The actor posted a copy of the notification issued by the provincial government to his Instagram account, thanking Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz for giving his fans the opportunity to watch his film Zombeid in theatres.

“People of Punjab, CM Maryam Nawaz has opened cinemas for you. Now go and watch our film,” the actor wrote in the post’s caption.

In the comments, his Zombeid costar Mehwish Hayat sent him a congratulatory GIF and the province’s ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, sent him love for appreciating the government.

On Tuesday, Mustafa posted an appeal to Punjab Senior Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb calling for a “modest” extension in the operating hours of cinemas — which were closing at 8pm like most businesses in the province — to give people time to watch movies later in the evening.

His open letter said the austerity measures were adversely affecting newly-released films which needed “this period to reach audiences”.

Under the new regime, businesses have been divided into four categories with different timing curbs. Shops, markets, shopping malls and bazaars will be the earliest to close at 9pm, with marriage halls, marquees and ceremonial spaces next to shut their doors at 10pm.

Restaurants, cafes, cinemas, eateries and standalone fruit and vegetable shops will close at 11pm under the new schedule and a number of businesses — bakeries, tandoors, milk shops, fuel pumps, CNG stations, electrical vehicle charging stations, gyms, sports facilities, padel courts, IT companies and call centres — will be exempt from these austerity measures entirely.

Hospitals, clinics, medical laboratories, pharmacies, medical and medical supply stores will similarly be exempt owing to their essential nature.

In an Instagram post shared by the festival, the ACPK and its president, Ahmed Shah, it was announced that filmmakers from around the world were invited to submit their work for consideration to be displayed at the festival.

The post said submissions were live on Freeway and a variety of categories were welcome, including documentaries, narratives and short films.

The World Culture Festival will take place at the Arts Council from October 29 to November 22 and is expected to feature over 1,000 artists representing over 140 different countries.

Films aren’t the only thing on display at the festival, which has had strong theatre and music segments over its previous two runs. Dance and visual arts also form part of the festivities with exhibitions, performances and workshops.

The last edition, which ran from October 30 to December 7, had more than 800 artists from 102 countries displaying their work in Karachi.

The extensive film lineup for the 37-day festival included Pakistan’s Dukhtar and The Glass Worker, Spain’s Los Tigres and Glimmers, Polish feature Home and Italy’s Paper heart.

Other highlights of the festival were its many plays and grand weekly concerts and dance nights.

In an open letter to the province’s senior minister, Marriyum Aurangzeb, the actor contended that many moviegoers are busy with other things earlier in the day, so some audiences were “only able to attend screenings later in the evenings”.

Mustafa said that since many cinemas in the province were located inside malls — which close at 8pm under austerity measures taken in view of a global fuel crisis triggered by the Iran-US/Israel war — they were also operating on shortened schedules. “The early closure is affecting recently released films that are relying on this period to reach audiences,” he said.

The actor said a “modest” extension in operating hours would “increase ticket sales”, “support employment across the exhibition and hospitality sectors” and “provide greater access and convenience for audiences”.

Mustafa appreciated the Punjab government for its “support for the film industry,” including initiatives like CM Maryam Nawaz’s Film City plan for Lahore. He requested the government to support the creative sector once more with a “small relaxation” in cinema timings, something that would be “appreciated by filmmakers, exhibitors and cinemagoers alike”.

The actor’s film Zombeid premiered on Eidul Azha and is playing in theatres nationwide. The film was one of three Pakistani movies released over Eid last week, competing for screen space limited by the restrictions in timings — which were relaxed temporarily for the holiday.

Any easing of these restrictions would allow these films more space to reach audiences.

The debate gained momentum after leading actor Deepika Padukone reportedly exited a major project last year over a demand for shorter working hours following motherhood, thrusting the issue of work-life balance into the spotlight in India’s film industry.

Bollywood has long been known for punishing schedules, with shifts often stretching from 12 to 18 hours and, at times, continuing for more than a day during intensive shoots.

But what was once accepted as the norm is now being questioned, with growing calls for humane working conditions and limits on daily hours.

Supporters of reform say the current system disproportionately puts pressure on women, who often face being labelled pushy or difficult — a stigma rarely attached to male stars.

A number of actors, including Suniel Shetty, Kajol and Ram Kapoor, have backed the push for healthier boundaries, arguing that established stars should be able to set limits on working hours.

“Once you have achieved success in showbiz… then, yes, you are in a position to choose how many hours you want to work,” Kapoor told AFP, reflecting a view that bargaining power in the industry remains tied to status.

Others, however, warn that the fluid nature of filmmaking makes rigid eight-hour shifts “unreal” to enforce on mega-budget sets.

Poor planning

“This is not like a corporate job,” said actor Ali Fazal, pointing to the varying demands of projects, particularly action-heavy or technically complex productions.

Actor Chitrangda Singh echoed that argument, citing several variables such as weather disruptions and equipment failures that can derail tightly planned schedules.

“Filmmaking is also driven by business realities,” she said.

Industry insiders highlight the steep costs involved in large productions, where locations, crew and equipment can cost more than $26,000 per day, creating pressure to maximise shooting time.

Former Cine & TV Artistes’ Association official Amit Behl said filmmakers often cannot afford to halt shoots midway, especially when a large crew or elaborate action sequences are involved.

“The bungalow in which Animal (an action blockbuster) was shot cost 25 lakh rupees ($26,300) a day rental,” said Behl.

“Then you have to prop it up with junior artistes, which is an additional expenditure besides catering, electricity, vanity vans and bouncers.”

But critics argue that such explanations often mask poor planning and systemic inefficiencies, placing the burden of long hours on cast and crew.

Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur criticised what he called a hierarchy that prioritises top actors over technicians, saying work-life balance should apply to all on the set.

“Everyone (should have) the privilege to define the hours they want to work,” he told AFP.

Workaholic

The controversy has also highlighted disparities within the industry, where junior artistes and crew often have little negotiating power.

For many, the recent debate marks a broader shift in Bollywood, with younger professionals and established stars alike beginning to challenge the long-standing norms.

Yet opinions remain divided.

“I have seen Shah Rukh Khan on sets working 27 hours non-stop when he had to complete a scene. He doesn’t need to do it,” Behl said, referring to the Bollywood superstar.

“But you can’t leave a scene mid-way… if it is an action scene where fighters are involved, anything can happen… it is not like shutting a laptop and working for an IT company.”

Some veterans, like actor Madhuri Dixit, frame the issue as a personal choice rather than a structural problem.

“We did a 12-hour shift or maybe more every day for Mrs Deshpande,” she told AFP, mentioning the 2025 crime thriller.

“But if a woman wants to work (fewer) hours, that is her prerogative, her life… more power to her. To each his own, I’m a workaholic!”

The endless yellow hallways of A24’s Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, terrified tens of thousands of people in its opening weekend to rack up $118 million at the box office.

And Focus Features film Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, has taken in $148 million worldwide in two weeks — a smash hit for a production that cost $750,000.

“It’s a huge, huge success and a real turning point for the industry, potentially,” said associate editor Matthew Frank of The Ankler, a digital media company that covers Hollywood.

“They’re breaking out with these films that are appealing to a younger demographic,” Frank said, adding that the vast majority of ticket buyers the past couple weekends “have been under 35 and even, you know, under 25. So it’s appealing to this demographic [that] normally doesn’t really get spoken to.”

In recent years multiplexes have faced a multi-fold decline, fueled by the rise of streaming, a lag in recovery in ticket sales since Covid, and the strikes that halted production in Hollywood in 2023.

But this year’s numbers are drumming up optimism for the best year since the pandemic.

This is thanks in part to Generation Z, which boosted the box office by 25 per cent last year, according to a report from the National Research Group.

Theatre owners are “ecstatic about these weekends,” said Ronnie Yount, owner of the Phoenix Theatres chain in the Midwest.

Yount compared both films to Lilo & Stitch for driving box office — which seemed unthinkable.

Franchise fails

The trick to tapping into the younger market is to “deliver the right films,” Frank said.

“Hollywood’s problem, for a while, was saying, ‘oh, it’s young people,’ when in fact it was because they were making the 10th (installment in) pre-existing franchises that were popular for their parents.”

