We recommend: The best new movies and TV series

 

Editor’s note: The movie gods have conspired to drag half of you out into the theatre, and keep the rest of you indoors through Valentine's weekend. On the big screen, is Shahid Kapoor rompin ‘n’ stompin in a Vishal Bhardwaj joint, a stylish horror romance featuring a crocodile, and a Wuthering Heights adaptation you would love to hate. On streaming, you must not miss: Sirāt, Sentimental Value, and Kohrra season two. Also, Orhan Pamuk is acting now.

 

New releases

 

Crime 101 (English)

 

Before we scroll down a roster of movies for couples, first: a film lab-created for single bros.

 

The spartan title suggests a fuss-free crime thriller from start to finish. Chris Hemsworth plays Mike, an L.A thief committing robberies with clinical precision. When things go wrong, Mike’s mentor Money (Nick Nolte) dares to replace him. There’s also Mark Ruffalo playing a scruffy detective. Not long after, things come to a head in this cat-and-mouse thriller based on Don Winslow’s novella of the same name.

 

Also starring Halle Berry, who apparently made Ruffalo nervous and forget his lines on set. “A goddess,” Ruffalo described her.

 

To note: the director Bart Layton is interesting. The British filmmaker’s first feature film, The Impostor (2012), was a documentary exploring the life of Frédéric Bourdin, a conman who has claimed to have had over 500 fake identities. That film won Layton the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut. 

 

Ben Kenigsberg of New York Times raved,

 

But like lovingly warmed leftovers, it has its satisfactions: a charismatic cast, evocative Los Angeles location work, the sort of granular details on diamond couriering and insurance valuation that might give impressionable viewers ideas.

 

Where to watch: Theatres

 

Wuthering Heights (English)

 

Shortly after Covid, there was a viral film essay headlined ‘Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny’. The writer RS Benedict argued, contemporary action and superhero films fetishise perfectly muscular or toned bodies, but no one is communicating desire. This matter has since mutated…

 

The problem, critics are saying, about the new Wuthering Heights adaptation is, the hero and heroine are horny indeed, but still nothing is sexy! Or smart. Or passionate? Or emotional? In an entertaining review for Vulture, critic Alison Wilmore, calling the film “smooth-brained” (guffaws!) wrote:

 

Wuthering Heights has the tunnel-vision horniness and girlish aesthetic sensibility of a high-school freshman who’s been assigned to read Brontë in class while tearing through a pile of explicit bodice-rippers under the covers at home.

 

While critics have summarily dismissed the adaptation, it found an unlikely champion in American author and Pulitzer finalist Joyce Carol Oates. About whitewashing Heathcliff, for example, Oates was unbothered: “Directors should feel free to cast as they wish: classics are always being reinterpreted & tastes, or shall we say trends, change. Wuthering Heights will survive any iteration.”

Our verdict? Guilty pleasures are healthy pleasures.

 

Where to watch: Theatres

 

O’Romeo (Hindi) 

 

Vishal Bhardwaj, that Bollywood bard of blood and roses, throws everything at the wall, plus the cat, for his 180-minute gangsta flick. His hero is Shahid Kapoor, who has lost memory of himself, pre-Kabir Singh. Once again, Kapoor is swaggering and stomping through the plot, playing hero to a white sparrow who has charmed him to slay badder men. A stacked cast: Nana Patekar, Triptii Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Farida Jalal, Vikrant Massey.

 

Above and beyond all, songs and lyrics by Bhardwaj and Gulzar. Mint Lounge’s Uday Bhatia had a scintillating cine-literate review where he wrote of Bhardwaj to be in “mad scientist mode”. Golly gee!

 

Over three chaotic hours, we get gunfights, bullfights, flamenco guitars, item numbers, Kumar Sanu nostalgia, Ganesh Chaturthi, Mumbai gang wars, a masquerade at a Spanish villa, a visit to Kathmandu and a Carnatic classical-singing Marathi cop. It’s all over the place and yet there’s an underlying emotional logic to the whole thing, a web of betrayals and transgressions that binds the three central players.

 

Where to watch: Theatres

 

Tu Yaa Main (Hindi)

 

He downtown, she uptown, they different but pro, nothin’ about ‘em slow-mo. A perfect date movie, Tu Yaa Main gets a tapori content creator Maruti (Adarsh Gaurav) and an affluent influencer Avani (Shanaya Kapoor) to hug and kiss. But then the plot throws them into a swimming pool with a crocodile. Critics have loved it, they would like you to know.

