Movie: Maa Inti Bangaaram
Rating: 2.5/5
Banner: Tralala Moving Pictures
Cast: Samantha, Gulshan Devaiah, Srinivas Gavireddy, Manjusha Mukkavilli, Diganth, Sreemukhi, Gautami, Anand, Lakshmi, Rachana, and others
Music Director: Santhosh Narayanan
DOP: Om Prakash
Editor: Dharmendra Kakarala
Producers: Raj Nidimoru, Samantha, Himank Reddy Duvvuru
Written by: Raj Nidimoru, Vasanth Maringanti
Directed by: BV Nandini Reddy
Release Date: June 19, 2026

Nearly three years after her last lead-role outing, Samantha returns to the big screen with “Maa Inti Bangaaram.” The film marks an important milestone in her career, serving as a comeback vehicle and also her first collaboration with husband Raj Nidimoru, who has co-produced the film and penned the story for this family action drama.

The big question is: has Samantha delivered a strong comeback with “Maa Inti Bangaaram”? Let’s find out.

Story
Swarna (Samantha) arrives with her husband at her in-laws’ village home to attend a family wedding. It is their first visit after marriage, as her husband had married her against his parents’ wishes.

Hoping to win over the family, Swarna settles into the household and tries to impress everyone, even seeking help from a friend for her cooking.

Just when she begins to feel accepted, trouble arrives. A group of men starts searching for her, determined to find out whether she is really Swarna or someone named Jhansi.

As the story unfolds, her hidden past comes to light. Years ago, she escaped from her mentor Karuna (Gulshan Devaiah) after discovering his true intentions. Since then, she has been living under different identities before eventually finding love and marrying her husband. Now, Karuna, who has completed a prison sentence, is back and determined to reclaim her at any cost.

Can Swarna protect herself and her newfound family from Karuna?

Performances
Samantha slips comfortably into the role. Despite returning to a lead role after nearly three years and overcoming health challenges, she retains her star presence and carries much of the film on her shoulders. While this may not rank among her best, she convincingly handles both the emotional and action-heavy portions, particularly in the second half.

Diganth plays her husband and delivers a decent performance, though the role offers him little scope. Gulshan Devaiah initially makes an impact as the antagonist, but the character gradually becomes routine, limiting his effectiveness.

Manjusha Mukkavilli gets a well-written supporting role and leaves a positive impression. Sreemukhi is adequate in her brief part.

Vennela Kishore appears in a cameo, while the rest of the cast performs within the requirements of their conventional roles.

Technical Aspects
Santosh Narayanan’s background score works reasonably well and elevates several scenes, especially in the latter half.

Cinematography is functional without offering any standout visuals. Production design serves the narrative adequately.

The film’s biggest technical shortcomings lie in its writing and editing. The dialogues rarely stand out, and the screenplay unfolds without enough surprises or dramatic highs.

A tighter edit and shorter runtime could have significantly improved the film’s overall impact.

Highlights
Samantha’s screen presence and performance
A few engaging moments in both halves
Some clever references

Drawbacks
Predictable screenplay
Unconvincing backstory
Lack of strong dramatic moments

Analysis
“Maa Inti Bangaram” is neither the emotional family drama audiences typically associate with Nandini Reddy nor the stylish action-driven narrative one expects from Raj Nidimoru’s storytelling sensibilities. Instead, it attempts to blend family drama with action, placing Samantha in a role usually reserved for a male commercial hero.

The basic premise feels familiar. Like many mainstream action films, it revolves around a protagonist whose troubled past threatens the peaceful life they have built. The difference here is that Samantha occupies the center of that narrative, taking on responsibilities and action beats traditionally assigned to male stars.

The first half unfolds largely as a family drama. Nandini Reddy focuses on the dynamics between the new daughter-in-law and her in-laws, presenting a series of domestic situations and emotional tests. The portions involving Samantha seeking help from her friend to impress the family with her cooking generate some humor and provide the film with a few enjoyable moments. Apart from these stretches, however, the narrative progresses at a measured pace.

The film gradually reveals why Jhansi became Swarna and why Karuna remains obsessed with finding her. While the backstory involving Naxalism provides the necessary motivation for the conflict, it never feels entirely convincing or emotionally compelling.

Once the central conflict is fully revealed by the interval, the film shifts gears. The second half becomes a straightforward battle between Swarna and the force threatening her family. While this creates a clear objective, it also reduces the scope for surprises.

A couple of scenes work reasonably well, and the climax action sequence inside the house provides some excitement, but the overall narrative goes on expected manner.

