Poulomi Das

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.

Somewhere in the past five years, the Indian crime thriller stopped being a story and became a mood. We know the grammar by now. A cop with a dead spouse and a drinking problem. A city shot like it owes the cinematographer money. A murder that matters less than the grief piled on top of it. So much of streaming has settled into this groove that you can predict a whole show from its first frame of rain on a windshield. Brown, the seven-episode ZEE5 series directed by Abhinay Deo (Delhi Belly), speaks this grammar fluently. The trouble is that it doesn’t seem to know any other language. It belongs to a very particular wave, too. Call it the Mare of Easttown (2021 American crime drama series) effect. Ever since Kate Winslet trudged through a grey Pennsylvania town, Hindi storytellers have been busy assembling their own tired women with badges. Kareena Kapoor Khan did it in The Buckingham Murders. Raveena Tandon did it in Aranyak. Now Karisma Kapoor does it in Brown.

It’s rare for a Hindi filmmaker today to command the calendar Anurag Kashyap has this year: two films—Kennedy and Bandar—arriving months apart, alongside the re-release of Dev.D (2009), the cult film that imprinted his signature on Hindi cinema. It’s a fitting moment to take stock given that Kashyap occupies a complicated place in our cinema. He is among the handful of storytellers who rewired its grammar. Yet, lately his own reputation has begun to precede him. The recent output has been prolific, but also a slow bleed of the edge that once made him essential. Think a boomer cosplaying Gen Z (Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat), or a raconteur sifting through his greatest hits (Nishaanchi).

There is a certain kind of homecoming story Indian cinema has told so many times that it has become its own grammar. Someone leaves their village for greener pastures. They survive the city and then return changed, sharper, more knowing. The village is the past; they are the future. Tribeny Rai’s stirring Nepali-language debut feature, Shape of Momo, begins as if it is that story and then methodically dismantles it. The film, set to release in theatres on May 29, opens with Bishnu (Gaumaya Gurung), freshly back in her village in rural Sikkim after quitting her job in Delhi, reading out a piece of advertisement copy she has written to a room full of relatives and elders. And then, in the same breath, the conversation turns to which of the few men still living in the village might make a suitable husband for her. Her face simply shuts. That small moment is the film’s thesis: that no amount of distance, education or financial independence fully immunises a woman from the place she comes from, because the place is not just geography. It is an expectation handed down for so long that it has started to look like inheritance.