heels for a noble soul, Afshan (Tripti Dimri gets to showcase her acting chops), who is struggling to come to terms with a personal loss. He is tired of doing the bidding of intelligence officer Khan (Nana Patekar); she is determined to settle scores with the killers of her love (Vikrant Massey). In the ruthless hitman, she sees hope.

As they join hands, sparks fly, but Bharadwaj leaves the pot simmering for far too long to hold our interest. Early in the film, it becomes palpable that it is only structured like a classic Bhardwaj; it doesn’t feel like one. The tangible chaos of Kaminey or the hair-raising conflict of Haider is sorely missing. The poetry provokes thought, but the prose doesn’t lead to emotional payoffs. Despite earnest performances, the motivations don’t add up, the leaps of faith don’t land, and the pathos doesn’t seep through the screen.

It turns out to be a showreel of Shahid Kapur’s range where he gets to play out emotional and action set pieces with Tripti. Shahid’s entry is electric, and his screen presence is magnetic. In the so-called item number with Disha Patani, Shahid turns out to be the pièce de résistance. His abrasive chemistry with Patekar as the whimsical Khan provides some chuckle-worthy moments.

But the eternal romantic in rage is once again let down by a predictable script and an uneven character arc in a wavering narrative. It seems there is nothing left to stir in the pot of stories of the Mumbai underworld. It is the same old story of a gangster working for the intelligence agencies to hunt down his previous gang lord, Jalal (Avinash Tiwary), who has become a terrorist after the Babri mosque demolition. The ferocious Jalal holds Ustara responsible for the damage to his personal life.

One can gauge the shades of Hussain Ustara and Dawood Ibrahim in Romeo and Jala, but in the Sajid Nadiawala production, the detailing and texture have been flattened or compromised to achieve scale and reach. The reliable Tiwary growls, but eventually he turns out to be a paper tiger scratching his feet in the Spanish bull ring, and Tamannah Bhatia gets reduced to a well-meaning showpiece.

ALSO READ: ‘Kohrra’ Season 2 series review: Mona Singh pierces through the mist of motives in this intriguing police procedural

The wandering storytelling ensures that Bhardwaj’s signature flourishes feel self-indulgent and misplaced. The massy action doesn’t blend with arthouse pretensions. There are isolated moments where you admire Bhardwaj’s visceral charm and biting turn of phrase, but for the most part of this 179-minute emotional exercise, you remain a distant spectator of the proceedings on the screen.

As always, there are plenty of oddball characters that dot the Bhardwaj’s screenplay. Rahul Deshpande impresses as a thumri-singing corrupt police officer; Hussain Dalal proves to be a solid sidekick with several one-liners, and the good old Farida Jalal gets to have some wicked fun. In between, Guru Gulzar comes up with his unmistakable poetry with lines like saans bhi dubli lagti hai, halka halka fever hai, hitting home, but the fever never gets to the nerves, as ‘O Romeo doesn’t deliver the emotional or narrative punch its setup promises.

O Romeo is currently running in theatres

Published – February 13, 2026 06:51 pm IST

“I wilted every time I saw a crop wither,” said renowned Tamil saint and philosopher Ramalinga Swamigal, or ‘Vallalar’ as he is popularly known. This resounding statement is a part of Vallalar’s Jeevakarunyam philosophy, which speaks about the need to ‘see god in all living things.’ This torch of humanity is also the seed of writer-director Raju Murugan’s latest Tamil film, My Lord, a work of social commentary on the pivotal need for affordable healthcare for all in India, and how the corrupt wouldn’t hesitate to even feed on the poor’s flesh. One fine day in Manapparai, Kovilpatti, Vallalar devotee Thirunavukkarasu finds a young boy named Muthu Chirpi picking at scraps for food. He takes him in and raises him as his own, along with his daughter, Susheela, and other destitutes under his care. Little would he know that when Muthu and Susheela grew up, they would fight through unspeakable afflictions to light Jeevakarunyam like a wildfire. An assured mix of social satire and political commentary, My Lord has the best of Raju Murugan we know, but it also hints at where he has always fallen short.

