Bharathi Pradhan

It’s laughable at first, like the main actors are caricatures. Curiously named Sophia Kanmani Shekhar (Bhumi Pednekar), the award-winning entrepreneur shows the middle finger to VIPs. Especially those that come riding a horse shirtless on a Sri Lankan beach. The Shirtless Sultan as Aviraaj (Ishaan Khatter) is later crowned, show creator Neha Sharma and directors Priyanka Ghose and Nupur Asthana labour at taking his shirt off to show a royal six-pack in swimming pools, during photo shoots and atop a horse. There’s equal effort put in to have Sophia-Aviraaj grab each other, smooch, grope, grow apart, a dozen times. VIP-hating Sophia, as confused as her name, has conceived Royal B & B, her own genius business model to have blue blood mingle with hoi polloi. An early taste of she-doesn’t-know-where-she’s-at: an encounter with same middle finger VIP at a bar. The next moment, they’re smooching in a room, ready for action. Only to end up calling each other names and to pull out saying, it was a mistake.

Four murders. In four different places. The victims: a minister’s daughter (Palak Jaiswal), a young adult; a private cab driver (Hakkim Shahjahan); his passenger, a senior police officer (Tigmanshu Dhulia) with temporary blindness caused by a welding burn; a random kid who’d shot a video of the alleged killer pulling the body of the cop. The killer, a young 20-something (Mayur More) whose name is kept gray, perhaps in an attempt to make the limited series not seem an apologetic thriller that makes one community come across as victims of a prejudiced system. The son of the politician’s driver, he’s soon dubbed a serial killer and has been on the run for two years.

What a wonderful story to document on celluloid. Costao Fernandes, the upright customs officer out to clean the coastal waters of Goa by going after gold smugglers with missionary zeal, has a heroism to his story that is rare. It’s a 90s’ tale unknown to most Indians and needed to be told with impactful storytelling. However, neither director Sejal Shah not writers Bhavesh Mandalia and Meghna Srivastava manage to give heft to his fight against gold smuggling and against the system that impedes his mission. There are flashes that are promising. In what’s supposed to be Costao’s young daughter’s voiceover, you’re told that 24-carat gold is priceless but useless, it can’t even shape into jewellery without milavat. “Mummy says the same about Costao.”

The camera globetrots. Budapest, Istanbul, Mumbai, London. Everybody’s cool. Rehan Roy (Saif Ali Khan), a fingersmith who’ll steal the necklace off your body or the mobile in your pocket with smart smoothness. A tad James Bondish too, the names of women in bed don’t matter. And he is the ultimate jewel thief, popular in the crime world as unmatched, unbeatable. Rajan Aulakh (Jaideep Ahlawat), the Page 3 rich man. So unflinching cool that the rottweiler he fed with his hands as a puppy gets a bullet in its forehead for cosying up to Rehan. So cool that he’ll watch a piece of art on his wall and admire its splosh of colour. It’s real dried blood of a human he’d strangled for tattling on his offshore accounts. Deficit of trust brings out the underworld gangster in him.

In a dark, bleak world, somebody lights a lamp. In the dock this time are not the British atrocities of the 19th century. It’s a centuries old slavery that Indians have practised against their own. Writer-director Ananth Narayan Mahadevan and dialogue writer Muazzam Beg paint a weary, dystopic India where no one smiles. Brahmins like Vinayak Deshpande (Joy Sengupta) and the Head Priest (Amit Behl) are always wound up and angry – the streets belong to them during the day, how dare the lower castes walk the same path as them and defile the area? English-educated Jyotiba Phule (Pratik Gandhi) whose father Govindrao (Vinay Pathak) got land from the British is moneyed. But every day is a confrontation with the upper caste.

For sure it’s a well-made film. It’s also well-intentioned as it tells the real-life story of BSF officer Narendra Dubey (played by Emraan Hashmi) who nabbed Ghazi Baba, India’s most wanted terrorist in the early 2000s. Between director Tejas Prabh Vijay Deoskar and camerawork by Kamaljeet Negi, the suddenness of a shot in the market that kills a BSF officer sipping tea, stuns the Force as much as the viewer. The rawness of the Kashmir valley in 2001 where stone pelting in the name of ‘azaadi’ and luring young boys to pick up pistols and shoot soldiers at random, is impactful. Writers Sanchit Gupta and Priyadarshee Srivastava equip Dubey with lines of zeal like, “Asli jeet” is not in taking the gun away from their hands, it’s in changing their thoughts, cleansing their minds of the hatred they harbour. Dubey also spouts ‘Aaj risk nahi liya toh kal sabke liye risky ho jayega’ every time he urges his men to act during a mission. It’s not the catchy line the writers probably intended it to be but it is expectedly thrown back at him at another time when his morale is low.

Once in a rare while, a film comes along that opens old wounds and corrects history so effectively that the revisit is worth much more than the price of your ticket. Director Karan Singh Tyagi’s retelling of The Case That Shook The Empire (authored by multi-faceted banker Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat) which focuses on the courtroom brilliance of Indian lawyer C Sankaran Nair (Akshay Kumar) is one such piece of cinema which shrinks the once mighty Crown into a small-minded, genocidal brute, exemplified by General Reginald Dyer (Simon Paisley Day), aka the Butcher of Amritsar. Tyagi and co-writer Amritpal Singh Bindra take cinematic liberties with a true story but the outcome is an impactful court case that lays bare the bloodiness of the Baisakhi massacre.

The opening line that a ‘cell’ phone has 1 billion prisoners is substantiated by all that follows. The security guard of a high-rise is so ‘imprisoned’ by a cricket match on his cell phone that he barely notices a visitor putting his name down as ‘Virat Kohli’ in the register. Director Amit Golani is off to an energetic start as a lady comes out of the high-rise and a body comes hurtling down from the terrace. All you see is the splatter of blood on her as she screams. The tone is efficiently maintained as Pratyush Dua (Babil Khan) wakes up to do what every gizmo-reliant, tech-freaky youngster does – ignore calls from Mummy, get gadget ‘Aby-e’ to switch on/switch off the lights and turn on mood music while a robot cleans the house and he’s online all the time. Contactless food, friends whose numbers he doesn’t know by heart coz it’s all stored in one gadget, followers who mean everything to him, an entire life that’s inside his mobile phone. He’s even done the unforgivable with his dad when the parent came between Pratyush and his mobile phone.