The safe bets from studios that hoped to cash in on an endless slate of summer action hero movies turned off younger audiences.

“When you make something that’s for that audience, that’s when they’ll come out,” Frank said.

Parsons, who is known to his 3.2 million subscribers as Kane Pixels on YouTube, has racked up more than 300 million views.

The inspiration for Backrooms came from a photo posted to an internet forum in 2019 showing, without context, a yellow space.

Parsons, then a teenager, told AFP that he saw the image as a “vaguely nostalgic and vaguely dreamlike but also very tangible science-fiction concept.”

His YouTube video of a young man lost in terrifying corridors amassed millions of views in a matter of days, and led to a contract with A24.

His endless nightmare is now on the big screen, starring Oscar-nominated actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.

Barker went from an audience of 1.1 million subscribers on his channel That’s a Bad Idea to premiering Obsession at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025.

The movie follows the horrifying consequences after a young man’s wish comes true, and the target of his romantic attention begins to love him more than anything else in the world.

Frank said very production company and studio in Hollywood right now is asking: “How can we replicate this?”

“Not just because they’re huge successes, but they’re also made for these limited budgets.”

But he warned it’s not just about finding successful YouTubers.

“It still requires just finding the great filmmakers, which can come anywhere.”

Although far from entertaining, it is by far the most interesting scene in a film that starts from nowhere, dawdles aimlessly, chooses to tell half a story, and ends with a “To Be Continued” bumper.

One can’t help but feel that story writer, director and producer Imran Malik is insisting that the remaining, presumably better half, rests in a sequel. A sequel that may never come to pass.

When one views the film in that context, can one really blame the lead character for being sad?

For the purposes of the story, we learn the source of Zarshaan’s sorrow through low-quality, AI-rendered flashbacks. His parents (Usman Peerzada and Saba Hameed) were researchers who had everything — money, a mansion, and a thriving business in Thailand — but lost it all thanks to a bad investment.

In one atrocious AI flashback, we see them perishing in a highway accident. Zarshaan, being the driver, is ridden with guilt. Or is he?

Penniless, sensible and cheerful enough when not sad — though we never quite understand why a grown man chooses wallowing over taking charge of his life despite his hardships — he helps a disabled boy retrieve a kite. At the end of the kite-chase he ends up — again, with AI-assisted inserts — in an apartment where several young women live.

Presumably an astute, worldly-wise young man (probably because Saeed plays him that way), he fails to notice that there is something off about these women.

For starters, they have no elders in the house, dress conspicuously and strut home late at night from parties, claiming that they’re coming from a shrine. They’re also scared of the law — when sirens blare, they scramble to hide beneath the bed.

It is revealed late in the film (insert dull surprise here) that they are prostitutes. The film chooses to call them ‘Tawaiafs’. Given that he is from Thailand — a country where prostitution thrives with a $6 to $8 billion annual turnover — it is hard to excuse his naivety, or the screenplay’s insistence upon it.

As was bound to happen, our hero falls somewhat in love with Billo (Mamya Shajaffar), the spunky, wide-eyed heroine who doesn’t blink.

“Somewhat” is the operative word here. There is no build-up to the romance, even when 70 per cent of the film unfolds within the confines of two sets that function as Zarshaan’s perpetually messy apartment. The very apartment whose room he rents to the two women.

While the audience tries to make sense of the relationship between the two leads, three side-tracks are shoehorned into the running narrative.

The first is the comic relief, Sardar Happy Singh (Rana Ijaz) — a good-hearted, lascivious sleaze-bag who befriends Zarshaan and then asks him to spy on his cheating wife (Happy, by the way, was cheating on her as well).

The second track involves Sureet (Mehrunisa Iqbal), a Hindu girl abducted at a young age and forced into prostitution. Like Happy’s track, this does not fit naturally into the narrative.

The third — and just as ill-fitting as the other two — features the eternally, manically happy villain (Tabrez Khan), who lives off the prostitutes’ earnings. Apparently a pretty big deal, this unhinged bad guy is never given scenes that establish who he really is or what makes him tick.

These scattered ideas — one cannot even call them a fully mapped-out story — lumber along until the pacing collapses under its own weight. Then the unthinkable happens: screenwriter Wajid Zuberi and Malik flip the script 180 degrees by introducing Babar Ali.

Ali plays one of Luv Di Saun’s two “other” heroes. He is the bodyguard of a billionaire (Rashid Khwaja) searching for his empire’s heir.

No points for guessing that Billo is the heir. After all, as she herself says in a scene, she always felt she didn’t quite belong in the life she was living, even though she is often seen having a ball.

The other “other” hero enters just before the climax: Humayun Saeed. Pakistani cinema’s unassailable superstar plays an unassailable Dabangg-style police officer who holds a tasbeeh in his killer hands. The man frees kidnapped women, looks up to the Almighty for permission, and then saves Zarshaan after he is beaten to a pulp.

By now, Luv Di Saun has thrown Farhan Saeed’s character to the sidelines, abandoning the idea of a simple wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story and replacing it with a plot-line that makes little to no sense.

And yet the film is still not over. The aforementioned “To Be Continued” bumper hits the viewer like a sledgehammer, alluding to a far bigger story that’s left up in the air. A story worth, perhaps, 10 minutes of screen time.

One fails to see the bigger picture here. For a good two and a half hours, the audience is forced to accept an unmapped half-picture — one that is amateurishly edited, badly sound-designed, and constricted to a few sets — only to be told that even this minuscule story has been left incomplete.

One wonders if Luv Di Saun is worse than Imran Malik’s last film, Azaadi, starring Moammar Rana and Sonya Hussyn. It is definitely better acted — though only because of Saeed, who is on-screen for 80 per cent of the runtime; it is also better shot (the director of photography is Syed Faisal Bukhari), and has a decent song or two. But these few qualities do not equate to a better experience.

For the most part, the long running time desperately tries to build characters. Both Zarshaan and Billo have scenes that could have added dimension and emotional resonance; instead, they feel fake and superficial. After a while, the entire exercise grows repetitive.

Being boring is the least of Luv Di Saun’s problems, though. The bigger issue is its failure to figure out its own story — and without a story brimming with passion, conviction, conflict, and forward momentum, what is left in a film other than wasted hours?

The acting was fine, the plot was fine, the visuals were fine. Everything was just fine.

As a zombie media aficionado, I’ve seen just about every zombie TV show and movie there is to watch on Netflix and beyond. I love the genre. There’s something about how a zombie apocalypse changes human nature that I love examining. But there was none of that here.

The zombie lore was quite basic — the virus spreads through an extremely predictable mechanism. The zombies are sensitive to sound, but not the smell of human flesh. There is, of course, a final zombie boss who is extremely pumped up on steroids and revenge and lacks the singular flesh-eating motivation the other zombies have… inadvertently raising questions about how that came to be.

I guess that’s one of the most obvious plot holes here for me — and let me tell you, I’m not great at identifying plot holes, I usually like to turn my brain off and watch movies. I enjoy being entertained. Was I entertained? Mildly. Would I watch it again? Nah.

Anyway, now that you have some context, let me talk about the film a bit more. It’s directed by Nabeel Qureshi and Fizza Ali Meerza. They’ve both teamed up with Fahad Mustafa and Mehwish Hayat on at least four other films. The first of these films was Na Maloom Afraad (2014), which I also saw in the cinema, though Hayat only had a cameo appearance in a highly controversial item number. They both starred as leads in their next film together, Actor In Law. What both of these films got really right was the way you could tell they were shot in Karachi because the city was a main character.

Unfortunately, despite Zombeid being advertised as Pakistan’s first zombie thriller, there’s very little in terms of visuals that suggests the film was shot in a recognisable Pakistani city. That was probably the biggest let down for me. After watching a clever promo on Geo News (the film was produced by GeoFilms) where these two anchors go through a rundown of the daily headlines while zombies ravage the office behind them, I was really pumped to witness a zombie apocalypse within a local context.

