One of the more delightful mainstream films at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF, was Good Fortune, an American film in English, in a Gala presentation. The film is directed by American comedian Aziz Ansari, with roots in Tamil Nadu. The film that also stars Keke Palmer and Sandra Oh is due for a worldwide theatrical release, including in India, on October 17, 2025.

From the South Asian Diaspora @TIFF, two diverse features comment on the evils of capitalism: Aneil Karia’s Hamlet in Centrepiece, starring Riz Ahmed and Sheeba Chaddha, a powerful British film adapting Shakespeare’s great tragedy in Punjabi and Shakespearean English. And with Good Fortune, it takes forward the trend of comedians becoming film actors/stars/directors, including Charlie Chaplin, Chris Rock and Jordan Peele, to our own Kapil Sharma, as singers once became film stars when sound came to the movies.
 
The film follows an angel named Gabriel (Reeves) who is a lowly angel with small wings not assigned more taxing duties than stopping people from texting and driving at the same time. But when he sees the struggles of gig worker Arj (Aziz Ansari), a delivery man working for an app-based company, who works multiple shifts, yet can barely feed himself and sleeps in his car, that gets towed away because of unpaid parking tickets. He swaps his life with that of a wealthy venture capitalist Jeff (Seth Rogen) at whose California mansion he delivers some goods. Gabriel assumes Arj will soon see how flaky the good, wealthy life is and want to swap back with his own modest life, but is in a dilemma as Arj is having too much fun with cocktails in the pool, and has no intention of swapping back to his own humble life.