A lot depends on Pakistan’s film and cinema industry this Eid al-Fitr. The long holiday weekend arrives as audiences increasingly choose OTT platforms over theatres, convinced that their time and money are better spent watching content on services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. Recent local releases such as Neelofar …
PUBLISHED March 08, 2026 The cinema of a region is never merely a sequence of images, it is a choreography of belonging. To speak of South Asia on screen is to invoke not a stable geography but a vibrating field of memory, partition, aspiration and loss. The image flickers between …
PUBLISHED February 22, 2026 KARACHI: Ever wondered how Netflix manages to churn out successful shows that land on your watch list and quickly become the topic of discussion among friends? The answer is simple: for every hit, there are several misses. The platform experiments constantly, learning what works and what …
PUBLISHED February 08, 2026 KARACHI: The Rip might not have released in a cinema near you, but it’s one of those films that would have played just as well on the big screen. Not only does it reunite Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, but it also restores the audience’s faith …
PUBLISHED February 01, 2026 KARACHI: Nisar Bazmi wasn’t just an ordinary music director—he was an institution. His name remains synonymous with quality film songs produced from the 1960s through the 1990s. His renowned student, Tanvir Afridi, pays a heartfelt tribute to his Ustad in the form of a biography, Kon …
Often mistaken for relevance, youth is prized almost everywhere in the world. To look young is assumed to mean confidence, competence, energy — still visible, still in the game. In a culture obsessed with speed, beauty, and productivity, youth offers protection from ageism and social erasure. But the desire to …
PUBLISHED January 11, 2026 KARACHI: There are bad films. Then there are worse films. And then some films sit beyond the worst—an unenviable category that Huma Shaikh’s Item proudly occupies. From a poster that screams cringe to a trailer that confirms it, the film ultimately blossoms into a full-fledged cringe …
PUBLISHED December 14, 2025 The last two decades have transformed the ecology of literary culture worldwide, but perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in the geographically dispersed world of Urdu letters. Social media, with its open gates and restless churn, has become both an agora and an anteroom, a performance space …
PUBLISHED November 16, 2025 KARACHI: I came across a reel on Instagram recently that described Dr Victor Frankenstein as the “OG f***boi”. As funny as this Gen Z take on the titular protagonist of Mary Shelley’s classic of Gothic horror may sound, it may not be that far off — …
PUBLISHED November 16, 2025 KARACHI: When Steven Knight set out to dramatise the making of Ireland’s most famous drink, few expected him to stir such potent contradictions. House of Guinness is not just a period drama about ale and ambition — it’s a story about class, faith, and the uneasy …