Best of the Best (2026): Is Netflix's Hasan Minhaj Dance Comedy Worth Watching?

What is Best of the Best actually about?

Best of the Best follows Maya and Anjali, two childhood best friends from the same South Asian community, who arrive at UCLA and immediately throw themselves into the world of competitive Bollywood fusion dance. On paper it's a familiar shape. You've seen this movie before, whether it was called Bring It On, Step Up, or Pitch Perfect. A tight knit but underestimated team, a bigger and better funded rival squad, a championship on the horizon, a friendship tested by ambition and ego along the way. What makes it different is the specific cultural language it's dancing in. This isn't hip hop or competitive cheer, it's Bharatnatyam and Kathak and contemporary and heels choreography stitched together into routines that are trying to say something about blending tradition with reinvention, which is basically the thesis of the whole movie dressed up as a dance number.

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan plays Maya, and her character is explicitly written as Tamil from Sri Lanka rather than a vague, interchangeable "South Asian" stand in, which is a small detail that actually matters a lot in a genre that has historically flattened an entire subcontinent's worth of identities into one aesthetic. Priyanka Kedia plays Anjali, her best friend and the emotional other half of the film. Hasan Minhaj himself plays Professor Hamza Latif, a supporting role rather than a lead, which tells you something about how he wanted to use his own presence in a story he clearly built for someone else to carry.

The film was shot on a demanding production schedule. Ramakrishnan went through roughly four months of dance training, six days a week, across two different cities, to prepare for an eight week shoot. That's not a small commitment for what could have easily been a paint by numbers studio comedy, and it shows up on screen in how confidently she moves even when the editing around her doesn't always do her justice.

Who's in the cast?

• Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Maya, the emotional lead, fresh off years of playing Devi in Never Have I Ever, here trading teenage sitcom chaos for college age ambition and a demanding physical performance.
• Priyanka Kedia as Anjali, Maya's best friend and the other half of the film's central relationship, carrying a lot of the story's warmth.
• Hasan Minhaj as Professor Hamza Latif, the film's writer and creative engine, playing a faculty adjacent supporting character rather than inserting himself as the lead.
• Chaneil Kular as Arjun
• Ankur Rathee as Ronak
• Shreya Navile as Deepica
• Becky Alex as Dimple
• Nihar Duvvuri as Nirbhay
• Nico Greetham as Harry
• Amryn Khurana as Sumi
• Tanishq Joshi as Vishal
• Lilly Singh as Sunny
• Sasha Bhasin as Preethi
• Janina Gavankar as Rekha
• Saara Chaudry as Ayesha
• Kavi Ramachandran as Shree

The ensemble here is deep, and a lot of the fun of Best of the Best comes from spotting familiar faces doing something slightly different from what you know them for.

That's a stacked supporting cast for what is, at its core, a mid budget streaming comedy, and it's a sign of how much goodwill Minhaj was able to call in for a passion project he'd been sitting on since the pandemic.

Who made this movie, and why now?

Best of the Best is directed by Lena Khan, and written by Hasan Minhaj alongside his longtime collaborator Prashanth Venkataramanujam, the same writing partnership behind a chunk of Minhaj's Patriot Act era. It's produced through 186K Films and Rideback, with Ryan Halprin and Ellen Schwartz serving as executive producers.

The origin story is charming, and it's the kind of detail that reframes how you watch the finished film. Minhaj has said he started developing this idea roughly six years ago, around the time his son was born, and that it grew directly out of pandemic era lockdown boredom with Venkataramanujam. Their shared reference point was the Step Up franchise, and their pitch to themselves was essentially, what if we made our version of that, but rooted in our own college experience and our own community instead of a generic dance movie universe. That's a sincere, specific starting point, and it's easy to feel that sincerity in how the film treats its central friendship, even when the plot mechanics around it get a little creaky.

Minhaj has also talked at length about why he cast Ramakrishnan specifically, saying he felt lucky to have her because she had both the comedic instincts and the emotional depth the role of Maya needed. That casting instinct turns out to be the smartest decision in the whole production. Ramakrishnan is doing committed work here, dramatically and physically, and she's the reason the film's better moments land as well as they do.

What's the critical reception actually like?

This is where Best of the Best gets interesting to talk about, because the numbers tell two different stories depending on who you ask.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently sits around 82% from critics, based on 17 reviews at the time of writing, a score that shifts slightly as more reviews come in but has held comfortably positive throughout. Reviews from outlets like the AV Club have been warm, calling it one of Netflix's better recent efforts in this genre. Roger Ebert's site landed closer to the middle, giving it 2 out of 4 stars, praising the leads' performances and some clever early visual choices, like nods to classic Hindi cinema dream sequences, while criticizing the editing for chopping up the dance sequences so aggressively that you lose the actual rhythm and storytelling of the choreography, which, in a dance movie, is a fairly significant problem to have.

Then there's the audience score, which sits at just 41% based on early ratings. That's a real, meaningful gap, and it's worth sitting with rather than glossing over. Critics tend to reward a film for its intentions, its craft choices, its cultural specificity, and its ambition even when the execution wobbles. General audiences going in expecting a fun, breezy dance movie seem to have found something a little more uneven than they bargained for, whether that's pacing, tone, or just a mismatch between the marketing and the actual film.

Does the cultural specificity actually land?

