Movie Reviews
Thamma Movie Review: The Ultimate Mythical Masala From Maddock Verse!
Director: Aditya Sarpotdar
Writers: Niren Bhatt, Suresh Mathew, Arun Falara
Cast: Ayushmann Khurrana, Rashmika Mandanna, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Paresh Rawal, Sathyaraj, Fasial Malik, Geeta Aggarwal, Rachit Singh
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Duration: 149 minutes
Rating: 4/5
Every now on then, a crossover yet original franchise movie takes everything by surprise and storm, Thamma is one of those movies, the film not only elevate the standard of whole franchise but has enough easter eggs to future instalments as well. This epic saga has everything going for itself, it is fun, wild, original, unique, relatable and above all packed with stellar acting, outstanding VFX, smashing numbers, it is something we have never seen before in mainstream Indian cinema.
The film kick-offs in this lush, mythological forest where ancient legends live and breathe — literally. But there is one cardinal rule, no one ever harm a human, and their sole purpose is to protect human race against evil forces. And one fine day is cardinal rule is broken which leads to many chaos, some centuries old and some set in present and future. Thamma is the prefect mix of folklore, fantasy, sentiment, and action into one thoroughly engaging ride.
Ayushmann Khurrana as Alok, who stars as a small-town reporter who gets into something much, much bigger than he could ever have dreamed. His character is so likable at the beginning — goofy, chatter box, inquisitive, and pure hearted. The arch of his character is something to watch out for, he goes undergoes many transformation and each one is deeper, darker, and incredibly emotional. You just feel what he’s experiencing.
Rashmika Mandanna as Tadaka, is a revelation. She’s hot when she needs to be, but the thing is, she comes off as so real and grounded. She doesn’t play the typical “horror heroine” cliche of screaming all the time or being eye candy. She has a genuine emotional center to her character, and her chemistry with Ayushmann is natural and organic.
Most of the first half goes away rather quickly establishing new characters, with back stories, and it is really smooth and engaging.
And then comes the second half, where the film goes into supersonic overdrive. Dramatic plot turns, action on a high level, major reveals, comic relief and love, but amidst of all the chaos, everything makes sense, everything has a meaning, even the dance routine has deep rooted back story, and then comes an epic showstopping fight between Ayushmann’s character Alok and Bhediya himself (yep, Varun Dhawan returns!).
Betaal Vs Bhediya, this is straight-up big-screen magic, outstanding choreography, amazing VFX, roaring music and towering performances, this is moment where you’re just glued to the screen, and do not want to miss a thing. It’s not just a faceoff, it is perfectly timed epic cinematic moment which will etched forever in fans memory.
And if this wasn’t enough, there is more coming. Thamma is loaded Diwali bonanza, You’re left with all awe and more questions — such as what is the precise relationship between Alok and Bhediya, There’s a big twist which gives you clues, but doesn’t give away everything. It’s maddeningly delicious — in a positive sense. You crave to know more.
And then there is one and only Sar Kata, making a sneaky comeback. A perfect goosebumps experience. It’s also a giveaway that all these movies are setting up to become part of one big, shared universe. Thamma is just a tasting, there is more coming, much more.
After from the leading duo, the epic saga is packed with outstanding performances by entire ensemble. Paresh Rawal is a comedy scene-stealer as he plays Ayushmann’s grumpy yet clever dad with just the right mix of wit and sarcasm. The film also marks debut of Nawazuddin Siddiqui in MHCU and he is such a seasoned performer that it feels like he has always been part of the world.. He is hilarious, witty, evil, intense, brooding, and unmistakably ambitious, qualities that makes him a formidable enemy.
Veteran actor Sathyaraj is also back as (Hand Of God) Mr Elvis, the quirky supernatural authority. And he is the pivotal point where tow mega franchise make an epic cross-over, he’s more than a comedic relief role. Die-hard fans of the universe may even glimpse one of his subtle disclosures that foreshadows a huge upcoming twist.
And then there is ever so gorgeous Nora Fatehi, her cameo is not just a mere glam flash. Her moment actually contributes to narrative substance and is directly connected to the original story which started it all, Stree. She brings emotional depth, and the makers smart adapted the item song as one more cross-over point. Nora will change entire universe. She a secret to world’s mysteries or not, or something much more complex, either way, we’re excited.