The film deserves credit for attempting something different within the commercial framework. Giving a female protagonist the kind of role usually written for male stars is a refreshing idea. Unfortunately, the execution lacks the emotional depth and dramatic strength needed to make the concept truly resonate.

Even the husband’s character feels somewhat artificial, functioning largely as a gender-reversed version of the supportive spouse often seen in hero-centric films.

Interestingly, some of the film’s most enjoyable moments come not from the action but from its lighter touches. References to older films, the creative use of the song “Mutyamantha Muddu,” and Samantha’s largely saree-clad appearance throughout the film, including during action sequences, add a distinctive flavor.

Ultimately, “Maa Inti Bangaram” attempts to merge family drama with female-led action. However, predictable storytelling and underdeveloped drama prevent it from reaching its full potential. The film remains watchable largely because of Samantha’s star appeal, but it never evolves into the engaging and emotionally satisfying experience it aspires to be. It makes an okay watch.

Bottomline: Not Pure Gold

For whatever reason, I never reviewed the first season of “Sugar,” which I’d stopped watching before its late-season big reveal — the detective (Colin Farrell as John Sugar) is an alien. Had that happened earlier in the story I might have hung on, but strictly as a production, I’d found its brand of neo-noir to be mannered, gimmicky, obvious, overdirected (by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian director of the fine “City of Men”) and, as you may have surmised, off-putting.

This is by way of announcing that the second season arrives Friday on Apple TV and that I like it very much. The stylistic eccentricities have been dialed back, including the use of old Hollywood film clips to reflect the action and possibly the thoughts of its main character, a cinephile from space, who is both practicing and enacting the work of a private detective. He reads American Cinematographer; he takes the Paramount studio tour, then takes it again.

One might navigate the new season without having watched the first, though at least reading an online synopsis. Sam Catlin (“Preacher”) has taken over as showrunner from series creator Mark Protosevich; the tone is lighter, the plot less perverse. Under new director of photography Marshall Adams, the camerawork, formerly too quirky by half — a mishmash of lenses and film stocks and canted angles — has settled down, as has the editing, enhancing the story by letting it breathe and staying out of the way of Farrell’s singular performance — the series’ distinguishing feature and warm heart.

For all his influences, Det. Sugar is the one character who can’t easily be traced back to an earlier model. As detectives go, he’s unusually sweet, optimistic, diplomatic, willing to give a villain a way out, closer to the Man Who Fell to Earth than to Sam Spade. He loves animals, and they love him.

Farrell, who also narrates in a soft voice, often wears a look of shy incomprehension, as if a beat behind in translating the world around him, a stranger in a strange land.

As aliens go, he is also something of a lightweight, demonstrating some mild telekinetic abilities (making a tennis ball float to entertain a pack of dogs, stirring the ice cubes in his drink) and the ability to speak any language, which underscores his empathetic nature. He makes friends with cab drivers, tour guides and security guards; as an “immigrant,” he appreciates immigrants. He’ll do the dishes for a woman too grief-stricken to attend to them, explain to a man who hates his own name that it’s a reference to Bogart’s character in “Casablanca” and a sign of his mother’s love. He can drink as much alcohol as he likes — his metabolism keeps him from getting drunk — which makes him indefatigable company in a bar, but he is horribly allergic to cinnamon. Remember that, if you’re ever forced to defend yourself from an ET.

Where classic noir detectives tend to be middle-class sorts a job or two ahead of losing their office, Sugar has a lot of money, whether saved up from earlier high-priced cases — his Season 1 client is a rich old man ripped from “The Big Sleep” — or piped down from space. He wears expensive suits, lives in a bungalow in a high-end Los Angeles hotel but also buys a house in the Hollywood Hills because its view allows him to spy on a dodgy character from Season 1; and drives a Nassau Blue 1966 convertible Corvette that he blithely parks in bad neighborhoods with the top down. When the car actually is stolen in this season’s opening episode, it brings him into contact with Val (Sasha Calle, Supergirl in “The Flash” movie), a spunky, punky petty criminal who negotiates its return and whom Sugar makes his assistant; I wouldn’t say Calle is underused, but I would have liked to see more of her.