Instead, most of the movie is centred around an unrecognisable, ugly, concrete block of a gym called Muscle Factory allegedly located in Karachi’s DHA Phase 8 but which may as well be floating in the ether for all we know. Hayat is Zara, a Zumba instructor at the gym, and Mustafa is Wali, a former Mr Pakistan winner whose bodybuilding career was cut short by injury. He asks for a job at the gym and is given a chance to get back into the fitness industry after some time away.

The bane of his existence is Marwan, his former bodybuilding partner, trained by the same (now-dead) ustaad. Marwan was disqualified from the Mr Pakistan competition because his drug test showed he’d been taking steroids. Since then, the man appears to have made it his mission to peddle steroids indiscriminately to insecure looksmaxxers at the gym. Interestingly, it was here that I began wondering… is Zombeid deeper than I’m giving it credit for?

Is it perhaps a commentary on the culture of commodifying and modifying our bodies, making them appear sculpted and perfect for the gazes of others looking at us through their phones? Is it suggesting that the ground zero of this culture are the gyms and bodybuilding competitions of the world? Could it be proposing that such a culture spreads like a virus through proximity to others who are infected with it? Are we all becoming mindless zombies, obsessed with looking a certain way, performing for others’ gazes a certain way?

I didn’t allow my thoughts to go any deeper than this because I thought I may be handing the filmmakers too much credit. There isn’t much else that pointed to any deep-seated motivations behind making this film.

Anyway, as you may have guessed by now, the virus is spread through a trial steroid that Marwan starts injecting desperate looksmaxxers with. What happens next is that the gym becomes infested with zombies. Of course, our leads all remain bite-free for most of the film. There are the usual shenanigans – sneaking around to find a way out of the gym, almost getting bitten, an influencer ludicrously going live to alert citizens about the situation in the gym, a police nafri that shows up hoping to bust a rave they can extort money and ‘confiscate’ drugs and booze from, and finally a throng of people gathering outside the gym, watching expectantly in exactly the way Karachiites hop over to Seaview the minute there’s a storm brewing. (There was a joke about this in the movie too, by the way.)

I won’t tell you how it ends, but I will say I enjoyed the little jokes and allusions to Karachi and Pakistani culture in the movie. The jokes were very current and cleverly written — for instance, there was one about “Strait of Hormones”. Ironically, there are scenes during Wali and Zara’s courtship where they watch a zombie movie in the cinema and then another where they get frisky while playing a zombie shooter game. The chemistry between the leads was good — after all the projects they’ve done together, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

I enjoyed the character of Zara just a little bit more than Wali. Mustafa tends to play the same kind of guy again and again — a sensitive softboi underdog with something to prove. I’m not saying he’s not good at it, but it would be cool to see him in a different role at some point. The visuals of him buffed up as a bodybuilder were hard to stomach though — they definitely looked like his head had been superimposed onto an AI-generated body. I’m not sure how much AI was used in the making of this film, but I’m not a fan of the use of AI in creative disciplines. Why don’t we just save it for things that human beings DON’T want to do?

Overall, I’d give the film a solid 6.5/10. Go watch it with your friends and family and enjoy the jokes. It’s no worse than spending the evening Netflix and chilling at home — and hopefully you’ll get to collectively bond over the experience. Isn’t that what cinema is about, after all?

In a Facebook post on Monday, the actor asked why such an idea was even being entertained, especially when many other women-centric stories exist that could be put on TV to motivate and inspire audiences instead.

In response to reports Saba Qamar was set to star in the project as Anmol herself, Abbasi said it was guaranteed that she would “perform so well that people will fall in love”.

He said Qamar’s earlier project Case No. 9 was a “fantastic drama” that left a “positive impact” on audiences that watched it. He said even he was inspired by the legal thriller that raised much-needed awareness on harassment and the avenues available to survivors seeking justice.

Abbasi questioned why she was then being used to portray such a negative character. He said he didn’t agree with the idea of popularising Anmol’s story by using Qamar’s fame, or anyone else’s.

The filmmaker argued that if the story had to be told, cinema would have proved a more appropriate vehicle as audiences have greater choice in what movies they watch and with whom. He said beaming the story of a criminal into living rooms with young girls watching was “tricky”.

Abbasi decried the drama as an opportunistic ploy to capitalise on the virality of Anmol’s case and said he knew the people behind the idea. He also said he wasn’t earning any favours with them by asking such questions, but that didn’t worry him. “I already am not in their good sacred books anyway,” he said.

The filmmaker was responding to reports a biographical drama serial based on Anmol’s life was in the works at 7th Sky Productions. Alongside Qamar, Case No. 9’s writer Shahzeb Khanzada is reportedly joining the project to write the script.

True-crime entertainment has been somewhat of a hot topic in Pakistan, with some previous attempts being struck down. In recent years, the film Javed Iqbal: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer was denied a nationwide cinematic release in 2022. The film finally reached audiences on Wednesday with a release on YouTube.

At the historic Chinese Theatre, where Monroe’s handprints are immortalised alongside Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) co-star Jane Russell, fans plan to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ — echoing her famed sultry serenade to president John F Kennedy.

One hundred roses and a cake will be placed at the site, a symbol of Hollywood’s golden age and a popular tourist hotspot.

Tributes to Tinseltown’s legendary daughter began on Sunday, with the Academy Museum opening Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, an exhibit celebrating her film career and life cut short.

After shooting to superstardom in the 1950s, the actress and model died of an overdose at her Brentwood home in August 1962, aged 36.

The Academy Museum will host special screenings of her prolific filmography throughout the month, including The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Niagara (1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Misfits (1961).

The exhibit, which runs until February 2027, includes hundreds of original pieces, some rarely on display — such as Monroe’s famed pink dress worn during her iconic performance of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Later in the week, on June 4, Julien’s Auctions will put nearly 200 pieces of Monroe memorabilia under the hammer as part of its special 100 Years of Marilyn sale.

The items include unpublished photographs, a script with notes from her final production, the unfinished short film Something’s Got to Give, and personal items such as handwritten recipes and her Elizabeth Arden lipstick.

Image maker

Born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, Monroe had an unstable childhood spent between orphanages and foster homes. She married for the first time at age 16.

She had her first brush with show business in 1944, while working in a factory, when a photographer arrived to capture photos of women working on production lines during World War II.

Launching into the world of modelling soon after, she divorced her husband and made a history-defining decision: dyeing her brown hair platinum blonde.

She landed her first contract with Fox, and by the age of 30 had established herself as a global star.

Behind the scenes, Monroe founded her own production company, attended the prestigious Actors Studio in New York, and even defied the studios.

In the 1950s, while under contract with 20th Century Fox, she refused to act in the adaptation of the musical The Girl in Pink Tights, deeming the script mediocre and her salary — three times less than that of co-star Frank Sinatra — unfair.

More than half a century before the #MeToo movement shook the global entertainment industry, Monroe denounced the Hollywood “wolves” preying on female talent.

However, Psycho doesn’t fully lean into any genre or theme at all. The film hovers on the edges of psychological thriller, horror and comedy, but ends up using the most cliche elements of all to create a collection of scenes that are structured without a storyline.

Let’s talk about the elements of horror in the film. We see a woman dancing in a short, gold sequinned dress; a scene that is supposed to alert the viewers that she is not mentally well. There’s blood-soaked faces and bodies and many fight scenes. We get many murders and hangings. A huge array of crime happens. None of that, unfortunately, makes it horror.

The primary facet of horror is the shock factor. If done right, horror should make you want to turn away but it should be so captivating that you simply cannot look away. The gore in this film makes you want to look away but you do not care enough to want to keep watching. That’s why the film feels so drawn out.

Horror needs an element of mundanity. If we cannot relate to the characters in some shape or form, it is hard to be scared of — or for — them. In Psycho, the characters are not fleshed out. You cannot find yourself worrying about two-dimensional characters, but that’s all we get here.

The film centres around two romantic couples, both of whom have large age gaps, which makes you question the casting choices. We have Javed Sheikh (71) paired with Meera (49), and Shaan Shahid (55) paired with Sonya Hussyn (29). I was hoping the age differences would be used to drive a point home about age-gap love stories, instead, the film tries hard to pretend that the couples are in similar age groups. At a time when misogyny and ageism are rampant in our society and women are considered too old past their 30s, it was frustrating to see these pairings, no matter how refreshing it was to see someone in his 70s dance and sing in love.

