Ishita Sengupta

Long before the Internet went into overdrive with spotting peak detailing in Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar franchise, Yash Raj brought us globe-trotting spy ventures, from Salman Khan-starrer Ek Tha Tiger (2012) to Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan (2023) to, most recently, Hrithik Roshan’s War 2 (2025). The films are part of a well-oiled franchise, headlined by male superstars who even show up in cameos in other spy worlds. Though there are female spies, too, from Katrina Kaif’s Zoya to Deepika Padukone’s Rubai, they’re not headlining the movies. Shiv Rawail’s Alpha, the latest Yash Raj Spy Universe film, breaks from this mold, building a world where women theoretically take the lead. It feels like a timely intervention and a natural progression. This time, the women are no longer the heroes’ sidekicks, but are granted their own individual heroism. Yet, Alpha ends up being a disservice to the leads, Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, and to its spy film predecessors. It’s a bafflingly ironic project that offsets the potential of its very premise.

Great filmmakers tend to tell the same story in different ways and weak ones find different ways to say little. Aditya Dhar, who is neither, presents a unique reality of telling all stories in the same way. This can sound alarmist given that he has directed only three features and two are parts of the same film. But the sameness exists, running deeper than aesthetics and assuming more stealth than superficial plot twists. Dhurandhar: The Revenge reinforces it with fuller might, revealing in the process the merit and limitations of his work.

Days before Anubhuti Kashyap’s Accused dropped on Netflix, the director admitted that the film was made keeping in mind the audience and algorithm. Her words were a radical confession, one that freely used the “A” word and distilled an aesthetic that is increasingly becoming a norm in the streaming landscape. Algorithm filmmaking, bent on holding the audience’s attention hostage, has diverse symptoms, ranging from using stark colours, recurring expositions and, as Kashayap shared, the dire need to sustain tension (“I kept taking very specific notes and showing the film at different stages to different people — asking, were you feeling relaxed here? Were you getting out of the film at this point?” she told The Hollywood Reporter). Such interventions can result in assembly-line products, and Accused is the recent casualty.

For better or worse, the intensity of love stories is understood in terms of conflict. The bigger the conflict, the more sweeping is the love. Pop culture has routinely peddled this notion, embellishing it till this has become the norm. Ravi Udyawar’s Do Deewane Seher Mein poses a challenge to the discourse by designing a low-stakes love story, but across its runtime, the film squanders all its potential, proving in culmination that prototypes are effective for a reason. Levity aside, this is a pity because Udyawar’s film starts off almost disarmingly. Boy and girl are forced to meet. Shashank (Siddhant Chaturvedi), a marketing guy, is arranged by his parents to meet Roshni (Mrunal Thakur), a content creator for a fashion label. No sparks fly, but it rains. They are on the terrace, and the dry clothes risk getting wet. He helps her with it, and in the act, falls a little. When asked, Shashank says yes, but Roshni says no.

There is a scene in Anubhav Sinha’s Assi, a social drama in the shape of legal deliberation, where a female lawyer gets into a heated argument with a male police officer. There is a context here: rape. In Delhi, a woman was gangraped and the accused, four till then, systematically erased and misled evidence. Frustrated, the cop gets hold of an accomplice and threatens to get a confession. Seeing this, the lawyer, representing the survivor, erupts. “You think only you are angry?” she charges at him. “We are so angry that we can burn the world. We just don’t want to.” In many ways, the speaker, Raavi (Taapsee Pannu), is the film’s chosen voice, yet Sinha’s work, too, is dipping with rage.

All Filmmakers plot legacy. For Vishal Bhardwaj, it filters to adaptations. The 60-year-old’s career — including 12 feature films in 24 years — is shaped, mostly, by taking literary texts and supplanting them in a world of his making. One can debate the merits, but there is something to be said about the tendency to assert his voice most intensely in borrowed words, thereby amplifying the collaborative spirit of creation. A chief collaborator, in this regard, has been Shakespeare, whose plays assume great malleability in the director’s hands. Bhardwaj’s latest, O’Romeo, is not drawn from one of the playwright’s works but still culminates as an ineffective Shakespeare adaptation — a first from the director.

Bejoy Nambiar’s Tu Yaa Main, a relationship drama in the garb of a creature film, redeems an animal and a profession. Both, unfortunately, were subjected to great disservice in Hindi films. Given that the animal has lasted longer, its ignominy is greater, and therefore, the absolution was both inevitable and overdue. Nambiar’s film proves to be largely effective in this regard as it takes crocodiles from the mouth of disrepute and posits them in a narrative where they are given space to lay eggs, chill a little, and nap.

It is not unusual for a good show to be renewed for a new season. What is unusual, however, is for the merit to be inherited, the voice to be sharpened, and the new work to feel like an organic extension and a distinct entity. One that occupies familiar space and yet grows new legs. Few showrunners in the Indian streaming landscape do it like Sudip Sharma. The sophomore season of Paatal Lok (2025), a structurally nuanced follow-up to a still-alive series, was an early example, and the new edition of Kohrra, marking his directorial debut, reiterates it.