Nonika Singh

When ‘Kohrra’ came in 2023, it was a breath of fresh air which not only put a majorly Punjabi language series on the world map of OTT, but showed a state dipped in shades of realism. Now, as its second season streams, the template is kind of… same. It’s still a police procedural with loads of human drama at the centre of it. ‘Kohrra 2’ starts on a similar note: murder of an NRI. But, hereafter, the series — again set in the hinterland of Punjab — takes a life of its own and envelops you as much in the mysterious air of whodunit as the lives of its protagonists. Investigation begins and we are all agog to know who has murdered this young lady Preet (Pooja Bhamrrah), a divorcee who loved to make reels and by no stretch of imagination was a pushover.

Justice, we all know, by and large eludes the powerless. On screen, however, poetic justice as well as its vigilante variant has been delivered time and again. At times with a loud thump and less often in a quiet, restrained tone. ‘Vadh’, as the name suggests, is about killing. Since the word has much significance in mythology, we know it would be for the right reasons. Enter a jail in Madhya Pradesh. Now the much-acclaimed series ‘Black Warrant’ and many other Indian films have already shown us what all the innards of a jail possibly entail. So you bet the presence of a despicable criminal like Keshav (Akshya Dogra), with deep political connections, hardly comes as a surprise. What does is the tender love story brewing between a criminal serving life sentence and one of the jail’s guards. Trust both Neena Gupta and Sanjay Mishra to breathe life into their characters of Manju Mishra and Shambhunath Mishra.

In ‘Bhakshak’, Bhumi Pednekar’s Vaishali Singh busted the wrongdoings in a shelter home. In ‘Daldal’, her character is face to face with a victim-turned-assassin from the same place. Before you accuse us of letting the cat out of the bag, let it be said that the seven-episode crime thriller is not exactly a whodunit. Early on, by Episode 2, we know who the killer is. So, it’s the why and how which is more significant. Suresh Triveni, who gave us the delightful ‘Tumhari Sullu’ and ‘Jalsa’, is the creator of the series.

Till date, ‘Border’, directed and produced by JP Dutta — never mind certain misgivings — is considered a significant war film. So when Dutta decided to produce its sequel 27 years later in 2024, the new captain of the film, director Anurag Singh, knew he had to tap into the same emotion which made ‘Border’ a blockbuster. Apart from Sunny Deol as the connecting thread, ‘Border 2’ thrives on music, emotions and of course melodrama. Anurag possibly couldn’t resist Sunny Bhaji’s “dhai kilo ka haath” manifesting with full force. So, Sunny Deol’s Lt Col Fateh Singh Kaler gets plenty of one-to-one combat scenes and some bombastic dialogues too, besides a heartrending track.

Many Hindi films on smuggling, aka taskaree, have delighted audiences since the days of the iconic ‘Deewar’. So what can ‘Taskaree: The Smugglers Web’ bring to the table? Coming from the stable of a brilliant director like Neeraj Pandey, who gave us the ultimate heist film ‘Special 26’, and headlined by a fine actor like Emraan Hashmi, expectations build up.

When Season One of ‘Freedom At Midnight’ — an adaptation of Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s book of the same name — dropped, a few naysayers had some issues with it. To counter the censure, mostly quibbles, Nikkhil Advani, the creator-director of the magnum opus on India’s freedom struggle, had declared: wait for the second part. Any misgivings about the portrayal of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi or even Muhammad Ali Jinnah vanish like a puff of smoke. If Season One was a precursor to India’s Independence, Season Two takes you to that historic moment when India breathed free, as well as to the cataclysmic times when the horrors of Partition engulfed Punjab and Bengal. In these harrowing episodes, when humanity acquired a monstrous hue, the immortal lines of Amrita Pritam — “Ajj akhan Waris Shah nu” — echo resoundingly.

Can a film on a war hero shun jingoism? Can a film based on the 1971 war avoid thriving on an anti-Pakistan sentiment? In times when ‘Dhurandhar’ is roaring at the box office, can it dare to go in the opposite direction? Can there be a war movie that instead of exacerbating conflicts is rather calming? The answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘yes’. National Award-winning director Sriram Raghavan (for ‘Andhadhun’) not only reinvents himself by moving to a genre he is not quite known for, but also shows what a biopic and a war movie should entail.

For some time, Dharma Productions has been wearing its progressive heart and beliefs on its sleeve. That’s all very well, what more do you want from the proponents of ‘rich lives matter’? Like the typical gloss and shine signature of its cinema, it can’t quite bid adieu to its glitzy USP. Any wonder then that the storyline spends the first half in picturesque Croatia. The ‘to-die-for’ locales of the European nation on the coast of the Adriatic Sea is where love blossoms between our two lovebirds.