Nonika Singh

“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.

Without much ado, the film comes straight to the point. A man, but obviously Sohrab Handa (Vinay Pathak), is found murdered in a living room. For those of us who have seen ‘Knives Out’, the basic template does not come as a surprise. A whole lot of men and women, relatives and friends have assembled in this picturesque getaway home. Expectedly, the fingers of suspicion point in all possible directions. There is the disgruntled father (MK Raina), sleepwalking wife Isha (Koel Purie), business partner Raman Chawla (Neil Bhoopalam) who we later learn wants Sohrab out of their business, and TV anchor Kumar (Danish Husain) of a crime show, ‘Pardafaash’. Like most things here, this name hasn’t been chosen randomly.

Courts, we presume, are dreary places of extreme decorum and discipline. Yet they can provide much fodder for merriment, as has been shown in umpteen films and most delectably in the Ravi Kishan-starrer web series ‘Maamla Legal Hai’. As it rolls on to the second season, the idea is still the same: to reflect upon thorny legal battles — actually, social issues — with humour. If you believe first time is the real charm, to begin with, the second outing of ‘Maamla Legal Hai’ may not seem as much fun. But soon enough, it finds its feet, just as the main protagonist Visheshwar D Tyagi (Ravi Kishan) does in his newly elevated position of Principle Judge of Patparganj district court.

Before Tamil superstar Vijay Sethupathi, who is also the producer of the Tamil series ‘Muthu Engira Kaattaan’, appears in his titular part, we see his smiling head. To begin with, the thriller set in a Tamil village and in a forest area rests on the dilemma of three policemen. The outsider wants the station to be shut because it is visited by creatures like snakes. Constable Kaali Pandiyan (Vaidivel Murugan), who happens to be the son of an affluent goat herder from the village, is so besotted with his wife that the thought of leaving the village for an outstation posting is outright unpalatable to him.