Best of the Best matters less as a race-to-the-finals movie than as a coming-of-age comedy built around a particular campus world. Netflix’s new film puts UCLA’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team at the center of the story, giving its friendship drama a cultural setting that is more specific than generic rehearsal-montage scenery. That specificity is the reason to pay attention: the movie is framed by its makers as one fictional story about South Asian college students finding community, creativity, and room to change.
A competition movie with a defined cultural setting
Streaming now on Netflix, Best of the Best is a 2026 PG-13 comedy running 1 hour and 52 minutes. Its official synopsis follows childhood friends Maya and Anjali as they join UCLA’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team and aim for a U.S. championship. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia lead the cast; Hasan Minhaj plays Professor Latif.
Those facts describe a familiar movie engine: friends, a team, and a high-stakes contest. The more revealing part is the setting. Co-writers Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam have said they wanted to make a coming-of-age comedy about South Asian college students. In Netflix’s account of the film, they describe college dance teams as places where students build community and connect with culture, informed by their own encounters with Bollywood-inspired collegiate competitions.
That is official creator framing, not proof that every South Asian student or campus team experiences the circuit the same way. Still, it identifies a meaningful choice in the film’s premise. Dance is not simply a shortcut to spectacle here; it is presented as the shared practice through which the characters enter a social world.
Why the Maya–Anjali bond is the useful scale
Netflix frames the film around sisterhood, friendship, and self-acceptance, and the Maya–Anjali partnership gives those ideas a human scale. A college story often turns independence into a clean break from old attachments. This setup suggests a more interesting tension: what happens when two people who have always moved together join a demanding team that asks each person to define herself?
That reading is an interpretation of the setup, rather than a claim about scenes or an assessment of the finished film. The official materials establish the childhood-friend premise and emphasize friendship and self-discovery; they do not support a beat-by-beat account of how the relationship develops. Keeping that boundary matters. It lets the premise do its cultural work without pretending that a promotional synopsis is a full review.
It also keeps the stakes grounded. The championship gives the story forward motion, but the more durable question is whether a friendship can make room for ambition, disagreement, and new versions of adulthood. For viewers drawn to campus stories, that is likely the emotional proposition behind the dance competition.
A visual language built for movement
Director Lena Khan has named Dope and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as visual influences, describing an aim for music-video energy with a more editorial approach to fashion. That statement signals an intention to make the dance sequences and college environment feel designed rather than merely functional. It is a useful clue to the film’s visual language, but it should not be mistaken for a verdict on how consistently the finished movie achieves that goal.
The cast’s preparation adds a concrete sense of the work behind that intention. In a Sept. 18 Netflix interview, Ramakrishnan and Kedia said they completed four months of dance boot camp, including 14-hour studio days and private lessons with choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman. That training detail does not guarantee what appears on screen; it does show that movement was treated as central to the production rather than decorative background.
What cultural specificity can and cannot do
The strongest case for Best of the Best is not that it can stand in for an entire community. It cannot. A Netflix comedy about one UCLA team is a fictionalized version of a real campus scene, shaped by its writers, director, performers, and commercial form. It is not a documentary, a survey, or a universal portrait of South Asian student life.
But a movie does not need to be universal to be culturally meaningful. By centering Bollywood-fusion competition as a creative and communal space, the film gives the old underdog-team format a more situated reason for existing. Its official materials point to a story about people trying to belong without losing their individuality. The value of that framing is its scale: a particular team, a particular friendship, and a particular moment of college life.
For an audience tired of competition stories that treat culture as surface decoration, that may be the film’s most promising distinction. Best of the Best asks viewers to meet the dance team as a cultural home in motion—one that can hold both collective joy and the complications of growing up.
Sources
- Netflix Tudum: “In Best of the Best, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan & Priyanka Kedia Take Center Stage” (Sept. 18, 2026)
- Netflix Tudum: “Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Priyanka Kedia on Their Best of the Best Dance Boot Camp” (Sept. 18, 2026)
- Netflix: Best of the Best official title page (accessed Sept. 22, 2026)
- Netflix Tudum: “New on Netflix in September 2026” (Aug. 31, 2026)
