RD Recommends: Superboys of Malegaon, Myself and Other Animals, How Did This Get Made? and More

From long-awaited returns to buzzy new releases, the entertainment world is overflowing—in the best way. Your watchlist is growing, your TBR pile is teetering, and there’s more to choose from than ever. Consider this list your quick, curated guide to what’s worth your time right now.

Superboys of Malegaon, In theatres on 28 February

Inspired by Faiza Ahmad Khan’s award-winning 2008 documentary Supermen of Malegaon, this is the amazing true story of Nasir Shaikh from Malegaon (near Nashik in Maharashtra) who ended up creating a mini-film-industry with the help of his friends. Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger) plays Nasir with rare sensitivity and humour—a man who uses superhero stories as both escapism and symbolism.

Vineet Kumar Singh (Mukkabaaz) is equally brilliant while the real star is comedian Varun Grover’s screenplay. Superboys of Malegaon fills every frame, every moment with such an infectious love of cinema and its history that even the most hardened cynic will surely crack a smile at these characters’ courage, pluckiness and childlike sense of wonder.

The Electric State, On Netflix on 14 March

The Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s ‘retro-futuristic’ paintings of a post-apocalyptic American wasteland comprised the bulk of his acclaimed 2018 graphic novel The Electric State, where a teenaged orphan named Michelle is looking for her lost brother alongside a robot companion called Skip.

The Russo Brothers, makers of Avengers: Endgame and other Marvel blockbusters, have adapted the graphic novel into an original story, adding the character of Keats (Chris Pratt), a drifter who helps Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown). The film also boasts of a stellar supporting cast, with veterans like Brian Cox (Succession) and Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad) featured in cameos alongside Marvel favourite Anthony Mackie (the new Captain America).

Ziddi Girls, On Amazon Prime Video, on 27 February

Amazon’s latest dramatic web series is set in the fictional women’s college Mathilda House, a thinly-veiled version of Delhi’s Miranda House. So much so that the current principal of the women’s college asked one of the series’ directors, and alumna, Shonali Bose (Amu, Margarita With a Straw) to remove any mentions of the acronym ‘MH’ from the show because real-life alumni often use it to this day.

In Ziddi Girls, meanwhile, a group of determined, strong-willed young women declare open rebellion against the tyrannical reign of a super-strict new principal. Will the residents of Mathilda House live up to their illustrious predecessors’ footsteps, not to mention their own ideals?

Myself and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (Viking)

Born in 1925, the British naturalist Gerald Durrell grew up on the Greek island of Corfu in the late 1930s. My Family and Other Animals (1956), his autobiographical (but exaggerated and sometimes, lightly fictionalized) account of those years, became a worldwide publishing sensation and has sold millions of copies down the years. 

To celebrate Durrell’s birth centenary, Viking has released Myself and Other Animals, an unfinished memoir that Durrell eventually fell too ill to complete. Durrell was renowned for gently laying bare his family’s neuroses and eccentricities, especially his elder brother the novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell (author of The Alexandria Quartet).

Spies, Lies and Allies: The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy by Kavitha Rao (Westland)

Kavitha Rao’s latest work of nonfiction immerses readers into an offbeat, globalist side of Indian history that doesn’t always receive the requisite attention. In focus are two all-but-forgotten communist revolutionaries: Virendranath Chattopadhyay and M.N. Roy. The former, Sarojini Naidu’s brother, eventually distanced himself from communism but Roy is still known as one of the pioneers and ideological founts of Indian communism.

 Together, they had some rollicking adventures across the globe—Russia, Brazil, Mexico—and encountered some of the most important men in the world at the time, including Stalin and Nehru. The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy is perfect for Indian history buffs—and if you aren’t one, this book might just convince you.

Life on Mars: Collected Stories by Namita Gokhale (Speaking Tiger)

Namita Gokhale is one of the veterans of Indian writing in English, having written over a dozen books since her debut novel Paro (1984) over four decades ago. Life on Mars collects her short fiction down the years, divided into two sections: ‘Love and Other Derangements’ and ‘The Mirror of the Mahabharata’. The former contains stories of ordinary people caught between duty and happiness, between propriety and release—the story of a surprising one-night stand in Rishikesh, of a woman who finds companionship with a man as young as her sons.

 The Mahabharata section takes us into the hearts and minds of some of the epic’s most memorable characters. Like Kunti and Gandhari, mothers united in their profound grief following the slaughter of the Kurukshetra war.

Middlebrow by Dan Rosen and Brian Park

Rosen and Park made their name doing online comedy skits about the eccentricities of millennial and Gen Z culture—and the Middlebrow podcast is in the same vein. This podcast, as the name suggests, is about those parts of contemporary pop culture that do not fit neatly into either ‘high’ or low’ culture (Rosen and Park also deliver a brief history of the Enlightenment and the split between high and low culture that happened as a result). Why are Sally Rooney novels suddenly so popular with 20-somethings? How did sommeliers become a status symbol? How did the rise and fall of TED Talks come about? Middlebrow takes listeners on an accessible and yet intriguing journey to answer questions like these.

How Did This Get Made? By Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas

This is a comedic podcast about films that aren’t just bad, but bad on an epic scale. Essentially, the genre dubbed ‘so bad it’s good’. Scheer, Raphael and Mantzoukas are all well-known comedic actors (Mantzoukas was on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, for example) and their familiarity with Hollywood history and the nitty-gritty of film production are this podcast’s biggest assets. They provide detailed breakdowns and behind-the-scenes gossip from some of Hollywood’s biggest ‘turkeys’—high-profile terrible films—like Fifty Shades of Grey, The Transporter etc. Sometimes they also talk about ludicrous low-budget marvels like The VelociPastor (2019), a movie about a Catholic priest who can turn into a dinosaur at will.

The Dave Chang Show by Dave Chang

Host David Chang is best known as the chef behind the Momofuku restaurants—and the creator of the Netflix docu-series Ugly Delicious, where ‘exotic’ foods are broken down in terms of taste, cultural context and socio-economic history. This podcast is a slightly more extended version of the same freewheeling, amazingly erudite and always-intriguing conversations that Chang sets up so beautifully in his Netflix show. As always, the theme is overcoming cultural misconceptions and bringing people together via food. For example, Chang famously set up a ‘Viet-Cajun’ fusion food business in New Orleans—where both Vietnamese and Cajun cuisines had long since thrived, but never converged.