Variety critic Siddhant Adlakha reviews "Mustache," the debut feature from writer-director Imran J. Khan, which follows its prize-winning 2023 SXSW premiere with a release on video-on-demand. The bilingual coming-of-age comedy centres on Ilyas, a 13-year-old Pakistani American boy in mid-1990s San Jose, who is uprooted from a private Islamic school and placed in a mainstream American high school, forcing him to navigate isolation at both school and home.

The review praises newcomer Atharv Verma's performance as Ilyas, whose anxieties are conveyed through vivid diagrams and elaborate voiceover narration rather than confident speech. Rizwan Manji plays his father Hameed, whose struggling business prompts the school transfer, while Ayana Manji plays Ilyas's former classmate and eventual co-conspirator, Yasmeen, who helps him scheme to get moved back to his old school. The film's recurring visual motif — extreme close-ups tied to Ilyas's self-consciousness about shaving his upper lip — underscores its blend of sharp comedy and wistful drama.