Also Read | Thamma Trailer: Ayushmann Khurrana And Rashmika Mandanna Star In Bloody Love Story This Diwali – WATCH
Apart from the poignant BGM, the album is a banger, it’s not loud numbers but serving a bigger purpose. There are no random dance-number-in-the-middle-of-the-woods nonsense, the songs are verry specific, even a dance routine is also a hint to the origin of Betaal and Rakhtbeej story.
And all of this doesn’t make you jump with joy, there is one epic faceoff between Thamma and Bhediya, a visual and action spectacle, which will leave you gasping for air.
Thamma is not just another addition to a superb franchise, it’s a genre-defying breakthrough for Indian genre films and shared universe storytelling, which is rare feist to accomplish. The film is smart, intelligent emotional, humorous, and ridiculously entertaining. Packed with exceptional performances, clever writing, and some serious world building, this movie is able to juggle big laughs, emotional moments, and high-fantasy action without any loss of momentum.
If you’re already a Stree fan, or Bhediya, or of the wider Maddock horror-universe — hold onto your seats. Thamma’s not just a good time at the cinema. It’s the start of something very, very much bigger.
Movie Reviews
Hollywood Pariah Kevin Spacey Opens in a Straight to Video Movie with 25 Producers, 1 Review, No Theaters, No Press – Showbiz411
As we know, Kevin Spacey is a pariah in Hollywood.
He’s in a rare club with Mel Gibson, Armie Hammer, Nate Parker, Jonathan Majors, and James Franco.
Spacey has managed to avoid jail time by reaching settlements with various accusers of sexual malfeasance, all men.
His film career — which included two Oscars and a Tony Award — has been destroyed.
Spacey has been reduced to appearing in straight to video films, made for whatever reason the various producers involved know only to themselves.
On Friday, a new Spacey movie surfaced against its will, but not in theaters. It also went straight to video. “1780” is a period piece set during the Revolutionary War. Spacey plays a toothless Pennsylvania country trapper.
There is no rating on Rotten Tomatoes, largely because there is only one review. The review by Alan Ng of Film Threat is positive. Ng recently reviewed “World War Bigfoot,” which he also liked. He seems to specialize in reviewing films no one has heard of.
“1780” does boast 25 producers who will probably not see a return on their investment. But they can say they made a movie with Kevin Spacey.
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Movie Reviews
‘House of Criticism’ Review: A Pensive and Touching Portrait of Married Art Critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith (It Is Only, at Moments, a True-Life Christopher Guest Movie)
If you wanted to be funny about it, you could say that Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, who occupy the center of the documentary “House of Criticism,” are like characters out of a Christopher Guest movie. Both are venerable New York art critics — but the thing is, they’re married New York art critics, whose lives revolve entirely around art and art criticism and talking about art and art criticism. They eat, breathe, sleep and dream it. In the Guest mockumentary of my imagination, the two would be played by Bob Balaban and Parker Posey, and they would be blissfully cracked egghead eccentrics who think that art is the most important thing in the world because it’s the most important thing in the world to them.
At moments, “House of Criticism” does throw off unintentional comic sparks of art-world insularity. But I’m kidding, ultimately, since underneath that it’s a pensive and touching documentary, and it happens to be about two writers I greatly admire. Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic of the New York Times, and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine, are writers of sway, elegance, legend. They’re two of the last powerful legacy critics in America, and both are fantastic writers. For them, the love of art is a mission, at once sophisticated and childlike. Roberta calls art “the most advanced operating system that our species has devised to explore consciousness, the seen and the unseeable.” The way art connects (and saves) these two on a daily basis is its own rarefied story, and it speaks to a certain vanishing culture of passionate New York literary brainiacs that used to be thought of as almost the essence of the city.
Early on, Jerry stands before Picasso’s epochal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art and does a head-spinning riff on it, describing how 500 years of art history collapsed in the late 19th century (through Manet, the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Cezanne), leaving the blank slate for Picasso to fill. He compares the way the painting remade the world to the cataclysm of 9/11 (“When we believed in one course of history, and obviously there was another course of history, and they shattered”). Now that’s criticism.