It was different enough from the usual stereotypes of romance being reserved for people in their 20s or 30s. However, it was hard not to notice the age gap between Sheikh and Meera in those scenes specifically.

Overall, in terms of romantic scenes, the film tries to normalise physical affection in married couples, which was a good step forward. But when things go wrong, the same couples turn to violence against each other.

The basic premise of the film, from what I could decipher — even though the premise and the plot seem to be hidden far beyond what the naked eye could see — is about a mentally-ill woman, perhaps even psychotic. But we don’t get any background or context for why she acts that way. All the cliches of a ‘mad’ person get translated through Meera’s character.

The promotions for the film have widely discussed mental health as a key theme that the film explores. So, going into the theatre, I was hoping to see some conversation-sparking characters and themes that could advance mental health care in the country. However, it was disappointing to see that the mentally ill character was just a caricature. She didn’t get a background story and there was no context for why she acted that way.

For a film that promised to shed light on mental health, it did the opposite. The story, if there was one, just reinforced the idea that mentally ill people are dangerous and need to be ‘eradicated’ from society. After the film ended, I was left wondering: why couldn’t the mentally ill woman get a redemption arc similar to the one every man in the film somehow seemed to get? Even the big bad is killed in a dramatic scene that might make you feel bad for him.

If the caricature of a psychotic person wasn’t enough, the film also employs jokes in poor taste, introducing a character who is called “gay” for acting feminine and openly called a “khusra” as a joke. The transphobic slur is used to instil comedic undertones, or at least that’s what the intention seems to be.

In the opening scene of the film, a rape trial is used to introduce the two lawyers. Sara, played by Hussyn, is fighting for the rape victim, and Salman, played by Shahid, is defending the accused. Other than the court scene being unrealistically dramatic, all seems normal until we find out that the two lawyers are in a long-term romantic relationship.

That reveal highlighted the film creators’ ignorance towards the sensitivity of rape trials. Using a rape trial to establish how ‘cool’ the defendant’s lawyer is was something I did not expect to see in 2026. Our drama industry has seen huge advances in terms of sensitivity towards such issues in recent times, but it seems like our films are still stuck in the pre-woke era where rape was just a plot device, not a life-altering incident for the victim.

In the absence of plot and character-building, the viewer would hope to see at least some good dialogue, which we were also deprived of throughout the film. We see some good acting from the big names here but their acting skills are not enough to make up for the lack of storytelling.

There was so much potential to create a film that could spark real conversations on mental health, especially in our society where we clearly lack awareness regarding mental illness, but the creators chose to depict the same stereotypes that typify mentally ill people as insane and dangerous.

The duo’s project was the only one selected from Pakistan and took home one of four prizes at the event, with the other three going to Indian films. Other titles in the running were from Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh.

The Emergency Exit is based on the experiences of people living in Parachinar, a war-weary city in Pakistan’s northwest close to the border with Afghanistan. Both filmmakers are Parachinar natives, so the subject matter is deeply personal to them.

A press release from the two directors said the film “explores how ordinary people continue living amid uncertainty, closely observing daily life, relationships, routines, and the quiet resilience of communities trying to hold onto hope while navigating disrupted realities”.

In an Instagram post on the film, Batool described the documentary as one she made “with a heavy heart and open eyes”. She dedicated it to “those who have suffered, waited for peace, and endured the shadows of war”.

The teaser for the film is the best clue to its haunting ethos, featuring a child around 10 to 12 years old being asked why he isn’t afraid of war.

With the expression of a man who had resigned himself to fate, this child answered, “[If] a missile will come, it will come. And if it hits this house, then what? At most, we will die.”

The Kathmandu Doc Lab brought together a diverse group of young filmmakers from South Asia for mentorship and workshops from industry professionals. Mentors at the festival included Pakistan’s Anam Abbas — of In Flames fame — Bhutan’s Arun Bhattarai and India’s Sarvnik Kaur.

Think of the craziest Bollywood action scene, something like Salman Khan pushing off a whole gang of thugs by force of his upper back alone or Ajay Devgn single-handedly — as in, with one hand — catching a flying ruffian mid-air and spinning him around like the world’s most buff pizza chef.

Now, replace those guys with Faysal Quraishi, with his wardrobe alternating between a police uniform and some stylish kurtas.

From what we can tell, this is a classic tale of a righteous hero fighting crime and taking names. Naturally, he also has a romantic side to him, brought out by Quraishi’s co-lead and the film’s producer Hareem Farooq.

She’s presumably how we get the film’s title too. In a scene, she looks at Quraishi’s lovestruck character and tells him his name should be “Mango Jutt”. When the blushing cop asks why, she replies, “Tu mittha vi ay, te sohna vi (You’re both sweet and pretty).”

Did we mention Quraishi tears some guy’s thumb off midway through the teaser? There are also a few dances peppered in to balance everything out.

While the teaser didn’t come with a release date, the video closed with the message, “Not just the mangoes, Jutt is coming too,” which leads us to believe they could be aiming for a summer release.

An earlier Instagram post from Shamoon Abbasi credited Abu Aleeha as the film’s director and said shooting had already wrapped up.

He shared a clip from the show, which just dropped its second season on Thursday.

“Eid Mubarak from Deli Boys season 2 which just dropped,” he wrote in his caption, asking people to spot the “fake qawwal” in episode five.

In the clip, Sethi sings ‘Chaap Tilak’ while Poorna Jagannathan dances along.

We totally should have seen this coming, given how the soundtrack for Bait, Riz Ahmed’s new show on a British-Pakistani actor hoping to become the next James Bond, was a celebration of all things desi music.

The second season of the Hulu dark comedy Deli Boys, stars Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh and Jagannathan, and has added five new names to its cast. Fred Armisen is set to join as a major character, which was announced back in August, Andrew Rannells and Kumail Nanjiani have been cast as recurring characters, while Robin Thede and Lilly Singh will be joining the show as guest stars.

Created by Abdullah Saeed, the show follows Pakistani-American brothers Mir and Raj Dar (Ali and Sheikh) who have lost everything and are now preparing to take over their father’s criminal empire.

The show, which received acclaim for its representation of Pakistani Americans and it’s comedic content, was renewed for its second season in August. The 10-episode first season — which includes a cameo by Pakistani fashion designer HSY — can be watched on Hulu and Disney+.

In an interview with Something Haute, the actor agreed with host Aamna Isani that this was a “breakthrough moment” for Pakistanis on the world stage and that there was a need for them to step out of the shadow of the ‘South Asian’ label and make an identity for themselves.

Talking about the positive coverage she received from Indian publications, Saeed said, “There was no agenda, we went quietly, did what we were there to do, it just blew up on its own”.

She said the simplicity of her mission made it easier for people to come together around it. “We weren’t with a brand that people are like ‘Should we be a part of this brand, should we not? Should we boycott it, should we not?’”

She said they were there to represent Pakistan and people couldn’t really find much wrong with that. To the people who said she wasn’t representing Pakistani culture by wearing a sleeveless outfit, the actor said they were missing the bigger picture.

She said the clothes she and Rehar wore in France were made by Pakistani craftspeople, including two of her outfits that were made by women in Bahawalpur. Saeed recalled asking Rehar what inspired him, to which the designer replied, “I am just so damn proud and happy to be Pakistani. It all comes from Pakistan, all my designs are 100 per cent Pakistani.”

Responding to a question on what she did at the festival, she said she was there to learn and that she realised Pakistani filmmakers, especially women filmmakers, need to get out into the world.

She said grants and funding for the arts were there for the taking and women needed to come together and try to get them. In that vein, she said she was considering going into production herself. “I can’t sit and wait for it all to fall in my lap,” the actor said.

She said she wanted to bring together writers and directors and make Pakistani cinema for a global audience. Saeed said family dramas were a beloved genre internationally and something Pakistanis excelled at, so that was one avenue to explore. “We’re so good at doing that, all we really need to do is make our stories a little more international somehow.”

On the subject of gender disparity in the entertainment industry and workplaces in general, she advised young girls to know their rights and not to shy away from asking for their needs to be addressed.

