Best of the Best review – college comedy formula gets a Bollywood makeover

What’s engaging in this tale of two best girl friends and a dance competition is not the familiar plot but the whip-fast telling and brilliant choreograpy

There is absolutely nothing unexpected about this Netflix comedy set in the world of rival Bollywood dance groups on American campuses. Each plot twist is instantly familiar, every character recognisable, the essential formula untweaked from a dozen previous college comedies. But it’s funny and snappy, and directed with infectious energy by Lena Khan, one of the few Muslim female film-makers working in Hollywood. The scriptwriters are Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, a pair of millennial comedians who look as if they’ve done enough research on the inner workings of gen Z behaviour to write a PhD.

Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) star as lifelong best friends who enrol together at UCLA. Maya is the clever difficult one; Anjali is the nice pretty one. (It goes without saying Maya is also a total babe.) During freshers’ week they join the college’s Bollywood dance club where, predictably, Maya locks horns with leader Ronak (Ankur Rathee) over the choreography. He wants to base their new-season r