One of the most pointed pieces of criticism the film has drawn, and one I think is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a footnote, is the observation that a story centered so heavily on South Asian women was ultimately written by men. Minhaj and Venkataramanujam clearly did the work of specificity in some ways, giving Maya an explicit Tamil Sri Lankan identity rather than a generic pan South Asian gloss, which is a meaningful and rare choice in this genre. But there's a real critique out there that the film's handling of its female characters, particularly how accountability gets distributed between the male and female leads by the end, feels uneven in a way that a story written or co written by women in this specific cultural space might have avoided.

I think that's a fair and useful piece of criticism to sit with rather than dismiss, and it doesn't cancel out what the film does get right. It's possible for a movie to be a meaningful step forward in representation and still fall short of the standard that representation itself invites. Best of the Best is that kind of movie. It's better than not existing, and it's not as good as it could have been if the writers' room looked a little different.

How does it compare to the movies it's clearly inspired by?

If you grew up on Bring It On, Step Up, or Pitch Perfect, you already know the emotional beats Best of the Best is going to hit before it hits them. Underestimated team, star pupil with something to prove, a rival squad with more resources and less heart, a climactic competition where the underdogs win not just with skill but with authenticity. That structure is comfort food at this point, and there's nothing wrong with comfort food when it's executed with care.

Where Best of the Best actually differentiates itself is in the specific vocabulary of the dancing itself. This isn't hip hop routines dressed up with a diversity subplot. It's Bharatnatyam and Kathak and contemporary and heels and groove styles, fused together, performed by a lead actress who trained in all of them for months before a single camera rolled. When the film lets that fusion breathe, particularly in the training montage that even its more critical reviewers singled out as a highlight, it's doing something fresh within a very familiar genre skeleton. It's just a shame the editing room didn't trust that footage enough to let the camera sit still and let you actually watch people dance.

There's also a funny running current of political commentary in the finale, touching on colonial reparations and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, that feels distinctly like Minhaj's fingerprints on the material, a small but unmistakable holdover from his Patriot Act instincts smuggled into a studio dance comedy. It's a strange, ambitious swing for a film this genre bound to take, and depending on your patience for a dance movie suddenly getting political in its third act, it either lands as a clever bit of layering or as tonal whiplash.

My honest take on Best of the Best

I went into this one expecting either a pure crowd pleaser or a slightly awkward vanity project, and what I actually got was somewhere more interesting than either of those, and also somewhat more frustrating.

The sincerity of this movie is not in question for me. You can feel, in almost every scene involving Maya and Anjali's friendship, that this was written by someone who lived some version of this experience and wanted to put it on screen with care. Minhaj clearly wasn't chasing a quick paycheck here, he sat on this idea for six years, put a huge amount of trust and screen time into Maitreyi Ramakrishnan rather than centering himself, and made specific choices, like Maya's Tamil Sri Lankan identity, that a lazier version of this movie simply wouldn't have bothered with. That matters to me, and I don't think it should be waved away just because the film has flaws.

But the flaws are real, and I think the audience score, lower than the critic score by a wide margin, is picking up on something true. The dance sequences, which should be the entire reason this movie exists, are undercut by editing that seems almost afraid of its own choreography. You put actresses through four months of intensive training across six dance styles and then chop the footage into rapid fire cuts that never let you actually see a full sequence build and land? That's a genuine miscalculation, and it's the kind of thing that separates a good dance movie from a movie that merely features dancing.

I also think the criticism about the gender dynamics is worth taking at face value rather than defending reflexively just because I respect the film's intentions elsewhere. A story this focused on two young women's ambitions, written entirely by men, was always going to be walking a tightrope, and it doesn't fully stick the landing. That doesn't erase the good faith the film clearly operates in, but good faith and good execution aren't the same thing, and Best of the Best has more of the former than the latter.

Where does that leave me? I'd call this a worthwhile watch if you go in calibrated correctly. Don't expect a genre redefining statement. Expect a warm, well performed, visually colorful underdog story that's trying, imperfectly but sincerely, to bring a specific cultural texture into a genre that badly needed it. Ramakrishnan alone is worth the runtime. The rest of it earns a solid, comfortable recommendation rather than an enthusiastic one, and I think that's an honest place to land given the gap between how critics and audiences have actually responded.

Frequently asked questions

Is Best of the Best based on a true story? No. It's an original screenplay, though Hasan Minhaj has said it draws loosely on his own and co writer Prashanth Venkataramanujam's college experiences.

Who wrote Best of the Best? Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam co wrote the film. Lena Khan directed it.

Is Hasan Minhaj the lead actor in the movie? No. He plays a supporting role, Professor Hamza Latif. The lead roles belong to Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia.

What is Maitreyi Ramakrishnan known for before this movie? She's best known for playing Devi Vishwakumar in Netflix's Never Have I Ever.

How long is Best of the Best? The runtime is 1 hour 52 minutes.

What rating did Best of the Best get? It's rated PG-13.

Where can I watch Best of the Best? It's a Netflix original and is streaming exclusively on Netflix.

Is Best of the Best worth watching if I don't usually like dance movies? Probably still worth it for the friendship story and the cultural specificity, though the dancing itself is the film's main draw, so your mileage may vary.

Does the movie have any music by well known composers? Yes. The soundtrack features a new song from Oscar winning composer A.R. Rahman, while the film's score itself was composed by Daniel Rojas.

Is there a big difference between critic and audience reviews? Yes, and it's a notable gap. Critics have rated it around 82% while general audience scores have landed closer to 41%.

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