“Voice your concerns, communicate with respect, because whether it’s a man or a woman, if you ask for something nicely, many times it happens.”

She said the thing people shouldn’t do was “silently take it, because nothing’s going to happen”.

In entertainment, she said she had always found that the industry treats women better than other places, especially if they knew their rights and read their contracts. She said this had only gotten better after efforts to unionise by seniors like Atiqa Odho.

For her last drama, Kafeel, she said she had been approached by so many people who could relate to the story, which was “heartbreaking”.

Saeed said she hoped the show could hold a mirror to women and help them realise they could help themselves. “If even one woman’s marriage or life is saved by my work, I’ll be very grateful and very happy that the mission is accomplished,” she said.

Even for her older projects like Zindagi Gulzar Hai, she said, “I chose to do these social message dramas because of the impact it had in real life.”

The actor said that not all dramas need to have a message and some can just be there for the sake of entertainment, but they needed to have some level of responsibility in their content.

She lamented that a lot of popular dramas didn’t adhere to that and many didn’t properly deal with the “toxicity” they were portraying on screen.

“If you keep showing and celebrating these things, they will never get resolved, they will continue to be celebrated, continue to be reinforced.”

The show’s lead, Lily Collins, recorded a video announcement to break the news to fans. “After six unforgettable years playing Emily Cooper, I am here to share that this upcoming sixth season will be our final.

“I can’t wait for all the magic ahead and to celebrate our final season with you in the most chic way yet,” she said.

The last season will start off in Greece, after which the show will take audiences to lavish Monaco before finally returning to the city that started it all, Paris.

Director Darren Star — who was given a state honour by France for his work on the show — thanked his team and fans for making the show a success. “Making Emily in Paris with this extraordinary cast and crew has been the trip of a lifetime. As we embark on the final season, I am so grateful to Netflix, Paramount, and, most importantly, the fans who have taken this incredible journey with us.”

Star said, “We can’t wait to share this last chapter with you. Thank you for letting us be a part of your lives, inspiring your dreams of travel and your love of Paris. We will always have Emily in Paris!”

For those in need of a recap, the fifth season saw the protagonist try to set up an office for her employer in Rome, romancing an Italian fashion heir along the way.

With the office now closed, the Italian love interest dumped, her heart still in Paris and a letter from her first French crush calling her to a yacht on the Aegean Sea, the stage is set for a dramatic finale to tie all the loose ends together.

Netflix has yet to announce a release date for the show’s finale; all we know is that it is expected to release sometime this year.

Cover: Netflix

But one A-lister who eluded the comic to the end was the pope, whom Colbert, a devout Catholic, had long touted as his dream guest.

“The pope, who was definitely my guest tonight, has canceled,” Colbert joked, blaming a dispute over hotdogs before McCartney appeared to rapturous cheers.

The show, which Colbert has hosted since 2015, was axed after he mocked the broadcaster for a $16 million settlement with Trump for allegedly “maliciously” editing an interview with his Democratic election rival Kamala Harris.

Colbert called it a “big fat bribe.”

CBS has insisted the decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the ratings leader in the time slot, was purely financial — and that it was a coincidence the move came as CBS parent company Paramount lobbied for government approval of its $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media.

Around that time, CBS brought in Bari Weiss, a right-wing journalist without significant TV experience, to run its news division.

In the weeks leading to Thursday’s curtain call, 62-year-old Colbert has at times cut a subdued figure, lacking some of his usual cheerful flair.

On Thursday he told the audience that “we were here to field the news with you, and I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt it.”

Colbert did not mention Trump directly on Thursday, instead using a recurring CGI wormhole gag as a metaphor for the president’s impact on US public life.

McCartney sang Beatles mega-hit ‘Hello, Goodbye’ to the capacity crowd at New York’s Ed Sullivan theatre where the Beatles performed in 1964 when they made their US debut.

“We thought America was just the land of the free, the greatest democracy. Was. Still is hopefully,” he said, wagging his finger at Colbert.

There were cameos from actors Tim Meadows, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds and Bryan Cranston.

“It was amazing. No he didn’t cry — he somehow kept his composure through it all,” audience member Koenraad Smits, 31, told AFP after the taping finished.

A huge crowd formed around the storied Manhattan theatre cheering every celebrity arrival and trying to listen through the stage door.

Late-night hosts on the main networks have drawn Trump’s ire for their barbs against him and alleged liberal bias.

Colbert’s fellow funnyman Jimmy Kimmel was briefly taken off the air in September 2025 by his network ABC after complaints about a remark he made over the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“You know, actually, one of these holes opened at my show last year, but it went away after about three days,” Kimmel said of the “wormhole” destroying Colbert’s show.

He has told Colbert’s fans to cancel their subscriptions to CBS’ digital platform.

‘Fired and festive’

Trump has repeatedly attacked media and press freedom since returning to office, using lawsuits and regulatory threats to retaliate for unflattering news coverage and jokes.

The president has long been a fierce critic of late-night talk show hosts and their jabs at him. Trump has called Colbert a “pathetic trainwreck” who should be “put to sleep.”

Trump hailed the end of The Late Show on Friday, posting on his Truth Social platform: “Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long!”

“No talent, no ratings, no life… Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” the president added.

Bidding a scathing farewell, rival host Greg Gutfeld of right-wing Fox News said on his show Wednesday that Colbert “did nothing but safe comedy.”

Colbert made his name playing a fictitious version of himself, embodying the type of conservative blowhard beloved by Fox News viewers — and derided by the left.

He first played the sharp-suited but dim-witted character on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart before getting a spin-off, The Colbert Report.

Colbert ascended to the pinnacle of US late-night TV when he was named host of the CBS flagship, shedding the character and employing his own voice.

Colbert has been coy about his next steps but announced he will be a writer on a future Lord of the Rings movie.

“Now a lot of people been asking me what I plan to do after tonight, and the answer is drugs,” he joked Thursday.

Rival late-night hosts all aired re-runs Thursday out of respect for Colbert’s swansong, which had an afterparty themed “Fired and festive!”

Cover via Reuters

The director previously shared news of his blockbuster film breaking into the Chinese market, something he touted as a first for Pakistan. At the premiere in Beijing, Lashari said the warm welcome he received was something he hadn’t prepared for.

“I’ve been to many premieres. Lahore, Qatar, four cities for my previous film. I thought I knew what to expect. I didn’t,” he wrote in an Instagram post.

“It’s been almost four years since The Legend of Maula Jatt released in Pakistan. People have been telling me to move on for a while, and honestly, I did. I moved on a long time ago. New projects, new stories, new headspace. This China release always felt like it was happening to a version of me that already finished this chapter. And then last night happened,” he said.

Since the release of the film, Lashari has spearheaded Velo Sound Station.

“The warmth we received in Beijing, from the press, the industry, the people in that room, was something I genuinely wasn’t prepared for. Not polite interest. Real warmth. The kind directed at you as a person, not just at the thing you made,” he said.

The love for the film in Pakistan is overwhelming, he mused, but different. “It’s wrapped up in everything else. The stars, the story, the years of waiting. Sometimes, as the director, you almost disappear inside all of that. Which is beautiful. But it’s a different feeling.”

In Beijing, none of that context existed, Lashari said. “They didn’t know our actors. They didn’t know our industry. They came in with nothing. And what came back was something pure. Just two of us who travelled a long way to share it, a director and a distributor, received like we’d brought something that mattered.”

That love and warmth reminded him of something he’d started to take for granted. “No platform, no algorithm, no TikTok can do what a cinema does. A darkened room, strangers sitting together, a story unfolding. Last night reminded me why cinema is cinema.”

Though just two of them went to represent the film, Lashari said he wished the whole team could have been in that room. “The cast, the crew, the hundreds of people who gave years of their lives to this film. And especially Ammara Hikmat, who produced this film and couldn’t be there. Her work is in every frame of what Chinese audiences will watch. She should have been standing on that stage,” he said.

“The Legend of Maula Jatt opens across China tomorrow, May 21. The 75th anniversary of China-Pakistan diplomatic relations. A Pakistani film. A Chinese audience. But right now I’m not thinking about any of that. I’m thinking about that room last night. And what it felt like to be seen.”

