We recommend: The best new movies and TV series

Editor’s note: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci are back to school you about fashion, cerulean blue, et al. Mammootty and Mohanlal in an intense, star-studded thriller about digital surveillance. Mirzapur creator Karan Anshuman has a new series on boxing and crime in Haryana. Japanese boss lady and controversial figure Kazuko Hosoki gets Netflix love. Dhanush has a movie. Sai Pallavi, the South queen, is caught in a Bollywood romcom. There’s a new Shivaji movie. And Wong Kar-wai.

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New releases

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (English)

Hardly the boss from hell, fashion journalism’s high priestess Miranda Priestly is back with her gals in a sequel that the critics are saying is a sobering look at contemporary journalism. Meryl Streep, 76, is older and more fragile as Miranda, based on couture warlord Anna Wintour. But Miranda is the one person who would fight till the last bell in a media landscape that is on thin ice.

Andrea Sachs (Anna Hathaway), having lived her dream of chasing the Pulitzer, is brought back into Miranda’s crosshairs to save her sinking ship, Runway magazine. In the 2006 film, aspiring writer Andrea, initially scoffing at the fashion biz., became Miranda’s assistant and slowly succumbed to the Girlboss’s charming competence. Andrea eventually left Runway after realising she was losing the plot. 

It all goes back to the true story of small-town English major Lauren Weisberger moving to NYC and finding herself traumatised by the clacking of stilettos as Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s assistant. Lauren quit Vogue after 10 months. The experience led to her debut novel, The Devil Wears Prada (2003).

Unlike the bitter, cynical, and angry book, the film was surprisingly cheerful and optimistic. A major reason was the casting. Emily Blunt reprises her role in the sequel as Miranda’s ex-assistant, and now an influential force in the fashion world. Stanley Tucci is back too as the lovable Nigel Kipling, a warmhearted mentor to Andrea.

Director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, the pair who also brought us the first film, are in top form. Here’s Justin Chang for The New Yorker.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope. As industries and their titans are brought low, this film suggests, the best we can ask for is the satisfaction of doing good work and the lasting friendships we may forge along the way.

Where to watch: Theatres

Patriot (Malayalam)

Writer-director Mahesh Narayanan (Take Off, Malik) brings together two pillars of the Malayalam film industry, Mammootty and Mohanlal, after 18 years. They were last seen pointing guns in rhythm in the 2008 film Twenty:20.

Narayanan's focus is the government-corporate nexus intensifying digital surveillance over its citizens. When government analyst Daniel (Mammootty) gets wind of one such rogue program, headed by a minister (Rajiv Menon) and his son (Fahadh Faasil), he is forced to go on the run and turn vigilante. Daniel's old friend Colonel Rahim (Mohanlal) is helping him from a distance. A stellar supporting cast is put to work to hold the plot together: Nayanthara, Darshana Rajendran, Revathi, Kunchacko Boban, Indrans, Prakash Belawadi.

Narayanan started his career as an editor and still edits his own films. This, he believes, gives his films precision. Admitting that he "writes for the edit", he once told Scroll, "The edit points in my scripts are clearly written. I always make my characters perform towards the edit. I have the clarity of where to go from a scene, where to track the camera, where to transition from the end of one scene to another, and what is the emotional graph of the film."

Has that helped his most expensive feature to date? Noting that Mammootty is "charismatic in this complex thriller", critic Vishal Menon of The Hollywood Reporter India wrote,

Even when the film begins to discuss dense topics, while handling multiple characters and subplots, there’s never a moment that feels long or unnecessary. It maintains the same tense pacing throughout, and even the big emotional moments are handled with so much class that we never feel the film slipping away. (...) Apart from a few portions that may feel particularly verbose, mainly due to how much the film needs to explain, Patriot feels slick despite a 180-minute runtime.

Where to watch: Theatres

Glory (Hindi)

Karan Anshuman (Mirzapur, Inside Edge, Rana Naidu) was among the earliest Mumbai filmmakers to find themselves in the thick of things at the beginning of the Indian OTT boom circa 2018-2019. Anushman utilised the opportunity and delivered back-to-back streaming successes, with at least one of them, Mirzapur, becoming nearly as much of a household name as Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), the film without which it wouldn't have been conceived.

With Glory, Anshuman and his colleagues pluck boxing in Haryana and bring to it their trademark style of mixing pulpy crime into a specific ecosystem and populating it with multiple characters.

The Olympic-obsessed coach is played by Suvinder Vicky, perhaps slotted for the next decade to play angry dads after his scenery-chewing act in Dhurandhar: The Revenge. The young'uns are estranged brothers; Divyenndu plays the hothead, Pulkit Samrat the collected one with something to prove. Add to the gallery Ashutosh Rana, Sayani Gupta, Zakir Hussain, Yashpal Sharma, and Sikandar Kher, and you get Mirzapur in a boxing robe.

Most critics agreed that while the show's not quite Olympic material, Divyenndu's performance is a knockout. Here's critic Udita Jhunjhunwala at Scroll.