As “House of Criticism” shows us, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith are luminaries and survivors who enjoy an idealized life together. Roberta is something of a contradiction, both the haughtier and more vulnerable of the two. She can be imperious in that Timesian way, but there’s a tremulous insecurity about her. Beneath a certain Midwestern patrician rigor, she’s full of self-doubt about her writing and is in constant need of encouragement, which Jerry is more than happy to provide. He’s blustery and big picture-oriented, while her insights are more delicate and intimate, blooming out of her holy communion with the work.
Jerry is a contradiction as well, a man who writes like a demon and looks like a dentist. But don’t let his fubsy aura fool you — he’s the social butterfly and loose cannon, plugged into social media (which he plays like a violin), and the audacious thoughts pour out of him. The most telling aspect of their relationship is that as writers they should be competitors, but instead they’re spiritual collaborators; they turn what could be a competition into a romance. They help each other on word choices, and even when they’re reviewing the same show, they’re really competing with themselves, with their own cultivated and highly different ideas of perfectionism.
Their relationship is built, to a large degree, around Jerry’s belief that Roberta is the superior critic — but this, for Jerry, is a form of chivalry, the flower of their love story. “Your writing is so condensed, right on the object, focused,” he says. He’s intensely supportive, but Jerry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018, is arguably the greater writer (his poetic showmanship flies higher), and it’s my reading that deep down he knows it. It’s his perpetual self-deprecation and devotion that keeps the marriage balanced.
The two have no children and no apparent hobbies outside of their unrelenting obsession with art. They slip in and out of gallery openings, where they’re treated like royalty, and they attend 20 to 30 shows a week. By all rights, they should have a social calendar that rivals Andy Warhol’s in the ’70s. But here’s the joke: They adore their life together but are so devoted to their work, so monastic about it, that they never go out. Jerry calls them “happy losers” and describes their spacious apartment off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village as “the house that criticism built.”
In the morning, he pours deli coffee over ice into a 7-11 Big Gulp cup, and he’ll consume three of those a day. It’s fuel, as is the food he eats. When his friend Adam Platt, the New York magazine restaurant critic, asks Jerry what his favorite food is, Jerry replies: the grilled chicken at Gristede’s (a slightly downscale New York supermarket). “That’s the life of the mind!” says Platt. “You’re as happy with prison food.” He’s not kidding. I live in the same neighborhood and use Gristede’s as a convenience store, and I would never consider buying the grilled chicken there. But as Jerry explains, popping a bag of spinach into the microwave, he and Roberta are so consumed with work that they subsist on this drone food. The two barely go to restaurants (though we see them having breakfast at their favorite diner). Do they drink? If I was them, I’d need a cocktail by the end of the day, but the movie never says.
“House of Criticism,” directed by Alison Chernick, has a sketchy but rather controlled vantage. There’s a lot you don’t learn (I would have liked to see more about the politics of the New York art world), and plenty you do — like the fact that Lena Dunham is their goddaughter. Late in the movie, she comes over to visit them and provokes a penetrating exchange on the subject of why they never had kids.
People don’t often think of critics in humanistic terms, but these two invest criticism with soul, and there’s something disarming about how they were both damaged people who came together by seeing, in each other, a mirror image. She was born in New York and raised in Kansas, moving back to Manhattan in her early twenties to be part of the art scene (her mentor was the artist and critic Donald Judd). She found her way to criticism as a role in life, yet there was something metaphysically lonely about her.
It’s Jerry who comes from trauma. His mother, who committed suicide when he was 10, was erased out of his life (she was never spoken of again). He tells a haunting story about how she dropped him off for a solo visit to the Art Institute of Chicago just two weeks before her death, and it was there, on that visit, that the art lightbulb went off: He realized that every painting is a story. He wanted to be a painter, and tried (he had some talent), but thought that he lacked the proper schooling. What he really lacked was confidence. In photographs from the time, Jerry looks like he could be Richard Dreyfuss’s sad-sack brother. He wound up becoming a long-distance trucker, driving 10-wheelers full of paintings (he did this for 10 years), and he confesses that at moments he would go back into the truck and stomp on paintings and damage them. That is seriously sick behavior (his self-hatred was off the charts), and it’s amazing that he became the menschy person he did.