The director ended his note with “Thank you, China” written in Mandarin.

The film stars Fawad and Mahira, Humaima Malick, Hamza Ali Abbasi, Gohar Rasheed, Faris Shafi and Ali Azmat, and is a reboot of the 1979 cult classic Maula Jatt, reimagining Punjab’s own superhero for a world audience.

The movie made Rs1 billion at the domestic box office and $10 million at the worldwide box office, as of January 2023, making it one of, if not the highest performing Pakistani films ever.

The film will be screened in cinemas across China from today (May 21).

Clad in his signature green kurta shalwar, topped with a Jinnah cap, Chhipa bravely stood beside one of the film’s zombies and delivered an important message to the youth: “Hey kid, don’t do drugs and take care of yourself. Otherwise, you too will become a zombie.”

If you’re anything like us, you too have several questions. What’s going on? What is he talking about? And, perhaps most importantly, why isn’t the zombie biting Chhipa saab?

Unfortunately, we have no further information on the matter. We can’t confirm the veracity of the claims and we can’t say if the philanthropist survived contact with a literal zombie — he did seem to have paramedics with him in case something went awry.

What we can say is that the promotions for Zombeid have generated some hype for the movie, which saw its trailer release on May 11. From the looks of it, the movie will be a gory, action-packed one with a strong sense of 80s Hollywood nostalgia.

The film stars Fahad Mustafa and Mehwish Hayat as a martial artist and his girlfriend who get stuck at the venue of a cage fight in the middle of an outbreak that is turning people into zombies. It is set to release on May 27.

The documentary follows a group of girls from Karachi’s Machhar Colony, one of Pakistan’s largest informal settlements, who battle a plethora of challenges to form a gymnastics team.

Facing poverty and rendered stateless by virtue of their ethnic backgrounds and bureaucracy, the girls’ inspiring tale of grit and determination will be screened as a part of the festival’s Documentary Competition on June 8 and 9.

Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel-winning women’s rights activist, is joining the documentary as an executive producer.

“I could not be more proud to support this beautiful film and the incredible young athletes at the heart of it,” Yousafzai said in a statement announcing her involvement. “The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony perfectly illustrates the power of sports to change how girls see themselves and how the world sees young women.”

She is joined by Emmy winner Mariska Hargitay, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Trish Adlesic and the film’s producer Amar Lohana.

Three-time Emmy-winning filmmaker Habiba Nosheen was particularly happy with the Nobel-laureate’s involvement.

“For years, Malala has been a global voice for girls’ education, and more recently, a powerful advocate for girls’ right to play, compete, and dream freely through sports,” she said in a statement to Variety. “That mission is at the very heart of our film, which celebrates the courage, joy, and ambition of remarkable Pakistani teenagers. Malala joins an extraordinary team of executive producers, including Mariska Hargitay, whose belief in the film has been invaluable as we prepare to share this story with audiences around the world.”

Hargitay was similarly pleased to have Yousafzai on board. “We’re honoured to have Malala join the team as executive producer. The heart of this film reflects her visionary, trailblazing advocacy for young girls,” she said. “The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony is a beautiful portrait of courage and determination, embodied in a group of girls breaking through barriers to claim a larger, more expansive life. Their journey inspires me and moves me deeply.”

The film will be released on Eidul Azha.

Addressing the media after the two short screenings, Shaan, who also stars in the film — alongside Meera, Sonya Hussyn and Shabbir Jan — said whenever he comes to Karachi, he gets the feeling that a lot is about to take place.

He acknowledged the love that he has received from Karachi pointing out that be they films, dramas or pieces of literature… Karachi is the first one to recognise, appreciate and accept them. “People from the whole country come here.”

With regard to the film, he said when an artist goes through the process of evolution, he feels he needs to challenge his craft, he doesn’t want to do run-of-the-mill work. “We could have also made a romantic film, it’s no big deal. But good artists challenge themselves, they don’t remain in their comfort zone… Screen is not a small thing. I think there’s great space in it.”

Shaan then thanked the producer, Salman Butt, cast and crew of the film.

Meera praised the director and said she’s very emotional and excited on the occasion. “We saw a dream and the dream has come true. It was all Shaan’s idea. I love you Shaan bhai very much. You have made such a good film for the Pakistan film industry.”

Like the director, the actress extended gratitude to the producer of the project.

Sonya Hussyn, too, was all praise for the film and its director.

Shabbir Jan said he’s been working in the showbiz industry for the last 40 years. Some people used to say to him he shouldn’t confine himself to TV (where he did most of his acting assignments), and that he should work in the movies. But by that time he hadn’t received any serious film offers.

“Things take place when the time is right for them. I was asked to do a guest appearance in Psycho and the work was to be done in two days. I think Shaan liked my work so he extended it from a couple of days to eight days,” he said.

Originally published in Dawn, May 19th, 2026

Abu Aleeha’s 10th (or is it 11th?) directorial feature — I’ve lost count by now — is a notch better than Taxali Gate, his previous big-screen venture produced by and starring Ayesha Omar.

Omar returns here as executive producer and actor, playing Behnaz, an ex-footballer-turned-national coach. However, unlike Taxali Gate, her presence is negligible, despite being billed as front-and-centre alongside the film’s lead, Dananeer Mobeen.

Dananeer is the glue — no, make that super-glue — holding together this exceedingly thin story of a girl from Lyari named Afsana, who dreams of playing pro-football and who ultimately gets selected. That is the entire gist. One wishes there were more — both in terms of the story and football.

Despite star Dananeer Mobeen’s valiant attempts to kick it into the stratosphere, Mera Lyari, which champions female empowerment and football, stumbles like all of director Abu Aleeha’s films

Surrounding Afsana is a familiar assortment of clichés. There’s her bad-but-good dad Arif Baloch (Nayyar Ejaz, delivering a hammy, over-the-top performance) — a bad-tempered rickshaw driver who lashes out because his backwardness opposes his daughter’s athletic ambitions. Then there’s her sympathetic mother Shakira Hussain (Samiya Mumtaz), who desperately wants a son and shares a bizarrely candid bond with her daughter — who doesn’t shy away from making uncomfortable, misplaced jokes about her parents’ sex life. A passing subplot also shoehorns predatory fake babas and taaveez (charms) meant to help women conceive boys.

Afsana’s best friend, Kashmala (Trinette Lucas), looks too refined, with model-perfect skin and make-up, to be from the lower-middle-class Lyari; like her bestie, she’s also a footballer and faces the familial pressure of being married off in her mid-teens to a much older man. Though her character suffers from the same superficiality as the rest of the cast, she gets a semblance of a happy ending that smooths things out — and thankfully, Lucas proves to be a genuine acting find.

The film loudly proclaims its theme of female empowerment and entirely discards romantic subplots. Men — with the minor exception of Behnaz’s assistant (Shoaib Hassan) — are largely portrayed as villains. To accentuate this, we get a nefarious neighbour, Faiq Khan (Adnan Shah Tipu), and Behnaz’s ex-husband (Paras Masroor), who shatters her leg in a flashback within a flashback — yes, really — that ends her career.

In those flashbacks, Behnaz lives in a modest Lyari home like Afsana. Yet, in the present, she resides in a posh house after returning from London. Unless the Pakistani government has secretly started handing out massive stipends to female footballers, a huge chunk of that story is missing. I suspect the latter.

Aleeha, a journalist-turned-filmmaker, has never been an astute screenwriter. Despite his staggering number of works, his scripts still feel like first drafts — good ideas hastily written and fed straight into the production grinder. His films always have one saving grace — Asrad Khan’s reliably strong cinematography — but are ultimately wrecked by the editing, music and sound design.

Here, apart from Asrad, there are two more technical pluses: the minimalist production design that suits the story’s naturalistic tone, and Ehtasham Mallick’s surprisingly dimensional surround sound mastering, even if the music cues fade in and out inelegantly.

Shayan Masood’s choppy editing is subpar and ineffective. The nested flashbacks and a disorienting 10-minute sequence — where four scenes with starkly different characters, emotions and tones happening simultaneously are mashed together — will make your head throb. It’s simply too much creative indulgence for a poor reviewer to bear.

