Priyanka Roy

Losing a phone is an inconvenience for most, a nightmare for many. For Pratyush Dua, it becomes a question of life and death. Pratyush aka ‘Pratman’ is an influencer — the kind that have swarmed around us in the oft-repeated dime a dozen manner — whose life in the Internet bubble is solely based on getting to 10 million followers on Instagram faster than his immediate rival. For that, Pratman is willing to do all it takes, with everything about his persona, including his jarring ringtone screaming ‘Notice Me’. Until one day when his phone stops ringing. Stolen by someone who claims to be his biggest fan, Pratyush — played by Babil Khan in Logout, now streaming on Zee5 — not only faces the usual comes-with-the-territory misdemeanours of identity theft, digital arrest, data leak and so on, he also finds himself quickly losing control over a ‘world’ he thought he had complete power in.

Early in Chhorii 2, Nushrratt Bharuccha’s Sakshi, a school teacher, is in the process of explaining the concept of ‘cavemen’ — their origin and evolution — to her young students. Given that a major part of the film, thereafter, will play out underground, with the action being dominated by an ‘aadi manav’, loosely translated in English as ‘original man’/‘first man’, it is an intelligent and effective foreshadowing technique employed by director Vishal Furia. But while Chhorii 2 does traverse some intriguing territory in marrying quite a few novel horror tropes with the greater horrors that the human mind is capable of, it eventually descends into a hurried hodgepodge of mumbo-jumbo and banal balderdash.

Writer 1: The first of our two leading men is a cricket legend past his prime. He has been out of form lately, and his place in the playing XI, ahead of a crucial India-Pakistan Test series — let’s call it ‘Freedom Series’ (slow clap) — is in jeopardy. His name is Arjun, but everyone, including his son, calls him ‘Dada’ (wink, wink). We can cast Siddharth, but a statutory clause in his contract has to be that he has to wear a perpetually pained expression throughout. In terms of grumpiness, we can ask him to channel Rang De Basanti’s Karan Singhania, but in a far inferior film. Writer 2: The other man, Saravanan, is a MIT graduate. Not Manipal, but Massachusetts, as he reiterates in the film with indignation. At least twice or thrice, we will make him say that he wanted to become the next Steve Jobs. He calls himself a scientist, runs a canteen in Chennai and is working on a project that he hopes will make Tamil Nadu the leader in fuel cell technology in the country. In a totally unrelated characteristic, he is also obsessed with biryani. We will put that in a couple of times in the script (note: look for a sponsor). But a twist of fate changes him. Since R. Madhavan just played an unhinged character in Shaitaan, let’s cast him. But tell him that he’s ‘crazy’, not unhinged, otherwise he tends to go overboard. And yes, make him sound like he is from MIT. Let him quote Jack Kerouac: ‘The only people for me are the mad ones’. Let him break into devilish laughter without any reason. Towards the end, make sure he stops shaving. How will he look and sound crazy otherwise?

‘Welcome to hell,’ says Salman Khan somewhere at the beginning of Sikandar. It doesn’t take you long to realise he was warning you about his own film. Salman, set to turn 60 this December, was never much of an actor (I use ‘much’ with much politeness). Except, perhaps, for few and far between flashes of some sort of emoting — and emotion — in films like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Tere Naam, and a fistful of others. The last film he truly ‘acted’ in was Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, and that was 10 years ago. In the last couple of outings (see box), the indifference has been evident, with directors employing everything from miraculous computer graphics to superhuman editing skills to simply ensure that Salman is a living presence on screen. In Sikandar, Salman’s disinterest has peaked, and in a directly proportional manner, so has our disillusionment.

Adolescence confronts the debilitating fear(s) of every parent — where are our children going? Who are they meeting? What kind of conversations are they having? Who or what is influencing them? And the biggest question of them all — what are our children watching? Ever since it dropped exactly a week ago, this Netflix miniseries has taken the world by storm. ‘A perfect piece of television’ is not a descriptor that comes by easily, but Adolescence has earned that in more than a few reviews. On social media, it is being discussed, debated and dissected. Besides the overall impact of this four-episode series, almost every scene, dialogue, body language and more, is being put under the microscope, even as the viewer peels off layers and semi-layers of this crushing yet cathartic watch.

Calcutta is a living, breathing entity in Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, but not in the way we have come to know of it on screen. The city — familiar to the world as the hub of culture and creativity, as the land of Tagore and Ray — is imbued with a sinister edge in this new Netflix series, functioning as a hotbed of gang wars, organ trafficking, kidnapping, murder and of the consistently tenuous equation between cops and criminals. So, a machher bajar, where the act of buying fish has almost been romanticised into a form of art by the Bengali gastronome (honestly, is there any other kind?) sees a policeman being hacked in broad daylight by a bnoti; At the parar cha-er dokan, adda is definitely a mainstay but so is the brokering of hit jobs. A significant character’s body is stacked against the gate of the Victoria Memorial, forming a dichotomous (I refrain from saying ‘striking’) bloody red foreground against the pristine white facade of the city’s iconic landmark. Guns are traded at New Market. The streets are seedy, the changing positions of the players often finds the underbelly indistinguishable from the rest of the city. Calcutta carries the burden of many bodies, its streets tinged with blood.

I had never thought that there would come a film — at least in my lifetime — that could challenge the combined vacuous pointlessness of the Student of the Year franchise. That distinction belongs to Nadaaniyan, a film which, even though we are just in March, stands a good chance of being within the Top 5 section of the worst films list of 2025. Nadaaniyan, streaming on Netflix, comes from the same folks who, of course, made the Student of the Year franchise. Dharma Productions may have packaged its ‘younger’ productions as the more sleek-sounding Dharmatic, but Nadaaniyan is clearly not the kind of film that is going to take them far. Nor is it the kind of debut that actors Saif Ali Khan and Amrita Singh should have approved for their son Ibrahim Ali Khan.

‘Shaukh paal ke kya karega, Malegaon mein tu marega.’ This innocuous line sung rambunctiously by two childhood friends on a bike ride is both about ambition and the realisation of the futility of it, destined as they are to live within the borders of Malegaon, the small town they were born in and will probably die in. And yet, it is these two boys — along with a few pals, all of who share a common love for cinema — that have gone on to put Malegaon on the map. Superboys of Malegaon revolves around this motley crew. A charming, slice-of-life film about ordinary men doing extraordinary things, this Reema Kagti directorial written by Varun Grover is a potent, layered example of storytelling, one which strikes a chord immediately, even if you know very little of the world the film is set in. Malegaon, an unassuming town close to Nashik in Maharashtra, has made it to the news for a variety of reasons. There were the Malegaon blasts close to two decades ago that claimed many lives. Five years ago, Malegaon incubated itself in such a way that very few lives were lost in the Covid-19 pandemic, prompting other administrations to attempt and replicate its model.