The attention to detail in 1917 is startlingly impressive, largely courtesy the seamless coalescing of the film’s technical departments. As the action moves from one hellish landscape to another, the audience has no option but to find itself in the midst of chaos.

In the age of CAA, words are the weapons on the tongues of wounded artistes. I witnessed the power of poetry first-hand at Mumbai’s Spoken Fest, where Varun Grover reiterated, “Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge” and Faye D’Souza asked, “Is the government reading the Constitution?”

In A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, Marielle Heller isn’t fixated with viewing Fred Rogers as a mystery that needs to be solved. Instead, Heller, complemented by a pitch perfect Tom Hanks performance, is invested in mapping the extent of his influence through a tender tale of redemption.

At a time when mob rule and goondaism seem rampant in the country, Jamtara, Netflix's latest Indian original, paints an effectual portrait of an India that we often look away from.

Awards season 2020 kicked off at last night’s Golden Globes, and with big-name celebrities, naturally, comes fashion. Forget saving their best outfits for the Oscars, the Golden Globes red carpet saw stars pulling out all the stops.

The first few days of January can seem gloomy and it’s probably the best time to fall back on your streaming subscriptions. We, the good folks at Arré, have some recommendations that should help you cope with the post-holiday blues.

While meme templates and pop references come and go like rainfall in Mumbai, some pieces of content captured the essence of this year quite succinctly. Here are our contenders for Meme of the Year.

Even as India registers a low rank for starting a business, and millions of micro-firms struggle to stay afloat, a new species of internet-enabled artist-entrepreneur is thriving. Unburdened by corporate or political bureaucracy, Indian hip-hop’s army of ardent creators have hooked our youth to a quality product.

Every Malayalam filmmaker of repute today has had a similar pattern of learning and self-reflection: There’s an ambitious film here, a glorious misfire there, tied together by cinema that defined the decade. Lijo Jose Pellissery's debut and steady rise – from a talent to watch out for, to one of the industry’s very best – reflects the journey of everyone who came along with him.

Usually, pop-culture has an archaic way of portraying older women on screen, depicting them as women who are devoid of desire. That seemed to change this year. In shows like Fleabag, Succession, and the Morning Show, middle-aged women wore their desire like second skin.

Fleabag has emerged as the literal last word in feminine black comedy – more universal than the self-indulgent whiners in Girls and more visceral than the witticisms of Broad City. Perhaps, it’s because Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s show has both the sharpness and the courage to identify problems with millennial feminism as we know it.

In the last decade, stand-up comedy came-of-age in India. The comedy scene went from being limited to laughter challenges on TV to hilarious sets packaged as bite-sized videos on YouTube. What started as a bunch of people posting their thoughts with the sole purpose of being funny transmuted into a sub-culture of its own.

The thought of watching another Jedi vs Sith battle while protests raged across the country was enough to cause a little guilt. But at the demonstration against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan, I realised that even here, there were people resisting the Dark Side of the Force.

In its third season, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel continues to be a perfectly pleasant – if overly long – confection. Yet it still seems unwilling to call Midge’s courage into question and ask whether she has what it takes to be not just a better comic but also a better person.

There is no battle in the stinging, visceral Marriage Story, a drama centred around divorce, the ultimate war against domestic decency. That’s because it doesn’t take sides, but offers a perspective, arguing that sometimes there’s no other way to love someone than to stop being in love with them.

Black Mitzvah, Tiffany Haddish’s debut Netflix stand-up special, is both a celebration of its star’s newly-minted fame. But it’s also a sobering commentary on the limited chances that a woman gets in the male-dominated trenches of comedy.

Much before gully boys were spitting “buntai” and “boht hard” into a mic, there was one man who was rapping about Mumbai and its streets. His name is Jaaved Jaaferi. The man, who turns 56 today, influenced ’90s kids with his music, moves, and inimitable commentary. Remember Takeshi’s Castle?

Hotel Mumbai makes the mistake of placing wealthy foreigners at the centre of its story, effectively taking a myopic view of the tragedy. The makers’ unfamiliarity with the cultural reverberations of the 26/11 terror makes it a classic victim of outsider-making-a-movie-about-India syndrome.

The Irishman, a 209-minute-long Netflix film, is a slow dimming of the lights on the Martin Scorsese-mob oeuvre that bows out of the ring, having built for itself a legacy akin to a museum that future filmmakers will visit to worship. It is nothing short of a miracle.

Hotstar's Out of Love isn’t the first Indian show to take a crack at the complexities of infidelity, but it might be the rare show that locates the pulse of the betrayal. Aided by a reliable Rasika Dugal, the show compellingly argues that sometimes the things that we do out of love are the very reasons that have us fall out of love.

In Season 3 of The Crown, Olivia Colman delivers a performance that understands that a good drama hinges on great performers yearning to be ordinary humans. She cries like nobody can see but everybody can watch. She cracks like someone who is forced to use death as a device to feel alive. She breaks like someone who discovers that the fourth wall cannot be broken.

How could you, Marie Kondo? After guilt-tripping us for being hoarders and telling us our beloved possessions, collected over the years, didn’t spark joy, you have the temerity to come up with an online store that sells even more crap!

For years, Bikram Chowdhury used his successful yoga franchises to rape and assault innumerable female students. Even though this has been public information, the yoga guru is yet to face his comeuppance. The clear directive of Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator is to be a searing call-to-action that guarantees that he does.

Frozen II is too self-aware, too correct, with too much head and too little heart. None of that matters, of course. If you have a young child in your immediate ecosystem, chances are you’re going to spend a lot of time in the movie theatre in the coming weeks.

Now officially the longest running live-action sitcom in the history of television, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, entered its 14 season this year, and remains as topical as it was when it first aired in 2005. It has never hesitated to address sensitive and pertinent subjects such as #MeToo and climate change.

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.