Anuj Kumar

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.

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.