Sugar came to Earth as part of a group of “thousands,” mixing among humans incognito just to observe them, for benign alien reasons, like Starship Enterprise on its five-year mission. (We get a flashback to Sugar’s first days on Earth, before he acquired the suits and the car and settled on a profession.) At the end of Season 1, their cover being blown, and humans being famously weird when it comes to extraterrestrials — you’ve seen the movies — they return home en masse, except for Sugar. He’s still working a missing persons case of his own, looking for his sister, hopefully alive, somewhere on the planet. And he’s becoming more of an Earthman — the dangers of assimilation are a specific Season 1 plot point. On top of that, like a lot of people, he just loves L.A.

Laura Donnelly as flirtatious Charlotte in “Sugar.”

(Jason LaVeris / Apple TV)

And then there’s Charlotte (Laura Donnelly), whom he meets in the bar of his hotel; it doesn’t take a degree in postwar genre fiction to recognize that there may be something fishy, perhaps “fatale,” about her. But like Sugar, we’re content to put that question off as long as possible, in the hopes that maybe this relationship will be as uncomplicated as we’d like it to be, and a tonic for Sugar’s loneliness. (He no longer has his dog, even.) He regularly gets on the subspace shortwave looking for any others of his kind left on Earth.

The new season will get around to that question, though the alien and earthly plot lines are kept on separate tracks. Most of the time “Sugar” functions as a straightforward compelling detective story, as the protagonist hunts for Ji Moon (Raymond Lee), the missing junkie brother of Danny Moon (Jin Ha), a talented young Korean American prizefighter on the first rung of the ladder to success. (Sugar is working pro bono, not needing the money but very much needing something to do.) It brings him into the orbit of drug dealers and crooked police officers and through an array of Southland locations, including the Beverly Center — finally, a good use for that place — Koreatown, the Vista Theater and the Huntington Gardens.

While there’s nothing particularly novel about that plot, it pulls you along, and the series as a whole is orchestrated to make one care about the characters and worry over their fates. Vivid minor characters — there are pro turns from Shea Whigham, Laura San Giacomo and Mireille Enos — make the story live. All in all, a good meal that leaves no bitter aftertaste.

What if the object of your desire was also the thing that’s trying to kill you? Not slowly irritating you to death for leaving the toilet seat up again. We mean actively trying to strangle you.

That’s the intriguing premise behind the horror-satire “Leviticus,” an auspicious feature film debut for writer-director Adrian Chiarella that’s both deeply scary and a queer revolt.

Named for the book of the Old Testament often used to justify homophobia, the movie explores the burgeoning relationship between two young men that is shattered when so-called “conversion therapy” — a scientifically discredited practice — unleashes a demon that stalks them. Some have called the movie “It Follows” meets “Heated Rivalry,” but that’s a disservice to Chiarella’s ambition.

The film centers on Naim (Joe Bird, the breakout star of A24’s “Talk to Me” )and Ryan (newcomer Stacy Clausen), who we watch fitfully, awkwardly fall for each other, slowly exploring their sexuality and stutter-stepping into their true selves. Wrestling turns to flirtation, which becomes longing and tenderness.

That doesn’t go over well in the small Australian town where the movie is set, a blue-collar community with belching smoke stacks, low-slung houses, barking dogs and a Christian pastor — with a “deliverance healer” — who prefers his flock much more heterosexual.

Chiarella is leaning not only into the notion that sexual desire makes you vulnerable, but also the harm that repressing who you are can do. In this case, the demon takes the form of your crush. It has weaponized lust.

“You shouldn’t be near me. I shouldn’t be near you, either,” one of the would-be lovers says to the other.

Chiarella starts his movie with a nod to Alfred Hitchcock — a shower scene worthy of “Psycho” — and nods to others in the genre, like “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” He can be a bit clunky with his images — a frog being eaten by a snake — but his pacing is flawless and his ramping up of terror is sure. “Leviticus” might be an indie film, but it’s got the blessing of Frank Ocean, who gave the filmmakers the right to use his song “Self Control.”

The monsters — in addition to the nasty one only the boys can see, of course — are the adults: the parents and caregivers and friends who turn on vulnerable, scared young men and make them scared of each other. Mom might kindly take some disliked olives off her son’s pizza, but she won’t accept him kissing another boy.

Chiarella’s pro-queer filmmaking extends to his ability to perfectly capture the fumbling ecstasy of new love, the fierce longing of stolen kisses and how scary it is to submit to a new partner. Kudos to Bird and Clausen for capturing that universal feeling.

With his film, Chiarella forms a triumvirate of young filmmakers making horror brilliant in summer 2026, alongside Curry Barker with “Obsession” and Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms.” The future of movies is in good hands.

“Leviticus,” a Neon release that’s in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “bloody violent content, language, some sexual content and teen drug use.” Running time: 88 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

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