There’s great pleasure in consuming literature that is cerebral and challenging. But I also really, really love the literature that has no greater purpose than to entertain in the moment and spark instant joy. The Princess Diaries, Sweet Valley High, The Fault In Our Stars remind me of who I was before I became who I’ve become.

As a 14-year-old, I turned to teen shows like Hannah Montana and Lizzie McGuire naively believing that they’d help me escape my woes. Instead, I was left aching for a life that could never be mine. It's why I am glad that awkward teens are ruling TV today.

Amazon Prime Video’s One Mic Stand shows us Shashi Tharoor’s likeable, charming side. Look, he’s the guy you can hang out with. But we don’t need Tharoor to be relatable. We needed him to be cutting and crisp, to shame us out of the political coma most of us seem to have slipped into as we wait to hear on our Canadian PR application status.

In Ford v Ferrari, the rivalry indicated in the title is merely a footnote. Instead James Mangold is more interested in locating the bruises that propel men to declare war and mistake it for glory. The result is a thrilling racing drama that ruminates on the line separating ego from pride.

Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World tells us that social awkwardness isn’t necessarily a prison people need to break out of. That looking and behaving like everyone else isn’t the end-all of our existences.

There’s very little point in forming a real opinion on the songs in Jesus is King, for their purpose has gone beyond being just songs. Instead, these are roundabout ways for Kanye West to announce to the world who he is at this point in time.

In the Shah Rukh Khan episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, David Letterman struggles to get DDLJ right, and asks aloud which country SRK’s father fought against for India’s freedom. It’s embarrassing and cringe-worthy, and I’m amazed the audience didn’t immediately break into a chorus of boos.

The enduring appeal of Jaspal Bhatti’s Flop Show lies in the fact that it is rooted in reality. In one episode, government officials were dispatched to find a lost dog – not too different from the three UP cops who were punished for delays in looking for Azam Khan’s stolen buffaloes.

The horror in Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Jallikattu feels potent because it is not posited as a horror film. It’s rooted in a world all too real, where cops are wife-beaters and BJP flags loom the streets and men will literally tear each other apart to assert their superiority.

With two Paul Rudds living side by side, Netflix’s Living with Yourself shows how, in the end, we are all metaphorically battling a version of ourselves that we think we are capable of being. And the worst kind of emotional abuse is the one we inflict on our confidence.

When Boys Don’t Cry released in 1999, it started a conversation about the trans community. But the movie is not without its flaws. It is criticised for inaccurate casting – Hilary Swank, a cis straight woman essaying a trans man – and for being ambivalent regarding its protagonist’s trans identity.

Deepti Gupta's Shut Up Sona is a captivative record of the never-ending punishment, in the form of FIRs and rape threats, that singer Sona Mohaptra has to endure for not being submissive; for being demanding instead of accepting; for using her voice instead of hushing it.

It was with great anticipation that I awaited Modern Love, the Amazon Prime Original show which dramatises, with fictional flourishes, some well-loved Modern Love columns. But I needn’t have held my breath. The show takes everything that makes the column series profound, and flattens the hell out of it.

Upstarts, Netflix India’s latest offering from first time director Udai Singh Pawar, falls in the same category as shows Pitchers and movies like Rocket Singh. But while it attempts to differentiate itself by making a comment on the discrimination women entrepreneurs face, it fails to fully address the issue.

October is a twilit month, suspended between bright summers and shadowy winters. For a fan of horror, there’s no better time in the year. This year, it’s The Terror, a gripping survival horror series, and the new Stephen King adaptation, In the Tall Grass, with which I’m greeting the season of spookiness.

In Euphoria, no passing reference is made to the makeup that its characters wear scene after scene, not even as a compliment, which feels refreshing in a world where women are constantly made conscious of their appearance. The show nudges us to look at makeup as more than a means to an end.

Fight Club is not meant to be the Gospel of the “modern man”. Instead, it does the complete opposite: it takes a sharp jab at the male ego and its heroic pomposity.

The urban gangster was pictured in Pulp Fiction taking casual dumps and discussing the pros and cons of foot massages. The film cushioned its scenes of extreme and gruesome violence, typical of gangster films, with long drawn-out scenes of people just being people. And that’s why you vibe with them.

If Breaking Bad was a show about the sweet innocent Walter White taking control of his life, El Camino is about his loyal sidekick Jesse Pinkman finding his own, finally free from Walt’s manipulation. Aaron Paul pulls this off with the same soft intensity that he injected into Pinkman during Breaking Bad’s five-season run.

What most angry criticism of Joker has missed is that getting inside the headspace of a culprit is not tantamount to validating it. That acknowledgement of mental health does not translate into negation of accountability. The film never denies that Arthur Fleck turns into a psychopathic, nihilistic murderer.

The question of “Is Heisenberg alive or dead?” still looms, thanks to the fact that El Camino, the new Breaking Bad movie, focuses on Jesse Pinkman instead. I couldn’t be happier, because after five top-notch seasons as second fiddle, Pinkman deserves his time in the spotlight.

Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona, a biopic documentary of the greatest footballer of all time, is an enthralling, explosive record of the time when Diego, born in an impoverished town outside Buenos Aires, became a prisoner of Maradona, the celebrity brand he created for himself.

Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, marks the first time we, the audience, get to see The Joker not as the larger-than-life Clown Prince of Crime, but as just another disturbed loner – a novel approach to portraying a character that has been analysed, explained, and dissected both in print and on film for over 50 years.

Bard of Blood is yet another insipid Netflix book adaptation that feels foremost, at odds with the format it has chosen. It boasts neither the complexity nor the suspense to warrant seven episodes that run at a length upward of 45 minutes.

The Shawshank Redemption made it okay for guys to cry, and spawned a change in modern-day cinema that helps encourage this. Even superhero films today don’t end with the guy saving the day and getting the girl, they end with tears and male fans endorsing their bawling as a thumbs up to the movie.

The Family Man is slick, fast, and in the hands of the peerless Manoj Bajpayee a delightful watch. His Srikant Tiwari is a hero, but can’t claim to be one – in some ways, a loser and tired evidently of being labelled so.

Twenty-five years on, F.R.I.E.N.D.S is the subject of our generation's biggest polarising pop-culture debates. The millennial criticism of the sitcom accuses it of being sexist, unfunny, and even bland. But I often wonder if using a 2019 lens to critique a TV show that is not from this time, a valid critique of it.

Stephen King’s books reveal their depths slowly. Great horror comes from a fight between hope and hopelessness, empathy and the lack of it, and all of King’s stories straddle that fine line.

Eleven years after Sylvester Stallone’s last outing as the Elon Musk of innovative murder techniques, he’s back as Rambo in a film that makes you feel as if you’ve gone back in time while you’re watching it. Watching Last Blood feels like being served leftovers from the earlier, better films in the series.

I am an incurable Christopher Nolan fan; I took a two-day train journey to watch Interstellar, the way he wanted us to. I never thought I’d really meet him. So when I chatted with the director about film projectors while he was shooting Tenet in Mumbai, the moment felt unreal.