Anuj Kumar

When in form, the infectious, chaotic energy of David Dhawan’s cinema can make even the most cynical critic melt. After a lull at the box office, the sultan of slapstick invokes a title from his inventory of playful songs and recreates the vibe of a period in Hindi cinema where logic politely steps aside to make way for a relentless cascade of laugh-out-loud misunderstandings. Dressed in a slick, contemporary cover, he partners with writers Yunus Sajawal and Farhad Samji to generate rapid-fire, rhyming situational humour that once defined the Govinda-Dhawan tempo. In his son Varun Dhawan, he has a performer who can deliver Govinda’s frantic spirit and channel the charm of a lovable rascal.

By taking India’s most exhausted street insult and turning it into a literal roll call — Maa (Madhuri Dixit) and Behen (Triptii Dimri and Dharna Durga) — the prolific Suresh Triveni essentially asks this week: What if the women routinely weaponised in local cuss words actually team up to hide a dead body or the rot of patriarchal entitlement. It shares DNA with Darlings and Haseen Dillruba, pulp-crime comedies headlined by mainstream actors in which ordinary women subvert expectations by outsmarting society, only to reveal that the crime we panicked over is more visceral than it seems. Set in a middle-class housing society, cleverly called Adarsh Colony, Maa Behen gradually becomes a physical representation of societal surveillance. The neighbour network, led by Charitra Kumar Gupta (Ravi Kishan), is designed to show how a judgmental community assassinates the character of a single woman, a single mother.

Almost two decades after Dev.D, Anurag Kashyap returns to conduct another autopsy of male entitlement, but in the post-#MeToo space, he has a far more treacherous, shifting terrain to navigate. The filmmaker’s cinematic identity is built on a refusal to provide clean moral answers, and Bandar initially promises to be his ultimate playground of gray before it stagnates. Samar Mehra (Bobby Deol), a fading, entitled television star, has his life systematically dismantled when his ex-girlfriend Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi) hits him with a rape accusation. Anurag, along with screenwriters Sudeep Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, makes the audience sit with an agonising double vision, trapped between a deeply flawed, hollowed-out man-child and an erratic, unpredictable accuser. He denies the audience a clear hero to root for or a definitive villain to despise. The policeman invokes Bachchan to remind Samar, ‘no means no,’ but there is no one to tell Gayatri the boundaries of a consensual relationship. The film touches on humanity’s status between left- and right-swipes. When policemen cover his face to save him from the marauding media, Samar’s claustrophobic mind goes to the moment when he casually demanded to choke Gayatri for momentary physical pleasure.

The greatest superpower of cinema is the ability to make us believe again. Jackie Shroff’s little summer adventure, The Great Grand Superhero: Aliens Ka Aagman doesn’t just ask us to believe in flying grandfathers or marauding aliens, it invites us to believe in something far more radical in these times of attention and trust deficit. The film tells us that a wrinkled, mischievous Dadaji can still be the mightiest hero in a child’s universe, and that childhood imagination isn’t childish — it’s the original superpower. Intelligent, imaginative, but lonely, young Dipu (Mihir Godbole is pitch-perfect) fabricates grand stories to win over new friends in new schools and new towns where his father gets transferred. In his script, his grandfather (Jackie Shroff) is a superhero who fights aliens. The tone is secretive, and Dipu limits the age group to under-18 because he perhaps knows his adventure will not pass the adult scrutiny.

We often believe that Northeastern society enjoys far greater gender parity than the Hindi heartland. Yet, watching Shape of Momo, we realise that while the shape of patriarchy may vary, its taste remains exactly the same. Here, the humble dumpling becomes a brilliant, tactile metaphor for the rigid social architectures women are forced to inhabit. Between the geometry of conformity and imperfection as resistance lies a tender coming-of-age story worth savouring. Often, the luminescence of cinema lies not in loud rebellions but in the mapping of invisible boundaries. Tribeny Rai’s debut feature delivers a gentle, sharp-witted exploration of autonomy, inheritance, and the friction of modern ideals against ancestral soil. Along the way, the film effectively dismantles romanticised views of Himalayan communities, highlighting economic disparities, migrant labour issues, and gender expectations in a cultural context.

Another week, another commentary on uncomfortable societal truths packaged in the form of a mystery where solid performances and subtext are marred by predictable beats. At first glance, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s System masquerades as a legal thriller, but beneath its polished exterior, it promises to lay bare the facade of institutional neutrality. It positions the courtroom not as a temple of justice, but as a theatre of social stratification where truth is a manufactured commodity. The narrative (penned by Arun Sukumar, Harman Baweja, and Akshat Ghildial) forces a meta-textual collision. Neha Rajvansh (Sonakshi Sinha), a public prosecutor fighting the suffocating shadow of her iconic legal patriarch (Ashutosh Gowarikar), is subtly challenged from the margins by Sarika (Jyotika), a humble yet resilient stenographer who weaponises the very bureaucratic machinery designed to keep her invisible.

At a time when mainstream romance usually oscillates between airbrushed fantasy and comedy, with a dash of toxic masculinity, Vivek Soni’s Chand Mera Dil arrives as a grounded, mature counter-narrative. It subverts the grammar of a Bollywood musical melodrama, or what we call the Dharma production tropes, to deliver a sharp dissection of modern intimacy with a melancholic flourish. After a long time, a love story doesn’t dump career and bread and butter issues. Aarav (Lakshya) and Chandni (Ananya Panday) are not flaky cardboards. Besides the raging hormones, they come across as believable engineering students facing rigorous academic pressures. They do not drop out when life gets messy. The writing (Vivek, Tushar Paranjpe, and Akshat Ghildiyal) respects their intellect and ambition, showing that pursuing career ambitions isn’t an alternative to a love story, or vice versa. It is a heavy framework within which the love story must exist, and Ananya Panday and Lakshya strike a delicate equilibrium to anchor the film’s transition from a lyrical college romance into a stark, mature reality. They establish an effortless physical and emotional intimacy early on, making the eventual fracture sting all the more.

These days, OTT films flirt with hinterland politics but settle for safe social commentary. They are conceived with the data-driven rigour of a journalistic research project, but executed with the unfinished, compromised soul of a half-written novel. The trending themes are child abuse and caste honour, but the actual grit remains strictly dialogue-heavy and dialect-deep. The volatile social issues get diluted by a cautious approach. The narrative feels distinctly over-vetted, leaving one with the inescapable impression that a legal team sat directly beside the editor, scrubbing away uncomfortable truths.