These two have thrived as critics by evolving. Jerry says of critics, “We have to adapt to the times, or we’re bullies and geezers.” He’s right. The film culminates in Roberta’s ultimate evolution — her decision to retire from the New York Times. The time feels right, but the question hovers: Without that job, what will her identity be? In a moving moment, she tells Jerry, “You’re my infrastructure.” “You’re mine,” he says. (That’s the critic version of “You complete me.”) And seeing each other through the prism of art is both of their infrastructure. These two are standard-bearers for the glory of a culture that once was. It’s a culture where criticism is about judging things, but more than that it’s about exploring things — experiencing things, bringing you closer to life.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: June 26th, 2026 / 08:03 PM
SUPERGIRL movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros./DC Studios
Rating: PG-13
Stars: Milly Adcock, David Corenswet, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Diarmaid Murtagh, Jason Momoa, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham
Writer: Ana Nogueira, based on characters created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster
Director: Craig Gillespie
Distributor: Warner Bros./DC Studios
Release Date: June 26, 2026
The new SUPERGIRL doesn’t have that “Eureka! This is how you do this now” spark that galvanized its immediate franchise predecessor, last year’s SUPERMAN. Director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira, basing the film on characters created by DC Comics’ Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, probably wisely, aren’t going for that.
Instead, the SUPERGIRL makers are intent on providing a lively adventure, getting to the point quickly and letting the action unspool with unquestionably strong motivation, abetted by plenty of punch-ups, kicking and frequent explosions.
Supergirl, aka Kara Zor-El (Milly Adcock), is from the now-dead planet Krypton, just like her cousin Clark/Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet). However, where Clark has chosen to remain on Earth, where the yellow sun gives him superpowers that allow to help Earth’s residents, Kara likes to party on planets that have a red sun, where she has no unusual abilities.
This is because Kara seems to have taken to heart a dictum from a different comic book universe – with great power comes great responsibility – and decided the inverse is true: with no power comes no responsibility.
We get insight into exactly why Kara is so duty-averse over the course of SUPERGIRL, and it’s probably not a spoiler to say that she re-examines some attitudes as events unfold.
Kara plans to celebrate her twenty-third birthday on a backwater red sun planet. The bar where Kara chooses to drink is entered by preteen Ruthye Knoll (Eve Ridley), whose family has been murdered by brigands, led by the horrendous Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Ruthye is out for revenge. Kara thinks Ruthye is a bit young and pure-hearted to be on a murderous quest.
Even on a planet with a red sun, though, Kara is still handy with fists and feet. Ruthye sees what Kara can do and concludes she is the ideal ally. Kara absolutely refuses to help. Then something occurs that credibly rouses Kara to do whatever it takes to achieve her aims, which sort of line up with Ruthye’s.
No explanation is needed for why Kara feels such urgency, which we easily share. Her concern for Ruthye is understandable and her connecting to larger purpose is shown rather than spoken.
Intriguingly, the aesthetics of SUPERGIRL are largely those of STAR WARS, with some MAD MAX and BLADE RUNNER thrown in. The filmmakers have a good time with all sorts of utterly nonhuman alien people and figuring out how to make interplanetary versions of familiar items like vending machines.
The pace is pleasingly brisk and the structure doesn’t require much exposition. When they hit a hard-to-answer question like why Kara is Supergirl while Clark is Superman, they acknowledge it and then get out from under without irritating anybody.
For anyone wondering about the veracity of the recording from Superman’s parents that appeared in SUPERMAN, a quick line of dialogue here confirms it (sorry, Jor-El supporters).
There is the expected amount of CGI involved, including a great motion-capture performance by Kara’s dog Krypto (modeled upon executive producer/SUPERMAN director James Gunn’s dog), but a lot of the stunts and makeup appear gratifyingly practical.
Adcock is fine in all of Kara’s moods, from wasted to resistant to determined, with a delightful reaction to feeling her body’s response to the yellow sun. Ridley is an appealing young hero, and Corenswet offers wholesome support. Schoenaerts lets Krem revel in his own soft-spoken vileness, and Jason Momoa enthusiastically portrays an intergalactic bounty hunter. David Krumholtz is affecting as Kara’s scientist father.
SUPERGIRL isn’t going to redefine superhero movies, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable example of the form.
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