Still, Aleeha has improved as a director. His aesthetic approach to blocking and performance has noticeably matured, and his greatest assets remain his actors. Mumtaz, Masroor, Lucas and (in a few scenes) Omar do genuinely elevate the material.

However, it is Dananeer who (pardon the pun) tries her valiant best to kick the film into the stratosphere. Despite occasional slips in her accent, her debut is a smashing breakthrough. She displays range, sincerity and a maturity that many actors fail to muster even after years on screen.

At times, she makes you believe the impossible: that the creative slip-ups and the glaring lack of actual football matches and training are trifling matters. She makes you believe there’s a better movie hidden inside this barebones production that boasts about as much (if not less) plot and production values than a standard telefilm.

Chances are you won’t find it, but watching Dananeer give the film her all, you can’t help but wish it were hiding somewhere just out of plain sight, behind the goal post.

Produced by Waqas Hassan Rizvi and Sania Sohail and released by Distribution Club, Mera Lyari is rated PG. It features loud, adult language and scenes that heavily champion female empowerment.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, May 17th, 2026

In an interview with Brut America at the Cannes Film Festival, Rogen shared his opinion on the use of AI in scriptwriting.

He said he doesn’t understand what AI is supposed to do. “Every time I see a video on Instagram that’s like, ‘Hollywood is cooked’, what follows is the most stupid, dog s**t I’ve ever seen in my life,” he laughed.

“And if your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process, you shouldn’t be a writer, because then you’re not writing. Go do something else. And if you don’t want to go through the process, you shouldn’t be a writer.  Like the whole idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing,” he clarified.

His comments come amid a renewed push — especially in Hollywood — for the use of AI. Demi Moore recently said fighting AI is “a battle we will lose” at Cannes, calling on creatives to find ways to instead work with AI.

The Academy Awards announced at the start of the month that actors created using AI will not be eligible for Oscars, as part of its crackdown on the use of AI. New rules include a requirement that only real, live human performers, and not their AI avatars, are eligible for the film world’s biggest prizes, and screenplays must have been penned by a person, rather than a chatbot.

Even Spotify is planning to launch badges to distinguish human creators from AI.

In Pakistan, AI is slowly creeping into our film industry as well. The country’s first AI-generated film, The Next Salahuddin, is set to premiere on HUM TV soon.

Bardem plays an overbearing film director with an explosive temper in The Beloved by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday to widespread praise from critics.

In an expletive-laden outburst at a press conference on Sunday, Bardem said part of his character’s flaws were due to “toxic masculinity” which led to men killing their ex-wives and girlfriends — and starting wars.

“That problem also goes to Mr Trump and Mr Putin and Mr Netanyahu,” Bardem, 57, said, referring to the US, Russian and Israeli leaders.

Bardem has been one of most outspoken film stars against Israel’s war on Gaza since 2023. The Israeli campaign has devastated the Palestinian territory and killed more than 72,000 people, more than half of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. A “genocide” is “still being committed”, Bardem said.

“It’s a fact. You can try to justify it, explain it, but it’s a fact. If you justify it with your silence or your support, you are pro-genocide.”

Speaking on Saturday, Bardem said he was “getting more work than ever” despite his public campaigning against Israel’s war on Gaza, something he attributed to “the narrative changing” around the conflict.

Originally published in Dawn, May 18th, 2026

Bulgaria had missed the last three editions of the glitzy extravaganza but took the crown in Vienna for the first time ever, overtaking Israel at the very end as the points came in, with Romania finishing third.

Pop singer Darina Yotova, known as Dara, was not among the favourites going into Eurovision week but the 27-year-old gained traction following a strong performance in the semi-finals, with her highly-choreographed dance routines.

“Everything is possible: Bulgaria just won Eurovision!” Dara told a press conference.

“I really like breaking rules. I’m really good with following my rules — not anybody else’s. We wanted to give to the audience something new and fresh, something that is not expected.”

Eurovision highlighted that “the song ended up winning both sets of scores, which is the first time the juries and the public have chosen the same winner in almost 10 years, since Kyiv 2017”.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev hailed “a young artist who, thanks to her talent and professionalism, has managed to rise above all the complexities and prejudices surrounding the voting process.”

“Bulgaria is looking forward to welcoming Europe and the world for Eurovision 2027!” he added on social media.

Around 10,000 glammed-up fans filled the Wiener Stadthalle arena in the Austrian capital to watch Saturday’s showpiece final of Eurovision, where, as always, the razzmatazz didn’t escape the geopolitics in the background.

Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Iceland and Slovenia staged the biggest political boycott in Eurovision history over Israel’s participation, citing the war in Gaza.

Originally published in Dawn, May 18th, 2026

In Doctor Bahu, Kubra plays a young doctor who marries into a family of medical professionals. Sania marries Salman, the youngest son of the family who isn’t a doctor himself, and finds that despite marrying into a respected family of doctors, women aren’t allowed to work in their household.

The show stars Khan, Shuja Asad, Shahzad Nawaz, Saba Hamid, Hajra Yamin, Mira Sethi, Adeel Hussain, Atiqa Odho, Mahnoor Khan, Syed Mohammed Ahmed, Marina Khan, Usman Mazhar, Humza Sabzwari and Bakhtawar Mazhar. It has been written by Sanam Mehdi Zaryab and directed by Mehreen Jabbar.

Kubra’s post came with a fun caption declaring it a “SaniaGram”.

“Hi, Sania here! You guys have given us so much love. So I thought… maybe I share some moments you’ve not seen before? So here it is! 🥰❤️Sania - Thinking out loud.🥇”

She started off with a picture with Asad, Sania’s husband Salman in the show. “We’re off to the beach! He said he has a lot to tell me. Should I be worried?” asks ‘Sania’.

“Did he just call me a Gulab Jamun?” she asks in the second picture.

“A lot of effort was put into fitting onto this staircase. I don’t think my family realises I have an exam to prepare for. Hmph,” reads the caption for the third picture, which also features the director herself!

“Phuppo has no chill. Appointment pe rishta pakka karna shuru kardiya. Woh bhi MERA! I mean Sumera bhi to hai na! (She started arranging a rishta for me! I mean, Sumera’s around too!)” she said.

“Why is he being so friendly all of a sudden..? Shall I say something to scare him? Kickboxing ka bata doon (Should I tell him about my kickboxing)?” she said, with a picture of their wedding.

At least Sania’s sister-in-law is nice!

A nice picture with the fam before uncle Shehzad Nawaz came in to dash Salman’s dreams.

She soon warmed up to Salman a little — emphasis on little.

She was playing games and taking names without even realising she was.

‘Sania’ ended it with a picture of some random kids from a production team. This certainly isn’t a drama!

We love it when stars use social media for good — funny posts about their shows, that is.

The actor spoke against the dichotomy drawn between adult sons and daughters when she appeared on Good Morning Pakistan on Tuesday to speak about the insecurities women face in life.

The discussion was revolving around the pressure many women face to give birth to a son rather than a daughter, when Nafees said the ideas that pushed this pressure were now outdated.

“The biggest reason they give is ‘Sons will support you in old-age, daughters will go to their husband’s home,’ whereas in today’s day and age, across all classes, boys leave their parents’ home after marriage. A son is a son till he gets himself a wife, a daughter is a daughter all her life.”

The actor said she knew daughters who supported their parents, even after getting married, insisting that such antiquated ideas need to be “eradicated” from society. She said there were parents out there who had multiple sons, but yearned to have a daughter.

“We are a lazy nation,” Nafees said. “Ask anyone why they want sons and they’ll tell you they want support in old age.”

“Sons aren’t even as affectionate as daughters, but still everyone will tell you they want sons to support them.”

She urged such parents to stand on their own feet: “Be your own support in old age. Use your youth to make enough money to support yourself through retirement.”

Actor Shermeen Ali interjected to say support isn’t necessarily financial and could also be emotional and moral, but said that sons had the right to their own lives with their families.

“When a man gets married, he has a wife and kids, it’s not necessary that he lives [with his parents] all his life. It’s possible he needs to move away… In that sense, I think, sons and daughters are the same at times,” she said.

