Priyanka Roy

The last time Kata Mara appeared on the big screen as an astronaut, it was The Martian. The Ridley Scott film, which has immense repeat-watch value, cast Mara in an important role, but like her peers on that Mars mission, she did end up being a side player to Matt Damon’s “Martian” Mark Watney. Like in The Martian, Mara’s Sam Walker is also part of a failed space mission, but all comparisons to the 2015 film end just about here.

A little more than 40 years ago, cartoonist Alison Bechdel formulated The Bechdel Test, which, over the decades, has become an essential metric to evaluate the representation of women in media, with special emphasis being laid on film. The Bechdel Test has a simple ask — to assess whether a piece of performing art has (a) at least two named women and (b) whether the female characters in it engage in a conversation (or more) on a topic which is something other than that centred on a man. Many films, since then, even while not being feminist in the classical sense of the term (or female-centric, according to commonly-used parlance), have proved to be worthy candidates of the test. Many others have not, despite their on-the-surface female presence, been able to pass muster. But no film, at least in recent times, would perhaps have failed it as spectacularly as Dhurandhar: The Revenge.

Q: You know what they say about good surgeons? A: Their hands never shake. This pops up in more than one conversation in Accused. What it attempts to convey is the sudden turmoil that Geetika Sen (Konkona Sensharma) finds herself in. A celebrated gynaecologist in the UK, Geetika has it all — a career on the upswing, a steady marriage (with Meera, a paediatrician played by Pratibha Rannta) and a reputation that she has painstakingly built over the years. However, Geetika’s life undergoes a seismic shift when she is accused of sexual misconduct at work. What starts off as an anonymous allegation quickly turns into a collective pointing of fingers, threatening to upend all that Geetika has at present and aspires for in the future.

Within the first few minutes of The Bluff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas slices and dices, swoops down and slashes a bunch of buccaneers in a relentless, action-packed, adrenaline-pumping sequence. Except that her character is no ordinary damsel in distress and neither is this a regular home invasion. The men who break in aren’t your streetside thugs either. They are, in fact, tied inextricably to Ercell Bodden’s past (Priyanka) and now stand to threaten her future. For Ercell wasn’t always Ercell. Known as “Bloody Mary”, she grew up sailing the seven seas as a pirate but gave up her swashbuckling, edgy ways for a domesticated life in Cayman Brac. The invasion — in which Priyanka plunges into the blood and gore with both physical solidity and psychological grit — is just the beginning of the high-stakes action that defines this Frank E. Flowers-directed film.

Anubhav Sinha is a fine filmmaker. More importantly, he is a fine filmmaker with a conscience that refuses to be cowed down and a voice that resists being drowned out. After Islamophobia (Mulk), caste chasm (Article 15), marital violence (Thappad) and the pandemic-induced migrant crisis (Bheed), Sinha trains his lens on rape, with the title of his latest film Assi being derived from a terrifying statistic that slaps one in the face, hard and long, as soon as the film begins. As many as 80 women are raped in India every day, one happening every 27 minutes. Assi keeps reminding you of these numbers, in ways more direct than subtle, throughout its 143-minute runtime.

Kennedy is a former cop who is now a hitman for hire. Set in the dark recesses of Mumbai, aka Anurag Kashyap’s playground, with the director returning to crime noir with gleeful indulgence, Kennedy is distinguished by pulsating action, a deeply brooding core and the Kashyap trademark of anti-institutional protest. Very little in Kennedy is subtle, and the humour, though rare, is often on point, marking Kashyap’s return to form in a genre he has well and truly earned his stripes in. But Kennedy (streaming on ZEE5) is not for everyone. For starters, despite the surprises that pop up often — including a twist on the “I see dead people” trope — it is a bit of an overindulgent slog. The film often feels stretched and Kennedy’s attempt at an emotional pull that seeks to make you empathise with its tragic anti-hero doesn’t quite land.

O’Romeo is a story of revenge served hot and bloody. Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest film — on many parameters the director’s most commercial outing yet — gets off the blocks with a visceral and violent scene in which Shahid Kapoor’s Ustara whips out his signature ustara (aka razor) and proceeds to cut open half a dozen men. The scene takes place in a single-screen cinema with Madhuri Dixit going “dhak dhak karne laga” even as Ustara goes about slicing and dicing his adversaries with both dramatic precision and poetic choreography. The sequence lays the foundation for the vibe as well the visual language of O’Romeo — a film that often relies on gratuitous violence but can also be vulnerable and tender (mostly when the ‘Romeo’ in O’Romeo surfaces) when it chooses to be.

Like its title, Punjab nebulously creeps up on you in the new season of Kohrra. This is not the bhangra-dancing, balle-balle boisterousness that almost every depiction of the state has been weighed down with, but a Punjab that feels real and lived-in; where secrets lurk in the shadowy cul-de-sacs and conspiracies are hatched in dilapidated local bars. It is a Punjab where generational trauma is a byproduct of gender bias, and vice versa. A Punjab where humour resides not in the backslapping, jokey way we are accustomed to expecting, but arises out of everyday situations which may (or may not) naturally lend themselves to it.