Lena Khan

In Best of the Best (2026), people leave rooms mid-sentence. Khan does not let a scene sit a beat longer than it needs to; the film has moved on before a joke has finished landing, and a few of the better ones are thrown away on the way out of a door. It is the right tempo for a campus where everyone is exhausted and nobody will admit it. It is also the clearest thing we can say about how she directs: she trusts the audience to keep up and would rather lose a laugh than wait for it.

She came to features by way of shorts, commercials and music videos. Her debut, The Tiger Hunter (2016), which she wrote and directed, was a comedy-drama about an Indian immigrant in the 1970s, drawn from her father's experiences. A family film, Flora & Ulysses (2021), followed, then episodes of Never Have I Ever and The Mysterious Benedict Society, and then Best of the Best. We have reviewed only the last, so we hold the rest lightly. But the line through them is plain: comedies with South Asian characters at the centre, several at once, played without a word of explanation for anyone who might need one. Khan has said that "When you have more than one of a minority character, then there’s suddenly become real characters", and the dance team in Best of the Best is that idea put to work.

The cast is where it pays off. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia carry the film as the two young women who run the team, and Khan gives them a rhythm of talking over each other that makes the friendship feel older than the film. Prashanth Venkataramanujam and Hasan Minhaj's script accepts the shape of a dance-competition comedy, rehearsals and rival and final, and is right to. The faults are two. The film forgives its young men far more readily than its young women, and it cuts its dances to pieces.

That second fault is the one that puzzles us. We laughed a good deal, and then the final came and we sat forward for the dancing we had been promised, and it arrived as confetti, cut so fast we could not tell who was good. It is a strange thing to get wrong in a film whose whole argument is that these people are worth watching perform. Khan can time a line better than most comedy directors working now. Three features in, we would follow her into another one, on the understanding that next time, when somebody dances, she lets us watch.