Anuj Kumar

Neeraj Pandey has this knack for taking us to those forbidden spaces where offenders and upholders of the law become two sides of the same coin. He teases you with dribs and drabs of information, making us guess which side his characters would flip. This week, with Taskaree, the coin is golden, and the field of special ops is Mumbai International Airport. Celebrating the unsung heroes of India’s customs department, the series portrays their battles against organised crime with limited firepower.

History lovers often crave the human drama behind epochal events. They pine for the backroom intrigue, the clash of egos, the creases in the starched characters that decorate our history books, not to forget the impact of their moral stand on the man on the street. These days, ancient and medieval history offers plenty of elbow room to play with the past, but when it comes to modern Indian history, filmmakers tend to draw back, as the wounds are still fresh and memories of Partition linger.

These are interesting times in popular Hindi cinema, as a battle of perspectives rages at the turnstiles. Filmmakers known for overtly jingoistic tentpoles are turning to dark espionage dramas to convey their political intent, while those celebrated for their noirish, intricate thrillers are turning to patriotic dramas with predictable plotlines, in what seems like a well-argued counterpoint.

As we wait for Honey Trehan’s Punjab 95, which is still under Censor scrutiny, the filmmaker transports us to the heart of Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow-Kanpur axis, spinning a sharp crime thriller with a throbbing conscience. The spiritual sequel builds on the original’s noir aesthetic, using its atmospheric whodunit structure to examine how power dynamics and moral corruption shape justice and revenge in an unequal society. By asking what happens when victims and perpetrators trade places, Honey brings emotional depth to the unraveling of the mystery. Through vivid symbols — bulldozers and shallow graves — he critiques how power conceals exploitation and shields the corrupt.

After making headlines with the Oscar shortlist, Dharma Productions goes homebound with a tourism advertisement for Croatia, interspersed with product placement for the bronzer look of its fair-skinned lead actress. Masquerading as a breezy, feel-good romantic comedy that imparts the warmth of family values during winter break, it feels like an addition to the aspirational calendar of wedding and honeymoon ideas that the production house delivers every year to towns of different tiers.

After weeks of shrill, strident films, The Great Shamshuddin Family offers the warmth of a quilt and the taste of ginger tea in a Delhi winter. Nearly 15 years after Peepli Live, Anusha Rizvi returns with a day-long glimpse into the life of a modern Indian Muslim family that is achingly human, steadfastly hopeful, and consistently humorous. Carrying tensions arising from interfaith relationships and generational grievances within its layers, the film gradually builds the tenuous relationship between the home and the world. From the passive aggression of liberals, the youthful presumptions, the manipulation of conservative but well-meaning elders, to the bitterness, the casual communal innuendos, and prejudices that we see around us, the film brings out the foreboding and the fears of social violence in our subconscious mind without pointing fingers.

In the last few years, Aditya Dhar has emerged as a dhurandhar, an expert who can soft pedal nationalist propaganda with aesthetic execution. After Uri and Article 370, here he turns a potential OTT series into a 212-minute unyielding character study of ‘enemies’. Addressed to an audience who lost faith in ‘aman in aasha’ with the neighbour after the Kandhar hijack and the Parliament attack of 2001, the film is mounted like a tribute to the exploits of Ajay Sanyal (R Madhavan), who seems to be based on National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. While the disclaimer calls it a fictional exercise, the similarities with real-life characters seem more than coincidental.

Bollywood is in love all over again. After Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara, Aanand L Rai, another master of the poetic portrayal of passion and pain, returns with a gripping interrogation of love’s destructive underbelly, set in a social context. Connected to Raanjhanaa(2013) by an umbilical cord, Tere Ishk Mein talks of the magic of love that is lost in modern life’s logic, which entices us to trade emotions. In Rai’s universe, love is both poison and panacea, and once again, he has taken up a risky subject — the transformative power of romance.