Akhil Arora

CTRL lacks control. The new Indian Netflix original movie—directed and co-written by Vikramaditya Motwane—has a lot on its mind. It wishes to tackle the perils of building a business with your partner, the blurred lines between online validation and offline happiness, generational malaise and being severely attached to devices, and the dangers posed by Big Tech, deep fakes and generative AI models. There’s a lot more, some of it frivolous and the rest bordering on spoilers. And that’s exactly the problem—it cannot pick a lane. CTRL tries to pack in so much in its 100-minute runtime that it ends up doing none of it well. Worse, everything it does feels stale. We’ve heard and seen variations of this. Nothing it does shocks or surprises.

How do you approach a movie inspired by a series of gruesome killings that left a scar on the public but provided no closure? The police investigation into the 2006 Nithari serial murders—where a domestic help preyed on at least 19 minors, sexually assaulting them after their death, chopping their bodies into pieces and possibly indulging in cannibalism and organ harvesting, potentially with the tacit acknowledgement of his employer—was so badly botched that the case remains in the news in 2024, as the courts and agencies debate the sentencing. The two main accused were acquitted in 2023 over lack of sufficient evidence but India’s top crime body, CBI, has challenged it. With so many unknowable factors, this is rich territory for any filmmaker.

The Penguin—premiering September 19 on HBO and Max—arrives amidst a shifting mood in a space that’s been overdone. It’s another small-screen extension of a superhero movie. Who asked for it? This kind of blatant intellectual property exploitation, solely greenlit to boost a streaming service devoid of an identity, that expands the lives of minor Gotham characters and crime families. Comic book storytelling has already taken over everything. And, what, it’s on HBO too now? (The Penguin was greenlit as a Max original in 2022, but in July, the executives pivoted and stuck the HBO sticker on it.) Isn’t anything sacred anymore? Here’s the good news: infused with the energy of an all-time HBO hit, The Sopranos, the new DC spin-off miniseries is worthy of the HBO branding.

In Call Me Bae—the new Amazon Prime Video series from Four More Shots Please! writer Ishita Moitra—an extraordinarily privileged coddled young woman falls from grace and ends up on the street. (Except she has enough ultra-expensive possessions that she could get by for years by selling them in the open market.) She stumbles her way into TV journalism and, bafflingly, lands the scoop of any reporter’s dreams on the first day of the job. (Moitra clearly has a soft spot for good-looking, fashionably dressed investigative journalists. After working with Sayani Gupta’s Damini Roy in Four More, she concocts another unlikely one in Ananya Panday’s Bella Chowdhary.) In doing so, Call Me Bae needlessly complicates its fish-out-of-water tale.