‘Reporting Live’ (2026) Netflix Movie Review - Honest Journalists, Artificial Filmmaking

There is a promising movie buried under Dhruv Tripathi's Reporting Live that occasionally peeks through the curtain and talks about the physical perils of being a journalist. Sandhya (Parineeti Chopra) and her best friend, colleague, and cameraman Vinod (Deven Bhojani) are almost always on the ground talking to civilians, interviewing shady workers, and recording illegal activities. This puts them in close proximity to goons, including a man who switches on his radio before killing or harassing his victims. At a bus stop in Visargaon, this man intimidates and assaults Sandhya and Vinod, and later it's implied that he intrudes into their domestic space to send them a sterner warning. Tripathi and his co-writer, Mihir Jadhav, suggest that being a journalist is no easy affair. The profession is too risky, not only for journalists themselves but also for their families. But look at Sandhya and Vinod after they are assaulted at the bus stop. The two are found laughing at Vinod's home, as if they are all too familiar with situations like these. They are in a happy, celebratory mood because they've dug up the truth and have all the evidence for a cracker of a story. Sandhya and Vinod, in other words, are supposed to be true journalists. They love truth more than their own lives.

It also helps that Chopra and Bhojani share a nice, easygoing chemistry. I quite liked the scene where, after a professional conflict, Sandhya goes to Vinod's house after many weeks, and the two initially converse in low, apologetic voices. Their tone itself contains a subtext, and that subtext whispers, "I missed you very much, dummy." If Tripathi had shaved off the other plot points about corruption, scandals, and newsroom politics, and directed all his energies towards crafting a tale of friendship, he might have made an affecting film. But Tripathi, alas, has grand ambitions. He is as determined as the two journalists in Reporting Live, which is why he takes on land-grabbing scandals, collapsing bridges, superstitions, and illegal sand mining—all of which are tied to a powerful construction tycoon, the owner of Golden Sky (fun fact: R. Velraj is the name of both the tycoon villain and the film's director of photography). It's a classic case of too many ingredients spoiling the dish. Instead of developing intimacy and tragedy, Tripathi takes us through broad story beats that rely too heavily on the background music to lift certain scenes.

We hear a triumphant score when the illegal sand mining case is first cracked by the news channel Azaad Bharati. The soundscape grows loudly tense when a little girl goes missing, then turns mournful when a dog is found hanging from the ceiling. Tripathi's YouTube Shorts-like filmmaking is also evident in its simplistic worldview and politics: a news report goes viral almost immediately, a tycoon is publicly humiliated, and the public quickly takes to the streets to demand justice. I half-expected a fourth-wall-breaking monologue from Sandhya about the power of honest reporting, but Tripathi settles for a fourth-wall-breaking song that calls on us to become both a "mashaal" and a "mishaal" as the camera lingers on two dead bodies. One part of Tripathi wants to be real and say, "Truth consumes you, and it can also take your life," while the other inhabits a fictional movie world where characters can move among people engaged in illegal activities without being noticed—until the plot requires them to be. They also manage to escape with suspicious ease. Tripathi seems to be working with conflicting sensibilities: he wants to be sincere, but his mode of communication is artificial and flimsy.

Was this originally supposed to be a series? Did the radio-listening goon have more screen time before the material was compressed into a film? His disappearance after just two scenes of "exuding evil" makes you wonder whether an entire subplot was left on the cutting-room floor. One might need to call an investigative reporter to solve this mystery. No, Sandhya and Vinod cannot be reached. They meet their maker for doing their job properly. These honest reporters, unfortunately, will no longer be reporting live. RIP.