Where Glory does find some footing is in its performances. Divyenndu is the clear standout as Dev, easily the most compelling character. Dev is volatile, impulsive and deeply wounded, and the only one given layers and momentum. In spite of a terrible hairdo, Divyenndu brings a lived-in intensity and depth that the show sorely needed.

Where to watch: Netflix

Ek Din (Hindi)

Aamir Khan's son Junaid Khan's third attempt at being a successful hero—and second at being a rom-com lead—is here. Opposite him is the extraordinarily talented and effervescent Sai Pallavi, who has stormed the South Indian film industries over the past decade with performances in some iconic titles like Premam, Maari 2, Gargi, Amaran, and Kali. Junaid plays an awkward simp. Sai is the prize. The runtime is two hours.

Reviews are overwhelmingly negative. Critic Rahul Desai of The Hollywood Reporter India wrote that the film "just doesn’t have the personality to pull off a Saiyaara." Better luck with horror, Junaid.

Where to watch: Theatres

Kara (Tamil)

Sai Pallavi's rowdy baby Dhanush headlines what appears to be a heist film in the beginning but gradually slips into a 161-minute melodrama, according to the critics. The director is Vignesh Raja, whose first film, Por Thozhil (2023), was one of the better serial killer films to come from India. 

The Hindu's critic Srinivasa Ramanujam noted that there are some stellar moments in the film that is a drag on the net. He wrote,

Dhanush’s acting prowess — something that he has proved time and again — does shine at times. But after sitting through a 161-minute film that also involves bank loan scams and the Gulf War that led to fuel rationing, we are left to ask one pertinent question: Where is the pure genre film with a tight screenplay that Vignesh Raja promised us?

Where to watch: Theatres

Blossoms Shanghai part 3 (Shanghainese)

Here is the week of May 1, made perennially memorable through Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express because of a lovelorn character’s pineapple math. What better time to wrap up the final 10 episodes of the Hong Kong master’s new series about obsessive but ambitious men and longing but ambitious women?

Where to watch: MUBI

Man on Fire (English)

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II steps into Denzel Washington's really big and difficult shoes in the latest adaptation of AJ Quinnell's 1980 crime novel Man on Fire. Action film auteur, the late Tony Scott, had previously turned it into a frenzied and electrifying 2004 film with Washington. 

Bollywood grabbed it and threw up a copy in 2006 with Amitabh Bachchan playing the lead role. That film had just one redeeming factor, the song ‘Ek Ajnabee’. The plot? An ex-government mercenary is brought back from the doghouse to protect a young girl whose family is mysteriously killed as part of a larger conspiracy. 

Where to watch: Netflix

Straight to Hell (Japanese)

Infamous Japanese fortune teller and TV celebrity Kazuko Hosoki is the other hell lady thrown in the mix alongside Miranda Priestly this week. Across six decades, the postwar hustler reinvented herself as a blunt and fearsome diviner. Ties to the underworld and allegations of fraud followed. Now, Netflix has come to collect the check in a nine-episode scripted drama series.

Where to watch: Netflix

Raja Shivaji (Marathi)

Riteish Deshmukh stars in the lead role of Marathi ruler Shivaji in a star-studded affair of Hindu warriors fighting Muslim rulers for over three hours. Sanjay Dutt plays Afzal Khan, the general of the Deccan Sultanate, Shivaji memorably slayed in our history books back in school.

The supporting cast has a host of names from Bollywood, where Riteish Deshmukh, son of former Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, also has a career. He is also the director.

Abhishek Bachchan plays Sambhaji, Shivaji’s elder brother. Vidya Balan plays Khadija Sultana, who is among the antagonists. The rest of the cast includes Riteish’s wife Genelia, Fardeen Khan, Amol Gupte, Mahesh Manjrekar, Boman Irani, Jitendra Joshi, and Bhagyashree. Even Salman Khan has a cameo.

Reviews have been middling. But Dutt was singled out for being awesome. Here’s Shubhra Gupta at The Indian Express.

It has to be said that some of the most enjoyable bits of the film belong to Dutt in full Khalnayak mode, who chews the scenery, ratcheting his smirking villainy with every scene.

Where to watch: Theatres

Fresh off the big screen

The Kerala Story 2 (Hindi)

The sequel to the controversial 2023 blockbuster, which followed the election-time issue of Hindu women in Kerala getting coerced into becoming Muslim and joining the terrorist organisation Islamic State, is here. Not nearly as successful as part one at the box office, this one is strictly for fans.

Where to watch: Zee5

One more chapter

Undekhi: The Final Battle (Hindi)

Old war dog Dibyendu Bhattacharya is back as DSP Barun Ghosh in the final season of crime series Undekhi, which began at Sunderbans and moved to Manali across three seasons where the corrupt and evil rich are to be dragged to Lady Justice via bingewatching. If you haven't followed the series so far, it's worth a try just for Bhattacharya and Harsh Chhaya's uncanny performance as the Big Bad.

Where to watch: Netflix