 

Scroll’s Nandini Ramnath was all praises.

 

Every relationship demands strong survival instincts – this dictum prevails in Bejoy Nambiar’s Tu Yaa Main, which remains a love story even after sliding into horror territory. Trapped with the increasingly hangry reptile, and with no escape seemingly in sight, Avani and Maruti must summon every ounce of their courage while also learning to trust each other.

 

Where to watch: Theatres

 

The Art of Sarah (Korean) 

 

Sarah Kim, an American-Korean woman, moves to Seoul as a luxury brand exec and infiltrates Korean high society, becoming the talk of the town. Until she’s found dead. Will the detective on the case ever find out what really happened to Sarah Kim?

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

Lead Children (English)

 

Six-part Polish miniseries set in 1970s Communist-era Poland—children in a small town seem to be falling ill for unexplained reasons. A young doctor, Jola (Joanna Kulig), sets about trying to find out the cause, and discovers that they’re suffering from lead poisoning. She wants to help the children, she wants to treat them, but to do that she must go through the bureaucratic rigmarole, facing state apparatus, apathy from the authorities, contempt from the town.

 

As Clint Worthington of Rogerebert.com wrote: “It’s harrowing to see a town, and a people, and a government, do nothing to stop poisoning itself simply to save face, or protect their livelihood, or just allow themselves to pretend everything is fine.” 

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

Museum of Innocence (Turkish)

 

Based on Orhan Pamuk’s novel, Museum of Innocence is about the best kind of love: forbidden. Kemal (Selahattin Paşalı) is a 30-year-old in Istanbul who has it all—rich, privileged, charming, handsome, and a loving fiancée. He blows it all up and falls for a young distant cousin.

 

Also: he’s a raging klepto, and generally prone to being a weirdo. Bonus: Pamuk, who’s been heavily involved in the production of the limited series, makes his acting debut in a cameo!

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

 

Fresh off the big screen

 

Sirāt (Spanish, French, English, Arabic)

 

A father will stop at nothing to find his lost daughter in an endless desert—sliced and diced to electronic music. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes 2025, Sirāt was declared "the movie of the year” by The New Yorker’s Justin Chang, who called it a “harrowing, exhilarating dance of death”. 

 

Here's the critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site.

 

A brutal reminder that the journey can be more important than the destination, Sirât is an unforgettable exercise in tension that wallops its audience like a deafening blast of bass to the face.

 

Where to watch: MUBI

 

Sentimental Value (Norwegian, English, etc.)

 

The Instagram-friendly festival favourite from the director of The Worst Person in the World is finally streaming.

 

Stellan Skarsgård, playing a filmmaker who needs one final film to justify his choices to himself, lends an unsympathetic character dignity. His eldest daughter is a stage actress played by Renate Reinsve, who can do no wrong. She hates daddy but wants him around. Daddy badly needs a heroine, and, maybe, reconciliation with his estranged family.

 

Advisory contributor Sritama Bhattacharyya wrote for Outlook,

 

The things that do not get resolved within the span of this film are acknowledged as things that cannot be resolved; not for now anyway. And that is why the film feels so deeply true to life. Here, much like in life, what we can work on, we do; what we cannot, we hope.

 

Where to watch: MUBI

 

Predator: Badlands (English)

 

Unlikely romances of convenience continue. He is an outcast from a violent species of aliens that travel the galaxy to hunt for sport. She/they is an android who looks like Elle Fanning (also in Sentimental Value). Together, they have adventures, feat. blood and CGI. 

 

Where to watch: JioHotstar

 

The Conjuring: Last Rites (English)

 

This is the ninth and highest-grossing film in The Conjuring series of highly popular ghost-hunter horror films.

 

Where to watch: JioHotstar

 

 

One more chapter

 

Kohrra S02 (Punjabi, Hindi)

 

The burning sun of Indian longform storytelling is Sudip Sharma. In the second season of Sharma and team's Kohrra, cops Dhanwant (Mona Singh) and Garundi (Barun Sobti) are excavating India's patriarchal psychogeography via dead bodies, red herrings, and primeval heartaches.

 

There are lily-livered men trying to outswim the fate of their fathers in the fetid waters of Sharma’s Punjab. There are strong women subservient to men they decided were gods in the folly of youth. The past catches up with its gangrene claws because dementia about the self and the state, and the desire to invite ruin, is hereditary after all. Is there hope? Only for Dhanwant and Garundi.

 

Where to watch: Netflix