Best of the Best Review: Netflix’s Dance Comedy Finds Its Own Rhythm

Best of the Best knows that a campus dance movie is allowed to be familiar. There will be a competition, a team under pressure, friendships tested by ambition and a finale that asks everyone to put their feelings into choreography. Lena Khan’s new Netflix comedy does not try to pretend otherwise. Instead, it wins by making the people inside that well-worn structure feel specific, funny and worth following.

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia play Maya and Anjali, lifelong best friends beginning their first year at UCLA. After a rough high school performance, they find a new obsession in Agni, a competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team preparing for the U.S. championships. What starts as a chance to step into campus life becomes a sharp, spirited coming-of-age story about friendship, identity, family expectations and who gets to define tradition.

Written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, Best of the Best is not trying to radically reinvent the dance-film formula. Its smart move is recognizing that the formula can still work when the humor is this quick, the dancing this electric and the culture at the center is treated as a living, evolving part of its characters’ lives—not merely an aesthetic.

A Familiar Story With a Fresh Point of View

Maya and Anjali arrive at college with different instincts. Maya is the more outspoken and uncompromising of the two; Anjali initially has an easier time fitting in. Both have also grown up beneath expectations that reach beyond grades or a successful major, and the film lets those pressures shape their choices without reducing either woman to a lesson about “tiger parenting.”

Joining Agni puts the pair into a new community where talent is only the beginning. Team leader Ronak (Ankur Rathee) has a clear sense of what a winning routine should look like, while Maya wants the group to take a bigger creative risk. That disagreement provides the film’s central artistic tension: is honoring South Asian dance about leaning into what audiences already recognize, or making room for forms and influences that deserve a wider stage?

It is a question the movie returns to with real affection. Khan and her writers are not interested in declaring one version of culture authentic and another version diluted. The best scenes understand that second-generation identity is not a balancing act between two separate boxes. It is a place where the old and new, the traditional and the experimental, can collide and make something exciting.

The Friendship Is the Main Event

Ramakrishnan, coming off Never Have I Ever, gives Maya plenty of comic bite without turning her bluntness into a one-note flaw. She is often right, sometimes exhausting and always easy to understand. Kedia is the film’s secret weapon, matching Ramakrishnan’s energy while giving Anjali a quieter but equally compelling internal life. Their friendship feels established from the first scenes: there is shorthand, genuine irritation and the comfort of people who know exactly where to press.

That chemistry keeps Best of the Best emotionally grounded even when the plot hits a familiar dance-movie milestone. The pair’s disagreements matter because the movie has taken the time to show why they chose one another in the first place. When they are laughing, practicing or simply decompressing after the chaos of campus life, the film gets a warm, lived-in rhythm that cannot be manufactured by a competition montage.

Hasan Minhaj also appears as Professor Latif, providing a welcome adult voice without hijacking the students’ story. The supporting ensemble has fun with the heightened college-comedy material, but Khan keeps the focus where it belongs: on two young women learning that the version of success they inherited might not be the one they want to chase.

The Dancing Does Not Feel Like Homework

Dance movies live or die on whether the performances make you sit forward, and Joya Kazi’s choreography is one of the film’s biggest strengths. The routines draw from Bollywood, kuthu and classical dance traditions alongside contemporary collegiate competition energy. They are colorful, athletic and staged with enough clarity that the audience can appreciate the people moving together rather than merely the editing.

The cast’s effort is visible in the best way. Ramakrishnan and Kedia trained intensively for the film, and the choreography never treats their characters as performers who suddenly become extraordinary because the plot says so. Their progress is part of the story. The movie understands why joining a dance team can become all-consuming in college: it is a social life, an artistic outlet, a public declaration of identity and, yes, a source of ridiculous pressure.

Khan directs those sequences with real momentum, but she also knows when to let a reaction land. The film’s dreamier flourishes nod to Bollywood and Kollywood without stopping the story cold, and its needle drops keep the whole thing light on its feet. The result is a dance comedy that feels celebratory without losing its sense of humor.

Where It Follows the Formula Too Closely

The movie’s greatest limitation is also part of its charm: you can often see the next dramatic beat coming. Some supporting characters are asked to carry very familiar roles, and the family material—especially the mothers—could use more room. The film gives its parents enough texture to explain the pressure Maya and Anjali feel, but not always enough to let those relationships become as rich as the central friendship.

A handful of jokes and broad college-comedy beats do not hit with the same precision as the film’s cultural observations. But the momentum rarely disappears. Best of the Best keeps finding its way back to Maya and Anjali, and those scenes are strong enough to carry a little predictability.

Final Verdict

Best of the Best may know every stop on the college-dance-movie map, but it travels there with enough heart, wit and visual energy to make the route feel newly personal. Ramakrishnan and Kedia give the film a terrific center, Lena Khan makes the dance sequences pop, and the South Asian-American perspective is woven into the story rather than laid on top of it. It is a joyful, generous crowd-pleaser whose best moments are less about winning than the exhilaration of being seen—by your friends, your team and yourself.

Where to Watch Best of the Best

Best of the Best is now streaming on Netflix. Directed by Lena Khan and written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, the PG-13 film stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Priyanka Kedia, Hasan Minhaj, Ankur Rathee, Chaneil Kular and Saara Chaudry.