Anuj Kumar

In a cinematic landscape dominated by polarised, ‘us versus them’ period pieces, Rajkumar Santoshi serves a humanistic counter-narrative this partition day. Based on Asghar Wajahat’s seminal play Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya O Janmeya Nai, the film poignantly handles the play’s core ideological conflict and subverts Sunny Deol’s popular persona to underline that human empathy and shared grief can outlast any artificial border. A Muslim refugee family from Meerut is allocated a Lahore haveli vacated during Partition, only to discover an elderly Hindu woman, Durga Devi or simply Mai, refusing to leave. Having just survived the horrific communal violence, Sikandar Mirza and Hamida (Preity Zinta) arrive in Lahore carrying immense psychological trauma. To them, the allocated haveli is a hard-earned refuge and a rightful compensation for everything they lost in India.

At a time when man’s best friend is caught between systemic neglect and empty sentimentality, writer-director Amit Rai eschews melodrama to craft an absorbing thriller with a moral spine. Somewhere in Assam, young Apu’s attention-seeking dog, Momo (Oscar) goes missing. The local policeman, who looks well-meaning, tells him and his mother that their pet would have become a delicacy by now. Around the same time, deep in Bihar, Prince, a young construction worker, goes missing. There too, the ‘helpful’ custodian of law shows little interest in following the missing boy’s footprints. But the tech-savvy Apu doesn’t give up hope, nor does Oscar (Bruno), Prince’s street friend. In different timelines, as they launch their search-and-rescue missions, we get an engrossing tale with a message ensconced deep within.

Against the backdrop of a soft monsoon, Max, Min & Meowzaki unfolds as an elegant symphony of human vulnerability. Waiting in the wings for quite some time, at the heart of this coming-of-age, slice-of-life drama are three generations of single men, each carrying a heavy yet silent sorrow. They are men who have forgotten how to speak to one another. Yet to recover from the death of his mother, jingle singer Mahesh or Max (Siddharth Menon), is negotiating with the wreckage of a love story that has just collapsed into a bittersweet breakup with Minara Hussain, or Min (Medha Shankr). His father, Ramesh (Adil Hussain), a man tightly wound in rigid armour, is suffocating under a sleepless, unconfessed grief for his deceased wife and societal biases. The grandfather, an eminent Carnatic singer, Sridhar (Nassar) navigates the fading twilight of his memories, carrying a guilt of not being able to take his son along in the song of life.

Packaged as a modern, gritty OTT thriller, Ikka leans heavily on the core DNA of commercial Hindi cinema, a formula that has increasingly been reduced to mere nostalgia. Fuelled by the star-versus-star dynamic, its narrative weight rests on the explosive chemistry between Sunny Deol and Akshaye Khanna. Physical dominance and moral integrity meet cold stillness and sharp smirks as Netflix, perhaps, wants to test and capture the appetite of a massive, single-screen mass audience. As a result, the recent box office success of Sunny and Akshaye seems to have prompted the makers to dress up a decade-old story to add a new section to the OTT library. At its heart is Arjun Mehra (Sunny Deol), a towering, righteous defence lawyer who is forced into a moral trap when circumstances force him to defend a murder suspect, Shauryamann (Akshaye Khanna). Known to fight for what is right, Arjun’s gut feeling and past experience tell him that Shauryamann is in the wrong, but to save what is precious to him and his wife, Avantika (Dia Mirza), he needs to compromise on his values.

For a franchise whose premise is a loud satire of the destructive nature of human greed, the driving force, Indra Kumar, behaves like his desperate protagonists. By pushing the series into a hollow fourth installment, the makers seem to be executing their own creative heist — mining the final ounces of goodwill from a beloved 2007 comedy to secure a quick box-office payout. Ajay Devgn, who has produced the summer adventure, leads a pack of imbecile characters on screen chasing a mythical treasure. The star brings his deadpan energy to the madness as Guddu, who teams up with the eccentric Johnny (Sanjay Mishra) to hunt for a goldmine of laughs.

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.