Roar: Tigers of the Sundarbans

Anurag Kashyap's "Roar: Tigers of the Sundarbans" had a genuinely compelling premise—a grief-stricken man leading a commando squad into forbidden jungle territory to hunt down the tiger that killed his brother. On paper, it's the kind of raw, emotionally charged setup that could've made for gripping cinema. What we got instead was a half-baked revenge thriller that mistakes loud action sequences for actual tension. The film suffers from pedestrian writing, with dialogue that feels lifted from a dozen forgettable action flicks, and direction that never quite figures out whether it's making a character study or a beast-hunt spectacle. Nawazuddin Siddiqui does his best to inject some gravitas into Pandit, but even his considerable talent can't salvage a script that treats grief like a checkbox rather than a genuine human experience.

The technical execution is where things really fall apart. The Sundarbans—one of the world's most visually stunning ecosystems—is shot like a generic forest backdrop, draining it of atmosphere and menace. The tiger itself, clearly rendered through dodgy VFX in several scenes, becomes laughable rather than terrifying. For a film so heavily dependent on building dread around an apex predator, the creature never feels like a genuine threat; it's just a plot device. The commando team dynamics are forgettable, the action sequences are poorly choreographed, and the pacing drags in exactly the wrong moments. What could've been a tense survival thriller dev