Poulomi Das

At a moment when Indian theatres are increasingly crowded with spectacle — pan-Indian actioners, franchise filmmaking and historical epics — Boong arrives as something radical: a children’s film that trusts the intelligence and emotional acuity of its young protagonist. That it is returning to theatres after becoming the first Indian film to win the BAFTA award for Best Children’s & Family Film (defeating Disney’s Zootopia) is both a milestone and a small indictment. A milestone because a Manipuri-language film has found global recognition; an indictment because the film needed that recognition to be rediscovered by Indian audiences.

About an hour into Kennedy, writer-director Anurag Kashyap springs a sequence so wickedly orchestrated that it alters the film’s grammar in an instant. In the scene, former cop Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat) massacres a local politician and his family. The violence is merciless, yet staged with such choreographic precision — pauses, glances, the geometry of bodies collapsing across rooms — that it lands as shockingly comic as it is brutal.

Abhiraj Minawala’s Mardaani 3 begins where the franchise is most comfortable: with a crisis that demands urgency. Two girls are kidnapped from a farmhouse in Bulandshahar. One is the daughter of an Indian diplomat. The other belongs to the domestic worker employed by the family. The distinction is not subtle, and neither is the film’s point. What initially appears to be a mistake quickly escalates into a national-level crisis, exposing the familiar fault lines of power and urgency. Shivani Shivaji Roy (Rani Mukerji), now with the National Investigation Agency in Delhi, is called in to handle the case. She takes charge instantly.

Four More Shots Please! returns for its fourth and final season the way it always has: mid-chaos, mid-confession, and mid-freakout. The opening image is telling. There is a wedding underway, and right at its centre is Siddhi Patel (Maanvi Gagroo), spiralling. She is high on brownies, overwhelmed by commitment, and quietly devastated by the absence of her father, whose death still sits like an unprocessed ache. It is a familiar emotional cocktail for this show: intimacy laced with panic, humour doing the work of survival. But after the vows are sealed, the four women make a pact: to confront the patterns they keep dragging from season to season. It is a neat way to begin a finale. It is also, unfortunately, emblematic of a season more interested in tying ribbons than in pulling threads tighter.

Guru (a fearless Mohit Agarwal), a nervous young man, sits in a cramped cyber café, the fluorescent tube above him flickering in agitation, as though mirroring the restlessness crawling under his skin. He stares at the door, hoping the woman who he had been messaging on an online sex chat room to appear. The clock keeps ticking. The cold coffee before him remains untouched. When Guru finally understands he has been stood up, humiliation spreads across his face like a slow burn. It’s a quiet scene, almost banal, but filmmaker Kanu Behl tilts it ever so slightly: the silence around Guru feels weaponised, and the space — narrow, intrusive, public — feels like a character in itself.

In May 2020, two months into India’s lockdown, journalist Basharat Peer came across a photograph that captured the crisis with devastating clarity. It showed two migrant workers on a Madhya Pradesh highway — one lying unconscious from heatstroke, the other hovering over him, scanning for signs of life. The image was a moment of tenderness amid national neglect. Intrigued and unsettled, Peer investigated the story behind the photo and found that Amrit Kumar, a 24-year-old Dalit worker, and Mohammad Saiyub, a 22-year-old Muslim worker, were childhood friends returning home after the suspension of their factory jobs. Only one made it back.

In 2019, Siddharth Anand’s War gave us answers. That, yes, a big, pulpy blockbuster could look slick enough to make your eyes dance. That the camera doesn’t just love Hrithik Roshan — it worships him in salt-and-pepper mode, an object of thirst so undeniable even Tiger Shroff’s stoic glare softens in submission. That Shroff, with his balletic precision and coiled physicality, could turn action into poetry — especially when put chest-to-chest with Roshan, eyes locked, breath mingling. And that somewhere between the beaches, bullets, and blatant homoerotic stares, mainstream Bollywood might have finally figured out how to make spy thrillers pure cinema.

This is how star-crossed romances usually go: boy meets girl, hearts collide, the world relents, and they ride into forever. But not in Dhadak 2, the Hindi remake of Mari Selvaraj’s searing Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018). Here, love doesn’t float above the ground but sinks deep into the soil of caste identity. The film’s lovers, Neelesh (a standout Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Vidisha (Triptii Dimri), are young and idealistic. But society sees their surname before it sees their hearts. He is Neelesh Ahirwar, a first-generation Dalit student who lives in a slum. She is Vidisha Bharadwaj, an upper-caste classmate who falls for him. In debutante director Shazia Iqbal’s hands, Dhadak 2 proves that, in India, love isn’t blind — it sees caste in sharp, unforgiving focus.