Samir Satam

Danish Renzu’s Songs of Paradise is a hymn to the transformative power of songs and the steady courage behind it. It traces the life of Zeba Akhtar, portrayed in youth by Saba Azad and in later years by Soni Razdan. From its opening scenes, Zeba’s voice feels both fragile and insistent, an echo in a world determined to filter out female expression. Zeba’s character arc lingers on breath held before a performance, on an eye shift that betrays pride, on a voice bending the geo-cultural map of its time. The film’s narrative moves like an aria, weighing heritage and longing more heavily than dramatic Pyrotechnics. Saba Azad inhabits young Zeba with quiet intensity, every gesture calibrated less to attract attention, more to reclaim it. Soni Razdan, as the older Noor Begum, holds the screen with spectral calm, as if her voice still hums in her bones. Between them lies the film’s emotional chord: time has worn her strength thin, but not gone. Abhay Sopori’s re-creation of Kashmiri compositions and Masrat-un-Nisa’s vocals function as Zeba’s inner language, unsent, yet unignored. Renzu’s Kashmir is not the conflict-scarred image the world knows, but a land carrying memory, music drifting by willow trees, rivers that remember her, and small injustices that won’t let her stay silent. The film occasionally smooths edges: obstacles slip too easily, conflicts resolve with too much decorum. Yet those soft arcs reflect Zeba’s day-to-day perseverance rather than cinematic dramatization, her revolution is small, gentle, yet relentless. Songs of Paradise is a rising note carried on a breath. It reminds us that sometimes, revolutions are not always loud, but can be gentle and can be remembered in silence.

A Pressure Cooker in the Desert! The Last Stop in Yuma County unfolds like a forgotten postcard from the American Southwest, faded, sun-stained, and quietly ominous. Set in a lonely roadside diner, the film observes violence creeping through stillness and stiffled whispers. A gas station out of fuel, a waitress with tired eyes, and strangers who stay longer than they should, these are the ingredients of this taut, slow-burn thriller. The film becomes especially memorable because of the psychological pressure that builds up inside the diner. Everyone is waiting, some for gas, some for coffee, some for something to snap, and when it does, karma plays out with methodical precision. Director Francis Galluppi is more interested in dread than drama. He stages the diner like a pressure cooker, where politeness is weaponized and silence feels like a countdown. The characters are stripped of backstories, which somehow makes them feel more real, people reduced to decisions, caught in a game where hesitation can be fatal. At its core, The Last Stop in Yuma County is about ordinary people tested under extraordinary pressure. It asks what breaks first under fear: morality, community, or self-preservation. The answers are never dull.

Saeed Roustayi's Leila's Brothers is an intimate portrait of a family stretched to its breaking point, led by Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti), whose life becomes a ledger balancing debt, duty, and resilience. Set against Iran's economic turmoil, the film funnels a nation's struggle through the lens of one household. Roustaee places us in the cramped rooms, capturing micro-explosions of anger, desperation, and fleeting tenderness. The film's power lies in its psychological clarity: Leila's rage reveals itself in a slow burn of managing chaos while being invisible. Taraneh Alidoosti's performance is magnetic, holding in tension between what is said and left unsaid. Economics, traditions, and aspirations collide in the small dramas of daily survival: a wedding, a business pitch, a heated argument. Each scene reflects larger forces, sanctions, patriarchal expectations, class anxiety, without ever losing focus on the human centers at its core. Leila's Brothers is a film that leaves you unsettled, as it lets you feel the small tremors beneath.

Karan Tejpal's Stolen is a taut psychological thriller that unfolds like an observation of complicity under a conscientious microscope. The vision of self creeps in quietly, and leaves you staring at yourself longer than you'd like. Set in the blistering stillness of rural India, the film begins with a crime: a baby is stolen from a mother sleeping on a railway platform. But this plot is only the surface. The deeper drama lies in how the event reverberates through the psyches of the two urban brothers who happen to be at the site of crime. What makes Stolen compelling is its refusal to deliver catharsis. There are no heroes here, only spectators. The camera lingers on what it means to observe thus making the theft of the child a symbolic act of everything that is routinely taken from the invisible lower class by the booming higher class that watches, pities, and moves on. The psychological tension between the characters stems from their internal dissonance, but it also triggers our own. As their silence becomes contagious, our privileges grow porous; while we ask ourselves, what have we become in our cumulative inaction? Tejpal is particularly astute in portraying how the mind rationalises guilt. One brother intellectualises it, tries to help without awareness of ground realities, the other tries to ignore, flee from social responsibility, all the while justifying his cold-heartedness to himself. However, neither escape. The film quietly reveals how avoidance metastasises into self-estrangement. Their shared silence becomes a third character, more haunting than the crime itself. Stolen embraces restraint, building an atmosphere of moral claustrophobia: long takes, chaotic dialogue, and a slow unravelling that mirrors how trauma often seeps in sideways. What elevates the film is its unflinching look at the psychology of witnessing. In an age where tragedies are scrolled past, at the most just re-posted, Stolen asks: - What is the emotional cost of observing pain and doing nothing? - When does inaction become a form of violence? Stolen leaves you not with answers, but with discomforting questions, the kind that don't fade with the credits. - Were we primarily rooting for the safety of the brothers or justice for the mother? - Throughout the film, how much did we distrust based on social status of characters? - How many actions did we compartmentalise as 'practical' or 'emotional'? - Is our urge of sticking to the safe zone, dangerous for those with lesser social power? - What's our responsibility towards those with lesser power than us? It's a reminder that sometimes, what's taken isn't just an external object, but a part within us, we didn't know was still intact.

Finch isn't a movie about saving the world; it's about getting someone else ready to live in it. In Miguel Sapochnik's story about the end of the world, Tom Hanks plays the title character, one of the last people left on Earth after it was burnt by the sun. He constructs a humanoid robot named Jeff to take care of his dog after he dies. What happens is a mix of a road movie, an elegy, and a reflection on ethics. Finch cuts survival down to its most basic human elements: trust, heritage, and care, against a dwvastated landscape. The movie makes us think about what we pass on, how we treat other people and whether empathy can be taught. The sadness and the optimism of the film rise from the thought maybe it is possible to program decency, if it is first lived with commitment. In an empty world, Finch finds calm dignity in choosing to nurture instead of rule. It's more about inheritance than the end of the world, inheritance that doesn't need a name, only caring.

Secrets We Keep unfolds with quiet urgency, tracing the disappearance of a Filipino househelp, in an upscale Copenhagen suburb. What begins as a personal concern gradually exposes a layered critique of privilege, systemic neglect, and the quiet complicity of those who benefit from both. The girl’s absence becomes a lens to examine the asymmetries of care, labour, and belonging in a society that prides itself on fairness, yet falters when accountability challenges comfort. The storytelling is restrained yet charged, balancing empathy with discomfort. With only six episodes, Secrets We Keep distills its critique with precision, leaving behind not answers, but echoes difficult questions about power, silence, and the hierarchies embedded even in acts of kindness. This is not a crime thriller. It's a moral reckoning.