Anuj Kumar

A quiet hymn sung for the thousands of names in Punjab that the state machinery tried to wipe during the insurgency, director Honey Trehan tells the story of a god-fearing, resilient man who looked at a landscape of fear and chose not to look away. Armed with the fragile pages of municipal logs and the calculated weights of cremation firewood, he resurrects the disappeared, meticulously piecing together a forensic paper trail that strips away the senior police leadership’s complicity. For the uninitiated, Satluj (originally titled Panjab 95) chronicles the true-life crusade of social activist Jaswant Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh), who risked his life to uncover thousands of secrets behind the state-sanctioned extrajudicial cremations in the 1990s when Punjab was on the boil.

Moving past a heavy-handed Dunki, Rajkumar Hirani finds his deft touch, imbuing a warm soul into the Over-The-Top streaming space where even empathy feels algorithmic these days. Instead of adding to our daily anxiety, Hirani, who works as a series creator, along with director Avinash Arun, takes the clinical world of cybercrime and wraps it in an engrossing buddy-cop comedy that educates and comforts the audience. Reflecting the anxiety of the times when a single digital mistake can ruin a life, the series effectively uses the theme of forgiveness to heal people and relationships. Led by Arshad Warsi, who balances his signature effortless humour with a tougher tone, and debutant Vir Hirani as his father’s creative voice of the outsider who questions the absurd rules of the world, the narrative finds its sweet spot when the points of view of Pedro, an old school policeman nursing a young wound and Pritam, a modern hacker, living with his grandfather under an assumed identity, collide.

The YRF Spy Universe is running out of breathing room. What started as a focused story about one legendary agent has morphed into a crowded superhero-style playground where every major Bollywood star needs their own badge. After much delay, this week, Alia Bhatt jumps into the fray to bring some gender parity to a world ruled by men for over a decade. Traditionally, in spy movies, female characters were usually romantic interests, sidekicks, or spies who still needed the male hero to handle the big boss. Here, Alia is Alpha unto herself, not standing in anyone’s shadow. She is the central anchor of the mission, seeking to carry a massive, high-budget action franchise completely on her own shoulders. The actor doesn’t cut any corners for the physical and visual transformation required for the part of a trained, genetically altered operative.

Welcome To The Jungle is yet another invitation to a cinematic universe that assumes a bigger budget and a massive star cast equal bigger laughs, as director Ahmed Khan treats the third installment of the popular franchise like a 164-minute variety show rather than a cohesive experience. Based on late Neeraj Vora’s meta-story, it begins as a clever, self-aware critique of the film industry, where a corrupt corporate figure (Zakir Hussain), pushed by the changing political climate, decides to fund a guaranteed box-office flop to launder money. However, instead of exploiting the inherent situational irony of this film-within-a-film scam, writer Farhad Samji buries the narrative urgency under his characteristic, low-effort rhyming dialogues and disjointed sketch comedy and leaves it to Akshay Kumar and Johnny Lever to keep it afloat through their sheer improvisational brilliance.

Fourteen years after Deepika Padukone danced barefoot on our heartstrings as the chaotic, unforgettable Veronica, Homi Adajania returns to the bar with Cocktail 2 but ends up serving a lukewarm mocktail of ideas and aesthetics. The narrative playground shifts from the rainy, moody streets of London to the sun-drenched, high-fashion cliffs of Sicily. Kunal (Shahid Kapoor) and Diya (Rashmika Mandanna), a live-in couple whose decade-long bond has survived a long-distance relationship and COVID-19, hit a gorgeous obstacle in the form of Ally (Kriti Sanon) during a vacation in Italy. Trying to separate habit from commitment, and responsibility from burden, Diya decides to test Kunal’s loyalty by asking Ally to seduce him.

An economic thriller that utilises the textures of India’s Balance of Payments crisis of 1991 to deliver a message on state power, centralised authority, and the perceived liabilities of democratic noise, Governor: The Silent Saviour is yet another example of how history is being instrumentalised on screen today. It is not just looking back to understand the crippling economic impact of the Gulf War in 1991; it is looking back to legitimise the governance model of 2026. The timing of the film’s release feels remarkably prescient because India is once again navigating severe macroeconomic tremors triggered directly by a West Asian crisis, with petrol prices soaring, and rumours of depleting gold reserves floating in the air again.

The flood of true-crime content has turned the living room into a dark laboratory. It feels unsettling to measure which series ‘grieves better,’ which depicts ‘more realistic’ violence, or which frames ‘suffering believably’. The couch feels like a spectator’s seat to human misery. Yet, this discomfort perhaps serves the point. The niceness of a living room is often a bubble, while the city outside – as Raakh reminds this week – remains equally brutal and indifferent. In the sweltering haze of August 1978, a sudden rain washes away Delhi’s innocence. When two children, Suman and Sahil Arora (Divya and Vivan Sharma), vanish into the maw of a predatory night, the world of a decorated army man, Ashok, and his wife Mona (Aamir Bashir and Sonali Bendre), dissolves into unsolvable grief. Into this void steps Sub Inspector Jayprakash Jatav (Ali Fazal), a rookie defined by the sharp crease of his uniform and the heavy burden of his birth, hunting two shadows who kill with the casualness of a seasonal breeze. Inspired by the infamous Ranga-Billa case, Raakh is not merely a chase, but a dissection of the anatomy of crime in the Capital.

A sweeping, bittersweet examination of displacement, Main Vaapas Aaunga is a timely, intimate, poetic character study about how geopolitical lines permanently alter the trajectory of human hearts. Imtiaz Ali’s filmography is built around characters who travel in search of their souls. Here, he evolves from his road movies and, together with co-writer Nayanika Mehtani, grounds this obsession in the tragedy of Partition, turning his lens toward the refugee crisis, where transit is no longer a choice of self-exploration, but a desperate battle for survival.