Poulomi Das

Indian streaming turns ten this year, and Akka is what Netflix has to show for it. The platform introduced itself to the country with Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane’s S_acred Games_, a series with a worldview and the nerve to be bleak. Now we get a Netflix show set in Pernuru, a fictional kingdom ruled by women where an outsider arrives and threatens the peace. It could have been a chance to rethink the gangster genre. But Akka is happy to imagine a female version of it, with the same swagger and the same rituals of loyalty and betrayal, only the pronouns changed, leaving the genre otherwise untouched. That complacency says everything about the moment. Creators and platforms alike treat streaming as an afterthought. Netflix still hasn’t cracked the country, which has no single media appetite and no single disposable income, so its shows keep falling back on the grammar of television: the loud score, the lots of mutual glaring between characters, the plot that explains itself through expository dialogue, and a narrative content to drag itself to oblivion.

The opening 10 minutes of Devashish Makhija’s Gandhari is perhaps the clearest indication of the film’s intentions — and its intellect. Written and produced by Kanika Dhillon, it opens with the kidnapping of a five-year-old travelling with her parents on a train. When her mother, Bani (Taapsee Pannu), realises her daughter is missing, she tears through a crowded platform after the kidnapper, only to be knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. And because Gandhari apparently has no interest in leaving suffering at merely one notch, we soon learn that the injury has also temporarily robbed Bani of her eyesight. From there, the film’s idea of character development appears to be little more than a contest in accumulated misery. A traumatised and blind mother, leaning on a walking stick and waiting outside a police station, hoping they will help find her daughter: it is an image so nakedly engineered to elicit pity and helplessness that it barely registers as characterisation. In the next scene, the film piles on another layer of dread: as the parents grow increasingly desperate, a passerby tells them that if kidnapped children are not found within 48 hours, they are unlikely to be found at all. This is, in fact, Gandhari’s preferred mode of persuasion: pile misfortune onto a character, arrange it into a sufficiently potent image, and assume the audience will fall in line.

On paper, Ambiecka Pandit’s Babita Singh Reporting is a standard police procedural. The film, streaming on Prime Video, revolves around a pliant, under-confident sub-inspector who is suddenly thrust into a murder investigation in Madhya Pradesh. Again, on paper, this is a film that follows the Indian crime drama template of foregrounding the efforts of an underdog cop going against all odds to solve a crime. The identity of the killer becomes such a film’s purpose and point. But on screen, Babita Singh Reporting is really a character study of the subservience that consumes women whole. The murder investigation happens to just be the means to an end. It is, put simply, the anti-police procedural that makes a case for a genre that has been juiced so dry by Indian streaming that it has become its own aesthetic.

Rajkumar Hirani has spent two decades turning simple ideas into big, feel-good hits. The six-episode JioHotstar series is directed by Avinash Arun Dharware, the filmmaker behind Killa, Paatal Lok, and Three of Us. It’s an odd pairing on paper. Hirani makes cheerful, sanded-down cinema. Arun makes moody, textured, specific work. None of that specificity survives here. The show looks and moves like a generic OTT product. Pedro (Arshad Warsi) is a Crime Branch cop in Goa, punished for a colleague’s mistake and shunted off to the Cyber Crime Cell. To him, typing a password already counts as hard labour. Pritam (Vir Hirani) is a young ‘cyber genius’ who actually sells vacuum cleaners for a living. When a politician’s son goes missing, the two team up: Pedro needs the case solved to earn his old job back, while Pritam wants help recovering his grandfather’s stolen tape recorder, which holds an old recording of his late grandmother’s voice.

There is really nothing Alia Bhatt cannot do. In her entry scene in Shiv Rawail’s Alpha, she takes down an entire factory of soldiers — all men — with the unhurried efficiency of someone finishing her morning cardio, then pauses mid-massacre to rescue a hamster. A lab rat, like her. It’s the funniest thing in the film, and also, in its way, the saddest: a woman built and broken by the same institution, still soft enough to save something smaller than herself. Ek Tha Tiger (2012), Tiger Zinda Hai (2017), and War (2019) were standalone hits before Aditya Chopra-led Yash Raj Films called them a universe. It was Pathaan (2023), riding on War’s success, that formally stitched them into YRF’s spy universe, a shared world of R&AW agents fighting increasingly baroque threats. Alpha is the seventh franchise entry, and the first to hand the franchise to women. Working off a story credited to Uday Chopra, Rawail — son of Rahul Rawail— directs Alia Bhatt as Sita and Sharvari as Durga, twin sisters separated at birth and raised with entirely different fates. Anil Kapoor and Bobby Deol, playing special forces officers whose friendship curdles into something else entirely, carry the older, sadder half of the story.

The most wrenching performance in The Voice of Hind Rajab was never performed. At the centre of Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama sits a real recording: the shaking voice of a five-year-old girl captured on the last afternoon of her life. Everything assembled around it is staged. The friction between the two — actors straining toward a child who is already beyond their reach — is what makes the film almost unbearable. The facts are a matter of record. On 29 January 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab was trapped in a car in Gaza City, hemmed in by the bodies of her aunt, uncle and four cousins, after Israeli fire tore through the vehicle as the family tried to flee. She was the only one left alive. For hours, she stayed on the line with volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, asking, over and over, for someone to come for her. The ambulance that was finally dispatched never reached her; its two paramedics were killed, too. Hind was found dead days later. The recordings of those calls, released afterwards, went around the world. Ben Hania built her film around them.

Kane Parsons, the debut director of Backrooms, is 20 years old. It is the sort of detail you want to hold against the film, but you cannot. Parsons made his name in high school, helming a YouTube series called Backrooms. Like the film, it grew out of a 2019 image of an empty yellow room: the patron saint of the internet’s endless fascination with liminal spaces, those transitional, in-between places that feel wrong the moment you find them empty. The leap from that to an A24 feature (the film is based on his series) should have flattened the whole thing into content. Instead, Backrooms turns out cannier and more searching than its origins, spending its runtime worrying at questions about memory and what it means to be lost, which are far older than the internet that taught Parsons how to make it.

As it turns out, Partition is now the safest address in Hindi cinema if you’re a filmmaker making a film about politics, about bigotry, and about the Hindu-Muslim wound the present government keeps raking up. To set this in the present day would mean inviting forms of censorship that could range from a notice to a ban. But that isn’t the case if you reach back to 1947, where the bloodshed is settled history and nobody can accuse you of inventing it. Sriram Raghavan did it last year with Ikkis, sending Dharmendra back to Sargodha after a lifetime, crafting a film that is essentially an indictment against the cruelty of war and the real price of bigotry. Now Imtiaz Ali sends an old man to the same town and uses the journey to say almost everything a Hindi film in 2026 is otherwise forbidden to say.