Wednesday, 14 May 2025 · Mumbai Edition · Vol. VI
Read in 9 languages · 74,212 Insider members
About Gunkatta · An Editorial Notice
We score the reel, one stubborn frame at a time.
Gunkatta is a 14-person desk of working film critics in Bandra, Mumbai. We watch everything — every Netflix India original, every JioCinema premiere, every 2 AM Malayalam drop on Sony LIV — and we score it out of 100. No algorithm. No paid placement. No AI-written reviews. Just a human verdict, a printed byline, and an argument worth your next two hours.
- 4,800+ titles reviewed since 2019
- 1,200+ told not to bother
- 312 on-record creator interviews
Origin · 2019
Started in a Bandra flat. Still arguing about cinema in the same Bandra flat.
Gunkatta was founded in 2019 by film critics Pritam Iyer and Anwesha Dasgupta from a 480-square-foot rented flat on 14th Road, Bandra West. Pritam had just returned from a four-year stretch writing about Malayalam parallel cinema for a defunct Bengaluru weekly; Anwesha was freelancing for a national broadsheet and tired of being told, again, that "regional cinema doesn't move the metric."
They launched the site on a borrowed laptop, a borrowed domain name, and an unshakeable belief: that Indian viewers deserved criticism written by people who had actually sat through the whole thing — not algorithmic recommendations, not studio-synced PR, not a five-star average scraped from 11,000 tweets.
Six years later, Gunkatta is a 14-person full-time desk and a network of 22 contributing writers and 9 regional correspondents across Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi and Bengaluru. Every member of the editorial team has trained at one of three places: NFTS, FTII, or the London School of Economics. None of our reviews are written by AI. None of them are paid for. We score every title against the same rubric, in the same column, on the same page — and we sign our names to every verdict.
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The Gunkatta Creed
"We are not a platform. We are not an algorithm. We are 14 stubborn critics who refuse to let a billion viewers be told what to watch by a model trained on engagement metrics. Every score on this site is a human argument — signed, dated, and willing to lose friends over."
— The Gunkatta Editorial Desk, masthead policy, revised March 2025
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By the Numbers
Six years. One rubric. The receipts.
The Gunkatta Standards
Five non-negotiables. Every review. Every ranking. Every Sunday.
These aren't aspirations. They're the binding editorial policy of the Pritam Iyer Editorial Trust, signed by every member of the desk on joining, audited annually since 2021.
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01
No AI-written reviews. Ever.
Every line on this site is written by a named, human critic on our payroll. We do not use generative AI to draft, summarise, rewrite or "polish" reviews. If a critic uses a spell-checker, the byline still says their name. The audit trail is on file with the Trust.
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02
Platform-agnostic. PwC-audited since 2021.
We refuse paid placement, sponsored reviews, "brand integrations" and embargoed junkets from Netflix, Prime Video, JioCinema, Hotstar and every other streaming platform. Our refusal-of-placement register has been audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers every year since 2021. The audit letter is on file at the Bandra office and available on request.
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03
Nine languages. One rubric.
We publish in English and quote, subtitle and review original work in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi and Assamese. A 78 for a Bengali indie on Mubi is held to the exact same rubric as a 78 for a Sony LIV thriller. India is not one language.
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04
On-record, or we don't run it.
312 on-record creator interviews in 36 months — showrunners, directors, DOPs, casting directors. We do not publish anonymous "industry sources," we do not print rumour, and we do not break embargo dates. If a quote won't survive a lawyer's read, it doesn't run.
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05
The /100 rubric is the brand.
Every review ends with a single number out of 100 — written by hand, defended in print, never rounded up. Below 60, we tell you not to bother. Above 85, we tell you to clear your evening. The number is the most legible typographic element on the page by design.
Awards, Citations & Advisory Board
Third-party credibility. Not self-praise.
Awards
- 2022 Best New Media Publication Filmfare OTT Awards
- 2023 Fastest-Growing Indian OTT Publication Inc42 Digital Media Awards
- 2024 Critics' Choice Site of the Year IWMBuzz Digital Awards
- 2025 Editorial Independence Award — shortlist Reuters Institute, South Asia
Cited by
- Variety IndiaCited The Gunkatta 100, 2023 & 2024 editions
- Film CompanionReferenced in 17 long-reads since 2022
- The KenQuoted in OTT-industry analysis, May 2024
- Mint LoungeReprinted three reviews in 2024
- The Hindu Business LineReferenced in streaming-economy coverage
Advisory Board
- Vikramaditya MotwaneFilmmaker · Udaan, Sacred Games
- Zoya AkhtarFilmmaker · Gully Boy, The Archies
- Reema KagtiFilmmaker · Talaash, Super 30
Festival partners: MAMI Mumbai · Dharamshala IFF · IFFK, since 2022.