Anuj Kumar

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.

If the birth of Lust Stories was a shout for liberation, a tearing down of the velvet curtains that long hid Indian intimacy, then the third iteration is the echo. Helmed by a new set of original voices — Shakun Batra, Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, and Vishal Bhardwaj — and bolstered by an ensemble of actors who translate subtext through the vocabulary of body language, it does not seek to shock, nor does it carry the heavy burden of breaking taboos. It treats desire not as a provocative statement, but as a messy mirror. The four-part anthology shows how physical proximity often masks isolation in modern relationships. It shows how lust is weaponised, bargained with, or surrendered to. In the earlier films of the franchise, the stories followed a clear arc of liberation, a character realising their worth or claiming their pleasure. Here, within the recognisable OTT beats, the liberation is rarely external. In three segments, intimacy is readily available, but real emotional safety is scarce.

Coming at a time when society is increasingly seduced by the idea of instant, extra-judicial justice, Meghna Gulzar’s Daayra takes a diagnostic look at the rot within the body politic where ‘encounters’ are routinely packaged and sold as desperate acts of self-defence, and a frustrated public gleefully buys it for the wheel of justice is excruciatingly slow. Heavily informed by the details and fallout of the 2019 Hyderabad case, the film takes away the sensationalised, high-octane tropes synonymous with Bollywood police procedurals that have long normalised law enforcement officers becoming a law unto themselves.

At the heart of Last Man in Tower lies Vishram Cooperative Housing Society, a decaying, close-knit enclave of middle-class Mumbai families. Their world is upended when a ruthless real estate tycoon, Dharmen Shah (Boman Irani), offers them a life-changing financial windfall to buy out the building for luxury redevelopment. The catch is that the payout is all or nothing, contingent on a unanimous vote. While his cash-strapped neighbours eagerly scramble for a ticket into the modern world, Yogesh Mishra (Manoj Bajpayee), a retired schoolteacher known as Masterji, stubbornly refuses to sign away the home that holds the memories of his deceased wife. What begins as a disagreement quickly degenerates into a psychological social pressure cooker, as the neighborhood’s collective desperation, led by the chirpy Sangeeta Puri (Divya Dutta), turns into targeted malice against the lone dissenter.