How My Lord introduces many of its characters either piques your interest with its irony or leaves you in stitches. A pious and religious man from a low-income household, with a stitch across his abdomen, leaves for work, where he would feed off the needs of the helpless and coerce them into selling off their kidneys. Meanwhile, a powerful Central Minister, Sujatha Mohan (Asha Sarath), who has all the power and money at her disposal, suffers since there aren’t many kidney donors who match her unique H/H blood group. She is forced to measure even the water she consumes every day. Surely, she can ask her two children to donate a kidney, right? Raju Murugan compels you to sit right up when Sujatha tells us of the venom she has fed into the minds of her two children — details here are better left unsaid. Meanwhile, Sujatha’s minions return with the findings of two possible donors whose blood group matches hers: a poor woman in Bihar, and Muthu Chirpi (Sasikumar), a man from Kovilpatti.

When we first meet Muthu, he is a dead body — a corpse that wakes up and belts out a dance to cause a stir at a nearby political gathering. It’s a theatrical display to seek justice for the bizarre cruelty that he and his wife, Susheela (Chaithra Achar), have been subjected to — the government has somehow issued two death certificates in their names. With the help of a local journalist named Na Kathirvelan (Somasundaram), Muthu is attempting to gain the attention of the powers that be, not only to solve his problem, but also shed light on how the system is a vortex that plunders and leeches off the helpless for the benefit of the privileged. What happened to Muthu and Susheela, and the bridge that connects Muthu to Sujatha and to the organ broker, forms the rest of the story. From this summary, you might perceive a predictable story about organ trafficking, and though My Lord is a film that tackles organ thievery, the film we end up getting is anything but straightforward.

In fact, you begin to wonder if the screenplay has taken on a bit more than it can chew, but to the credit of Raju Murugan and editor Sathyaraj Natarajan, My Lord never skips a beat in explaining the complicated path through which the conflict is established and resolved. Every dialogue is sharp, and every move is pronounced. There are no unnecessary red herrings to throw you off. What’s compelling to note is how Raju Murugan refrains from making it just a gritty, hard-hitting social drama, despite having all the ingredients for it. Instead, he has, applaudably again, chosen to commercialise this story in two ways — by imbuing some cerebral humour to make it a social satire, and by making it a cat-and-mouse thriller in the later stages of the film. Without a doubt, he excels in the former.

From colourful character designs — like a cricket fanatic money lender or Krishnakumar (Ramkumar Prasanna), Sujatha’s lackey who goes to any lengths to achieve his goals — to astute dialogues, like one that goes “What does a man without money have to do at a government office?”, My Lord is filled with witty, ironical, and sharp pokes at The Man and all his comical misdeeds. Many fragments of ideas spread throughout the film, too compel your attention — be it the value of an identity card in today’s world, the need for medical awareness among the common people, or how social media is a manipulative tool that always benefits the privileged. As has been the case in most of Raju Murugan’s films, the actors give their all, from Sasikumar and Chaithra to those playing secondary characters, like Somasundaram and Ramkumar.

Where My Lord does lose the mark is when the cat-and-mouse begins. If three-fourths of My Lord strongly reminds you of the sting of Raju’s acclaimed Joker, the entire pre-climax stretch briefly brought back the demons of Japan, of how Raju struggled to commercialise a social satire. The sequence, which begins at a hospital and ends in a courtroom, feels extremely contrived. The staging and execution feel heavy-handed, and a film like My Lord deserved a better, more realistic courtroom scene. But even here, what shines through is Raju’s noble intention. What Kathirvelan and Muthu’s counsel (played by Gopi Nainar) argue is something that’s spoken for all of us.

At one point, when Muthu and Susheela’s medical debt rises and rises, I briefly pulled up a proverbial mirror — this was the situation of a man who chose to go to government hospitals or lower-rung private clinics, which are usually considered cost-effective. What about the lot of us who choose costlier facilities for ‘better quality’? And thus, if there’s a common leveller in the society we live in, it’s the fear that most of us are inches away from a catastrophic plunge into hell. We can choose to be a Sujatha, or her self-centred children, her lapdog Krishnakumar, the money lender, or the organ broker. But Raju, through this compelling tale, reminds us that in the game The Man has designed for us, we may not be a Vallalar, but we can be a common human being with a heart. We can be a ‘muthu chirpi.’ Someone as rare as a pearl sculptor.

My Lord is currently running in theatres

Published – February 13, 2026 07:43 pm IST

A still from Pennum Porattum.
| Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Until the early 90s, Chennai (then Madras) served as a common backdrop for Telugu films. However, the subsequent industry shift to Hyderabad gradually altered the geographical canvas of its stories. Despite Chennai remaining a preferred destination for the Telugu community in nearby regions of Andhra Pradesh for livelihood for years, modern-day filmmakers have seldom explored their enduring connection with the city through a contemporary lens.

