At its core, The Handmaid’s Tale is a primer in individual resistance, the battle between the indomitable spirit and the grinding wheels of subjugation. As Aunt Lydia tells Offred and the other Handmaids-in-training, any outrage becomes acceptable once you lose the will to fight back.

If you had a Venn diagram with two circles labelled “classy” and “massy”, the overlapping area would be marked “Adam Sandler”.

I remember discovering several RD Burman melodies only because Asha Bhosle had remixed and repackaged them, creating versions that were trendier and in sync with the times. Burman Da hardly needed extra boost, but sometimes, nostalgia and quality aren’t enough to attract a new generation.

It’s not that every show should be a cosy sitcom populated by well-lit, attractive people. But do they all have to be a gritty rural crime drama, or a chilling biography of a serial killer? For some bizarre reason, logging into my Netflix has become like stepping into a dark and terrible world.

In Arekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March, and Chitrangada, the last three films of Rituparno Ghosh’s acting and directing career, sexuality is almost a living, breathing character. He might have not lived long enough to be an activist, but these three films remain a crucial expression of his LGBTQIA+ activism.

It is honestly baffling to see Dave Chappelle go up on stage and attempt to rekindle what he had back in the early 2000s. The world has changed, people have changed, but he seems to expect all of us to forget that and reset to 2005.

Doordarshan’s Udaan was inspired by Kanchan Chaudhary Bhattacharya, India’s first woman DGP, who passed away earlier this week. The show was a first lesson in feminism for a generation of women. And though many of us fondly remember its protagonist Kalyani Singh, it is Bhattacharya we need to doff our hats to.

Eliciting discomfort from viewers is an art that David Fincher has mastered over his decorated film career. With Mindhunter, a true-crime show on serial killers, he uses this art to swap gratuitous violence and gore with conversations about it. The result is horrifying and suspenseful in equal measure.

Right from the moment I heard “Lover”, the titular track of Taylor Swift’s seventh album, it felt like a kind of homecoming, that was at once, wholly familiar and deeply uncomfortable. In it, Swift finally sings of love and not about it, like a poet invested in creating poetry. Like love is not as much a lifeboat of her life, but life itself.

Satyajit Ray’s films, starting with Pather Panchali, gave utterance to the suffering that the other, invisible India was going through. In an era of spin doctoring, of twisting statistics and data and rewriting history to fit the narrative of New India, Pather Panchali is exactly the kind of story we would want to distance ourselves from.

Co-produced by the Obamas, Netflix’s American Factory is the story of the clash between American and Chinese work cultures. In an age of globalisation, it asks a pertinent question: Can the American dream still exist in a world where its labour rarely has an upper hand?

Having humans as a main course for a man-eating critter is a time-honoured cinematic tradition, which over the years, has also proved to be extremely malleable. From sharks to alligators and everything in between, the dangers can be symbols of nature’s untamed majesty, or represent the consequences of our own actions.

A Delhi-based politician has filed an FIR against Anurag Kashyap for offending religious sentiments, barely a week after the release of the new season of the Netflix series. Makes sense, shows like Sacred Games, are after all, the number one threat to religion since “scientists” officially became a thing.

The panic to #SaveSpiderMan was sparked by a fallout between two Hollywood megastudios: Sony and Marvel. It was a reminder that we, the fans, don’t call the shots; that’s left to stuffed suits in polished boardrooms. They wield the power of life and death over our favourite characters and properties.

Although, none of the female characters in the second season of Sacred Games are killed off cheaply like Radhika Apte’s Anjali Mathur was last season, the new season can be accused of something worse: falling into the trap of mistaking the mere inclusion of female characters as doing justice to them.

From #MeToo to the rise of fake news to the complexity of politics, The Loudest Voice deals with some of the most controversial themes of our generation. Throw in a star cast led by the inimitable Russell Crowe that could easily be the line-up of the next Oscar favourite, and you’re left with one of the most relevant dramas currently streaming online.

Both Mindhunter and Sacred Games became jewels in Netflix’s streaming crown on the backs of their riveting first seasons. But while Mindhunter manages to recapture the brooding atmosphere that was its signature, Sacred Games’ well seems like it’s starting to run dry.

The second season of Sacred Games remains intriguing and baffling at the same time. It insidiously sprawls and at times, there is no differentiating between intent or accident, quality or scale. Moreover, it has a visible Gaitonde problem, a gospel it has built and now can’t shake.

Most movies look to use nostalgia as a tool, but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s ninth feature, seems to have cracked the code on using it as a weapon. It’s a detailed time-machine leading to the Hollywood backlots of the ’60s, only reimagined in Tarantino’s own flamboyant image.

Watching Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is a reminder that while the internet may have exposed the many facets of our “heroes” in the recent times, the system, including the media has always been diabolical and self-serving. Integrity has always been an exception, and will perhaps forever be.

Few characters have the kind of sway over Rabindranath Tagore’s followers as Labanya – arguably, his most complex and nuanced character – from Shesher Kobita (Last Poem). Almost nine decades later, Labanya remains as relevant as she was when she first stormed into popular consciousness.

In an industry that is obsessed with perfectly sculpted appearances, Fahadh Faasil has a receding hairline, no six pack, and painfully regular looks. He is not trapped by any notions of hyper-masculinity. In his films, like Super Deluxe, Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, or even as recent as Kumbalangi Nights, Fahadh is man enough to not be a man.

Four years ago, I was inspired to become a better cook after watching Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia. That quest for improvement turned out to be never-ending and all-encompassing. Here’s the story of a life, told in three recipes.

To read Toni Morrison was to be intimate with her politics; and to be intimate with her politics is to challenge, sometimes even annihilate patterns of thought. I haven’t always agreed with her, but she’s forced me to think, think, think. To cultivate convictions and be political.

How do you grapple with the irony that Netflix, a streaming platform that has acquired The Great Hack, a chilling documentary that profiles the invasion of privacy carried out during the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal, is itself guilty of controlling massive amounts of data about us?

Today, the ninth instalment of Fast and Furious hits theatres, promising to be loud, reckless, and most importantly, fast and furious. How has a series about driving fast and making quips been one of Hollywood’s most bankable properties for 18 years?

Easy not only dissects our lives, but also acts as a reference for all the feelings we may be feeling, but are unable to articulate. It’s precisely why I call for a desi version of the show. Let’s face it, the lack of intimate discussions around sex, gender, and sexuality in India have done us more harm than good.

If season one of Big Little Lies was all about shattering the them-not-us illusion of what a victim of domestic violence looks like, season two tried to capture the hypnotic nature of grief. Poorly written they might be, but between them, Mary Louise and the Monterey Five perfectly encapsulate the messiness of mourning.

A short decade ago, Himesh Reshammiya was performing sold out shows at Wembley and singing almost every second Bollywood chartbuster. Today, as the man — nay legend — celebrates his 46th birthday, it’s worth asking, “Where the hell did Himesh Reshammiya go?”

Queer Eye is about bringing the best tenets of queer culture into the mainstream: The values that come from people who don’t fit the rigid expectations of society, and who understand that, regardless of orientation, no one does. Beyond the trappings of chic wardrobes and tasteful decor, this is what makes the show binge-worthy even in Season 4.