Anuj Kumar

A corrupt yet efficient cop is a lethal paradox but a rare breed in Hindi cinema. Most films give us clean heroes or cartoonish villains in uniform, even though our police stations have plenty of specimens like Ajay Nivrit (Manoj Bajpayee). Few Indian filmmakers understand the inner workings of our law enforcement agencies as well as Neeraj Pandey. He operates in a fertile space where raw reality meets gripping fiction. In Gajab Raat, the writer-producer collaborates with director Ritesh Shah to look beyond cinematic stereotypes and show the power of an investigating officer if he decides to follow procedure. Originally titled Ghooskhor Pandat, which sparked controversy, the makers shifted the title to the generic Gajab Raat, pulling the character out of a specific identity to address broader institutional corruption. A chameleon, Ajay, regardless of surname, is a quintessential Delhi cop who could have spent his formative years in Darbhanga, Kochi, or Pathankot. He doesn’t compromise on law; he negotiates to mould it according to his interests. Together with his immediate boss, SHO Rana (Rajiv Gupta), he manipulates the system to nurture his farmhouse dreams. One night, even before the dust settles after a raid in a cheap hotel, the dynamic moves from a lucrative extortion plan to a dark, high-stakes national security crisis.

A Pakistani spy loses his memory and unwittingly starts working for Indian intelligence. Sometimes, a single-sentence logline is enough to trigger an urge to watch a film. Writer Aakash Kaushik, making his directorial debut with an espionage satire, nails that hook. Memory is perhaps a spy’s biggest asset. He assumes a new identity, but what happens if the operative sheds his original personality altogether? It opens floodgates for creative possibilities. When Bilal Ahmad (Ayushmann Khurrana), a Pakistani mole who has infiltrated an Indian security agency, loses recollection of his true role in a sudden blast, the script flips the spy action genre on its head.

The dastardly attacks of 26/11 have been covered in Indian cinema from multiple angles. This week, director Avinash Arun takes us into the systemic battle that followed, through the singular biographical lens of Ujjwal Nikam, the special public prosecutor popularly known as the man who sent Ajmal Kasab to the gallows. The choice creates a persuasive anchor. As we know the legal battle is a slow, faceless machine, by focusing on Nikam, Avinash gives that dry institutional process a human pulse.

At a time when investigative journalism is making news, Reporting Live exposes the high cost of illegal sand mining. The sand mafia has deep roots in the institutional architecture, but its corruption is often exposed by stringers and is buried in the inside pages of newspapers until a journalist is mowed down or a whistleblower is burnt alive. Drawing from real events, the film follows Sandhya Yadav (Parineeti Chopra), a field reporter for the Mumbai-based Hindi news channel Azaad Bharati, hunting for a primetime story. Alongside her pragmatic video journalist, Vinod Sharma (Deven Bhojani), she is dispatched to cover an infrastructure disaster in Visargaon, where the sudden collapse of a bridge claims the lives of school children.

For over a decade, Vijay Salgaonkar used cinematic logic along with the shared memory of October 2nd to build an impregnable fortress around his family that the law simply couldn’t touch. But every perfect alibi has an expiration date. Drishyam The Conclusion marks the moment director Abhishek Pathak cuts the umbilical cord to the Malayalam mothership and finds its feet in the grit and grandeur of the Hindi heartland. What distinguishes the franchise from a standard police procedural is its investigation of manufactured hyperreality. A story doesn’t need to be true; it just has to feel credible. It plays on a fundamental rule of human psychology: people believe what makes sense to them.

A timely critique of patriarchal definitions of consent and female agency, Pooja Meri Jaanworks like a companion piece to films like Pink and Article 375. Operating beneath the veneer of failed romance and a courtroom thriller, the narrative interrogates the limits of male obsession and the sharp societal backlash faced by a self-actualised woman asserting her autonomy. The plot follows Pooja (Mrunal Thakur), a young woman whose firm rejection of her longtime friend Aniket’s (Vikram Singh Chauhan) romantic advances triggers a chain reaction that upends her life.

In contemporary Indian cinema, few voices capture the anguish and alchemy of rural survival quite like Rima Das. With Village Rockstars 2, the auteur returns to the flood-bitten plains of Assam, proving that lightning can indeed strike twice in the same muddy field. If the 2017 original was a euphoric, barefoot sprint through childhood fantasies, this luminous sequel is a melancholic exhale of coming of age. The cardboard guitars have given way to real strings. Her Apu’s melody is now weighted down by the weight of adulthood, but Dhunu isn’t the tragic sister left behind to fade away.

What happens when the custodians of ecological preservation form a corrupt alliance with political forces in the name of progress? Arunabh Kumar and Ekta Kapoor combine to present the dialectic between ecological conservation and modernisation, wrapped in a glossy, high-pitched divine intervention, for a mass audience that, these days, looks South for grand mytho-mystical experiences. When Rishi (Sidharth Malhotra), a rational professional, returns to his ancestral village with his wife Mamta (Tamannaah Bhatia) to sell off his inherited land, he is sucked into a raging debate. Led by the double-faced Deepak (Sunil Grover), those aligned with the development agenda offer a better rate because they want to build a road through the forest to reduce travel time to city infrastructure. In contrast, the traditionalists, including his well-meaning brother Shashi (Anup Soni) and bitter sister-in-law (Shweta Tiwari), don’t want to upset the forest’s reigning deity and invite her curse. Because of a past incident, Rishi has lost faith in the goddess, but Mamta remains devoted. When Rishi ignores the sacred decree forbidding entry into the forest after sunset, fury breaks loose as we gradually discover that beneath the supernatural lies a timely message: reneging on a pact with nature can unleash self-seeking dark forces. Drawing from folklore, it reminds us that the ruler has a role to protect nature and what happens when the custodian goes corrupt.