Ashwin Chandrasekar’s directorial debut, Couple Friendly, offers a refreshing callback to Chennai, following two 20-somethings who move from their hometowns to the metropolis to rebuild their lives on their own terms.

Siva (Santosh Soban) is stifled by his conservative family in Nellore while struggling to make a career in interior design. His retired father exerts constant pressure on him to find his footing. For a momentary escape, Siva shifts to Chennai for an internship. Meanwhile, Chittoor-based Mithra (Manasa Varanasi) is still awaiting her job offer letter in Chennai and is close to returning home to marry a man of her father’s choice.

In an unlikely turn of events, Siva and Mithra turn roommates when their lives have hit rock bottom. Weathering a breakup, Siva has barely paid his rent for months, staring into the abyss while he sleeps on terraces at night, navigating loneliness and rejection on a daily basis. An optimistic Mithra gives a new direction to his life, even as she tastes little luck with her own career.

In the first hour, the film unfolds as a typical slice-of-life romance, barely prepping the audience for what comes next. The protagonists find solace in each other’s company as their professional and personal lives merge. The love story evolves through well-crafted situations. Siva and Mithra’s little nothings over calls, growing intimacy while residing in the same room, are innovatively visualised.

The duo gradually navigates the highs and lows of a live-in relationship, changing priorities, which also result in a few ego clashes. While the lead couple is rebellious in their own right, doing away with societal norms, the film effectively contrasts their romance with another unconventional relationship — Prithi, a friend of Mithra who falls for a much older man.

Throughout, Couple Friendly neatly integrates Tamil into the dialogue of the Telugu-speaking leads — a necessity for their survival in the city. The casting of Tamil actors Livingston and Yogi Babu further lends authenticity to the setting. The film’s chirpy, vibrant vibe extends into the early portions of the post-intermission stretch too, where the parental clashes take centre stage.

All of this changes with a drastic revelation that prompts a sudden tonal shift in the storytelling, utilising a trope common in many epic romances (including the recent Hindi film Saiyaara). Though you remain unsure if a simple, intimate film of this nature can handle a heavy plot turn, the director puts such speculation to rest with the sheer tenderness of the storytelling.

While an element of predictability sets in during the final segments and the proceedings lean into melodrama, the minimalism in the execution and the striking visuals more than make up for it. The dialogues rarely go overboard or overstates the obvious. The equation between Siva and his brother, and his sister-in-law’s tryst with IVF, adds significant value to the narrative, subtly foreshadowing the events in the couple’s lives.

Considerable effort goes into establishing Chennai as an invisible witness to their journeys. Cinematographer Dinesh Purushothaman captures the city through rain-soaked muddy streets, busy roads, and popular landmarks without making them feel touristy, alongside panoramic views from the terraces, tracing the couple’s mundane realities.

Its free-spirited vibe is enhanced by Aditya Ravindran’s spectacular, breezy soundtrack. The album features several ballads, soothing melodies, complementing the story’s inward tone and its changing contours through an eclectic mix of voices — Pradeep Kumar, Kapil Kapilan, Sanjith Hegde, Shakthishree Gopalan and Santhosh Narayanan, among a few.

The seamless blend of music, montages and dialogues contributes to the rich sensory experience. Through Santosh Soban, you appreciate Siva’s gradual transformation from a boyish youth to a responsible man. The actor’s three-year-long wait for a worthy lead role finally pays off, and you notice how well he has come of age with the poise, the diction and his ability to hold dramatic scenes.

Manasa Varanasi is the yin to his yang, playing an ambitious modern girl with a quiet strength — showcasing both Mithra’s resilience and vulnerabilities with an adept mix of assurance and innocence. Both leads share a terrific on-screen camaraderie that brings a palpable believability to their companionship, a testament to the film’s mature relationship dynamics.

Goparaju Ramana and Rajeev Kanakala exhibit flair with the Nellore and Chittoor slangs, cast as caring yet stubborn fathers who take time to embrace change. Livingston and Yogi Babu pack a punch with their brief yet impactful cameos, while Sriranjani is highly effective as a mother caught between her husband and daughter’s banter.

Couple Friendly may not boast a novel plot, but its narrative rhythm is refreshingly mature and modern. It treats both its protagonists as equals and values the minutiae of their lives as well as the big dreams. The key to the film’s impact is in the timing of the central conflict and the dignity with which it handles it.

Ashwin Chandrasekar’s film proves it is possible to make an engaging mainstream romance saga that speaks to the masses without diluting the story.

Published – February 14, 2026 10:23 am IST