Nonika Singh

‘Maa’, ‘Behen’ — two words that spawn a litany of abuses. When an acclaimed director, Suresh Triveni, chooses to name the film so, rest assured it is not any cursory nomenclature. It comes loaded with a host of meanings and layers and, in its own way, flips more than one stereotype. Why, the main characters too derive their names from a popular detergent advertisement. What’s in a name? A lot. But before we move to what the Netflix movie entails at deeper levels, let it be said that this dark comedy thrives on fun and subversive elements. The women here — who else but a mother, Rekha (Madhuri Dixit), and her two daughters, Jaya (Tripti Dimri) and Sushma (Dharna Durga), are unabashedly unapologetic. In the very first scene, we see Jaya sitting in an IVF centre minus her spouse. Soon after, she gets a call from her mother who has apparently killed her neighbour Charitra Gupta (Ravi Kishan) in her own house. As she and her sister Sushma descend upon the mother’s house, drama unfolds almost like the theatre of the absurd.

At one level, ‘Shape of Momo’ unfolds like a gentle love letter to one’s roots. Set in Sikkim, it unpeels the many layers equally. A festival favourite, with its world premiere at the 30th Busan International Film Festival in 2025, it won the Songwon Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award. The narrative begins innocuously. Bishnu (Gaumaya Gurung), back in her home in a village in Sikkim, is reading what seems like a poem. Soon, we meet women representing three generations. In this home bereft of male presence, women nurse their own set of fears and anxieties and, above all, an urgency to conform. Only, Bishnu, fresh from experiences of the outside world, is not ready to accept things the way they are and has several run-ins with the men of her village.

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said William Shakespeare. And in an average Hindi film, it often is too tortuous, if not torturous. ‘Chand Mera Dil’, the title, promises a film high on the gossamer shades of romance. Only, as the film opens, for a long time, the only shades you see are the matching colours of our hero and heroine’s outfits. Love-struck Aarav (Lakshya Lalwani) starts twinning with Chandni (Ananya Panday). Obviously, his outfit shade card — ranging from neon and fluorescent yellow to pinks — not only matches her clothes but catches her attention too.

“Dharm karte hain karm chhoot-ta hai, karm karte hain toh dharm; kartavya tak toh baat hi nahi pahunchti hai…” Pithy dialogue indeed, summarising the dilemma of modern-day mankind. Yet Saif Ali Khan-led ‘Kartavya’ is all about our hero’s duty towards his job and society at large. In the OTT space, Saif, who made a killer impression with ‘Sacred Games’, once again plays a conscientious cop, Pawan Malik. The very first few scenes, banter with his colleague Sanjay Mishra’s Ashok, establish him as abrasive. The scene where Pawan cuts a cake with other policemen also reminds us he has just turned 40. At home, he has an authoritarian father (Zakir Hussain), a loving wife (Rasika Dugal), a son and a younger brother, Deepak. Birthday celebrations at home can wait as he is expected to give cover to a journalist in town. That she would be murdered is obvious from the moment she lands in Jhamli, somewhere in Haryana.

Games that spies play… full of intrigue and treachery. And when it’s a high-stakes thriller like ‘Citadel 2’, no less than a Russo Brothers production, espionage moves touch a new level, certainly better than in the prequel. We have seen the first season where our very own Priyanka Chopra did a wonderful job. She is no less impressive in the second outing as Nadia Sinh. Only, the series, which moves from one European nation to another, kickstarts with the man, Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), who envisioned Citadel as a conglomerate of spies. He is held to ransom by Paulo Braga (Brazilian actor Gabriel Leone), who wants Bernard to develop a software to be co-opted in a person’s mind and turn him or her into an assassin.

A web-series rooted in Haryana’s inimitable terra firma around one of its favourite sports: boxing. Yet ‘Glory’ isn’t your regular sports drama, or a story of an underdog making it big. Marrying murder mystery with the shenanigans of the game, which is at once dangerous and thrilling, the seven-episode series too treads the same path. In the very first episode, we are witness to the murder of a gifted boxer, Nihal Singh (Yugam Sood). An Olympic gold contender, he decides to elope with his girlfriend Gudiya (Jannat Zubair), daughter of his coach Raghubir Singh (Suvinder Vicky). Coming from the land where female foeticide and honour killings are rampant, you smell a rat. And the guessing game begins.

She is nursing a heartbreak and a broken engagement. He is trying to cope with repercussions of a fake viral video. She is educated and hails from New Delhi. He was once a wrestler who had a tryst with infamy. Clearly, it’s a mismatch from the word go… and not even a classic case of opposites attract. A rather open-minded Ginny (Medha Shankr) and Sunny (Avinash Tiwary) with a small-town mindset meet in the world of arranged matches, where a lie here and there, pretending to be what you are not, is the norm.

When a film’s promo touts itself as ‘the OG of horror-comedy’, you can’t help but go back in time to ‘Bhool Bhulaiyaa’ (2007). The psychological treatise indeed was truly funny as well as scary. Coming from the same director, Priyadarshan, and headlined by the same superstar, Akshay Kumar, you expect an encore at the very least. A bagful of laughs and an ample dose of chills is a fair enough demand as many horror.coms, including two spiritual sequels of ‘Bhool Bhulaiyaa’, have had a blast at the box office and delighted fans of the genre. Alas, while ‘Bhooth Bangla’, which, as the name suggests, takes us to a haunted house, nay palace, delivers partially on the humour front, it nowhere succeeds in sending a shiver down our spine. If jokes make us laugh, Akshay Kumar addressing a decade younger Jisshu Sengupta (Dr Vasudev Acharya) as Papa is rather comic.