Ali added that she was the youngest of five girls and she always felt her parents had tried to have a son. She said that they had seemed disappointed over not having a son for some time, but now she and her sisters support their mother just like any son would.

Later, host Nida Yasir moved the direction towards mothers-in-law and how some of them torment their daughters-in-law in an effort to ensure sons remain loyal to their mothers over their wives.

Life coach Saima Hashim said this was a long-running cycle where women who had faced such abuse “projected it” upon the next generation. “The majority of mothers-in-law feel their sons’ marriages present a challenge to their authority… they see a potential for loss of identity.”

Nafees said this went against religious teachings “which say children should be given a separate home when they get married”. She said every family needs their space.

Being a boy-mom herself, the actor said she had already started preparing herself for when her two-year-old son will eventually leave the nest. “It won’t be his wife’s job to care for us. She has no such responsibility.”

She said even if parents couldn’t give their children a separate house, the least they could do was let their incoming daughters-in-law make any changes to the house which would make them more comfortable.

“When people, especially aunties, believe we’re right because of our age and the new girl must be wrong, that’s also where the damage starts.”

Ali said things were hopefully on the path towards change. She said her generation had changed the way they raise kids and might also adopt similar attitudes towards old ideas when those children got married.

Yasir said people needed to mentally prepare themselves for the day their children don’t need them as much as they did when they were kids. She also asked older women to keep themselves busy. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” she warned.

Diesel and Rodriguez posed with fellow actor Jordana Brewster and the daughter of late co-star Paul Walker, who died in a car crash in 2013, at the French film festival.

The Fast and the Furious will be screened in a midnight slot later in the day, bringing some Hollywood razzle-dazzle to Cannes where US studios are notably absent.

Hollywood majors such as Universal, Disney or Sony, as well as streaming giants Netflix and Amazon, have decided against launching any of their blockbusters on the French Riviera, unlike in previous years.

Pan’s Labyrinth returns to Cannes 20 years after record 22-minute ovation

Reasons for their absence include cost-cutting, a growing preference for tightly controlled social media-led launches, and the risk that a mauling from the Cannes critics can doom a movie.

The first edition of the The Fast and the Furious, a street-racing thriller, helped launch a franchise that has grossed more than seven billion dollars worldwide, according to industry figures.

Diesel announced on Monday that the concept — now in its 11th film — is being adapted into a television series by owner Universal.

Return of Pan’s Labyrinth

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro received the longest-ever standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival two decades ago for his historical fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, which returns this year to the Cannes Classics section.

Speaking, del Toro said the 22-minute ovation given to his Spanish-language film 20 years ago produced a “rush of human emotion.”

“Alfonso Cuaron was there with me because we produced the movie together and he said, ‘let it in, man’,” recalled del Toro on Tuesday.

“I’m not very good with praise and he said, ‘let it in, let love go in’ and I experienced it like that.” Pan’s Labyrinth did not win the top-prize Palme D’Or that year, but del Toro went on to win the best picture Oscar for his fish monster love story The Shape of Water in 2018.

The film, which has been digitally remastered, is set in Spain under the Franco dictatorship and follows a young girl who is enticed by a magical faun to complete three dangerous tasks while also dealing with her ailing pregnant mother and cruel military stepfather.

The concept for Pan’s Labyrinth came when del Toro was at a low point in his creativity following the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York.

“I felt really defenceless,” he said, and started to question what the role of a storyteller is in this situation. “I thought it would be really interesting to have a man of rigidity, a captain, having to face magic — something that seems imaginary, but his own notions of what is right and what is wrong, the captain’s notions, are also imaginary,” he added.

The cult classic, which will also be shown in 3D, is set to be re-released in theatres later this year.

Originally published in Dawn, May 14th, 2026

Quoting local newspaper Österreich, The Times of Israel reported two people were removed from the venue over the chants, which could be heard in the show’s live broadcast. Accounts on social media posted footage from the broadcast with audible chants.

The incident follows protests in Vienna, including one where demonstrators placed coffins in the city centre. At the site, 67-year-old Karin Spindlberger told AFP, “Israel has become an aggressor.” She said music brings people together, “but not in this way”.

Protests planned throughout the week leading up to the final on Saturday are expected to draw around 3,000 people to the streets.

Eurovision director Martin Green said the protests and competition taking place simultaneously showed people could have differing opinions on something and coexist. “It is a profoundly good sign of a democracy where you can have this show happening on one side of the city and a protest happening on the other side and they can both coexist. Maybe the world can learn from that,” he said.

This year’s Israeli participation is a lot less politically charged than last year’s, when the country sent Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the October 7, 2023 attack that started Israel’s devastating war on Gaza.

This year’s participant, Bettan, has qualified for the final based on a cumulative score of jury and public votes. He is joined by acts from Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Serbia and Sweden.

Ten more performers will qualify in the second semi-final on Thursday out of this year’s 35 participants — the lowest in 13 years. Hosts Austria, the UK, France, Germany and Italy also have guaranteed spots in the final.

Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain have all boycotted the competition this year in protest against Israel’s participation.

Public broadcasters Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have gone so far as to announce they will not be airing Eurovision at all, with Slovenian RTV opting to run the thematic programme Voices of Palestine instead.

Israel meanwhile continues killing people in Gaza despite a ceasefire having been in place since October. Three more were killed on Sunday, with the total death toll from Israeli military actions standing at over 72,500.

There were big cars, sunglasses, clunky jewellery and a whole lot of rap as contestants were seen performing on stage and dissing their adversaries in rap battles.

On Sunday, the programme’s season promo dropped, revealing it will begin airing from May 24 on Pixel Entertainment’s YouTube channel. This is a delay from an earlier timeline that would have had the show released around Eidul Fitr.

The show will have 12 up and coming rappers battling for the title of Rap Icon over the course of 10 episodes, executive producer Rizwan Siddiqui told Images in December. He said the goal was to “find the next Talha Anjum or next Bohemia”.

Contestants will have to take part in a number of rap-related challenges based around different themes and styles. Many of them will be eliminated as the show goes on, with the best making it into a “grand finale”.

While this is the first such show in Pakistan, the idea of mixing rap and reality TV isn’t new. The Rap Game ran in the US for five seasons between 2016 and 2019. Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow saw big names such as Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, DJ Khaled and Ludacris appear as judges.

Reality TV as a whole seemed to be having a revival in Pakistan in the last couple of years with shows like Masterchef and Shark Tank getting local adaptations. Pakistan Idol was also revived, but faces uncertainty with its finale indefinitely postponed in light of “regional tensions rising and calls for national austerity”.

There is still hope though, as Pakistan’s Got Talent may still be on the cards after Rap Icon.

“AI is here. And so to fight it is to, in a ​sense, to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to ​find ways in which we can work with it is a more valuable ⁠path to take,” said Moore.

The US actor, who received her first Oscar nomination for ​body horror The Substance after its Cannes premiere in 2024, is returning to the festival this year ​as one of nine members of the jury who will hand out the Palme d’Or top prize on May 23.

“Are we doing enough to protect ourselves? I don’t know,” added Moore, speaking to journalists. “And so my inclination ​would be to say probably not.”

The festival does not allow generative AI in competition, but ​the conversation about the technology’s role in filmmaking has been a dominant theme at the festival that positions ‌itself ⁠as a gatekeeper of what qualifies as cinema.

First Korean Jury president

Park Chan-wook, the first Korean filmmaker to lead the jury, reflected on how Korea has become a cinema industry powerhouse since he brought his thriller Oldboy to Cannes in 2004.

“Korea is no longer at the outskirts of the ​global cinematic industry,” he ​said, speaking through a ⁠translator.

“The reason behind it isn’t only because Korean film did very well and made it to the centre of the industry. It’s because ​the centre of the global film industry itself has expanded,” he said.

That ​made it ⁠possible for him to be named jury president, said Park, adding that he promised not to be biased towards the Korean entry, Na Hong‑jin’s Hope.

Comparing the 22 competition films and ranking them in first, ⁠second ​and third place might feel like a “meaningless” act, he ​said.

“But that’s also where the value of that lies, because it’s an opportunity to tell everyone and to beg everyone ​to please watch these films.”