Some college students have their a cappella groups. South Asians have dance teams. For a lot of us who grew up taking part in numerous dance practices and performing at wedding medleys across Bangkok’s hotels, joining one of these teams in college was the natural next dance step. Netflix’s Best of the Best (2026), directed by Lena Khan and co-written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, knows this world quite well. But what it doesn't know, or show, is the true grind behind it.
The film follows Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishanan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) who are childhood best friends entering UCLA, and who join their competitive dance team that is gunning for the “Best of the Best” title—a clear nod to the first competition of its kind in the South Asian dance circuit in America. Maya carries a chip on her shoulder (a scene later on in the film tries to physically embody this in a millennial joking flair) after a drone hits her head mid-performance during her high school recital; the clip goes viral, leading to a dance competitor in college to call her a ‘TikTok leftover”—a very of-the-moment humiliation for a very old kind of story: the striving girl who cannot let things go a la the Pitch Perfect (2012) premise dressed in a different cultural setting.
The specificity is where the film is strongest. The "South Asian Student Association” gets a sharp dig, as Anjali’s mother snipes that it’s a group that doesn't celebrate their culture so much as pad college resumes, to which Maya’s mother retorts back that it’s quite South Asian of them. Once Maya and Anjali join the team after an arduous and slightly satirical audition process, a team member claims that every dance group has its tropes—the token white kid on the team got a huge laugh out of me, mostly because my own dance team in college had one too. Best of all is how the film treats Maya’s identity. When she introduces herself, she says, plainly, “I’m Tamil. My family is from Sri Lanka.” Not Indian, not Sri Lankan. It’s a distinction that matters enormously and rarely gets that kind of casual precision on screen.
Ramakrishnan is stunning, and it’s a little frustrating that the role she plays once again is the tightly wound one who is told to be nice and pretty like her best friend. She has poise as Maya—unlike Devi’s chaos in Never Have I Ever (2020–2023)—which is its own refreshing point about how South Asian ambition can take many different shapes. But she is told in this film again and again that she is not “leading lady” material, which is hard to buy. Kedia, playing the easy-to-love Anjali everyone gets compared to, is doing a version of a character we all know intimately—like that one perfect cousin who can do no wrong—and she makes you like her anyway.
Where the film seems to lose me is in what it leaves off stage. We get quick references to the international kids clique, the “baddies”, the usual factions every dance team splinters into but we never actually watch that group cohere into the tight, chaotic, slightly toxic little family that a team becomes over a season. It stays peripheral rather than fully lived in. For example, the film shows Anjali’s academic probation as a fallout from the commitment but never the actual exhaustion of an 11 PM rehearsal, the difficulty of nailing a step, the pressures of keeping in touch with families, dealing with exhaustion, and generally grappling with loneliness of the first semester of college. The dances are beautiful and everyone in the team is already excellent.
There is also a scene where Anjali’s mom slaps her in the Residence Hall, leading to Anjali making a quip about how the white kids almost called the police. It’s an example of one of those quick-fire jokes that gestures at something real—the normalisation of physical discipline in South Asian households—without diving deeper. With that said, it is a story revolving around second generation Indian Americans whose experiences growing up in America are ones I do not have and cannot quite speak to.
To its credit, the movie does sidestep a trap it could have easily fallen into of manufacturing a love-triangle jealousy. There isn’t a big plot that revolves around who gets a guy. The tension between Maya and Anjali is about where you stand next to your best friend whom you’ve always been compared against—which, for anyone who has had a close friend and spent a season on one of these teams, is a far more accurate wound than any romantic subplot would have been.
Best of the Best is not trying to be a rigorous portrait of a collegiate dance team life. It’s a fun, sweet, well cast movie that clearly has affection for this specific world, and it’s nice to see that world get this kind of mainstream shine—its soundtrack is also wonderful. There has been a mixed response online, mostly skewing positive of this film with people calling it validating and joyful. But having lived a version of this story, I wanted it to sweat a little more and show more of the exhaustion beneath the celebratory moments. Perhaps reunions are where the gritty story gets told.