Rahul Desai

Disclosure Day hits the ground running. Walking is not its style. We’re flung into a story that’s already in motion. It’s a bit like joining a film midway through: no context, no beginning or warning. Catch me if you can, it seems to say. A young cybersecurity specialist (Josh O’Connor) has something in his bag that a shadowy supervillain (Colin Firth) and his deep-state corporation wants. They’ve abducted said hero’s girlfriend (Eve Hewson) to make the trade at a wrestling arena. But this hero, Daniel, somehow escapes with both girlfriend and bag intact. (If the baddies were competent, the story would’ve ended in a minute). So Daniel was being chased, stays chased, and remains on the run. A meteorologist with psychic powers, Margaret (Emily Blunt), joins him along the way.

Two teen-aged siblings wait at a bus stop on a rainy day. The sister is on her way to sing at a radio station; her brother accompanies (and annoys) her. They are offered a lift from two strangers in a fiat. They accept, but do not return. The panicked parents inform the police. The investigation is led by rookie SI Jayprakash; the kidnapping case soon morphs into a gruesome murder case and a nationwide manhunt. This search is intercut with the ‘adventures’ of Babu and Rajjo, the two criminals, in the days leading up to the abduction. These are separate timelines a week apart, but they run parallel to each other in how the police trace the escalating journey of the killers; the present must catch up with the past before the crime enters the future. Either way, they become a definitive moment in history.

A 95-year-old Sikh patriarch (Naseeruddin Shah) quivers on his deathbed. He mutters what sounds like gibberish: random words and incoherent ramblings, delusions dancing with reality. The only thing clear is his desperate desire to visit the pre-Partition Punjab he grew up in. His adult sons put it down to his dementia; they wait for the inevitable. But the old man refuses to go, almost as if he were tricking his life into flashing before his eyes. These flashes, though, feature nothing from his 78 long years in India; they feature everything from his first 17 in ‘Pakistan’. His grandson (Diljit Dosanjh), a London-based NRI who rushes to him, is the only one he responds to. He’s the only one willing to look for a breathing tale within the debris of fractured memory. A portrait of love in the time of severance emerges: his college days as Keenu (a soulful Vedang Raina), a girl named Afsana (Sharvari), furtive glances, covert meet-cutes, his mediocre Urdu poetry, dreams interrupted, a romance rushed by history, and a love story suddenly reduced to faith and fate.

If I had an Indian Rupee for every neo-noir crime drama that features a haunted-and-disgraced cop with a drinking problem, buried trauma, a grieving subordinate and a gloomy colour palette, I’d be wealthy enough to not care about the weak conversion rate when I buy currency for a foreign trip. The eponymous protagonist of Brown is so brooding that she’d give Dracula a pale-faced complex. Rita Brown (Karisma Kapoor) rolls her own cigarettes for good measure; every puff she takes is punctuated with loud crackles of burning and inhalation so that we hear the emptiness of her soul. She misses her dead husband (Shaan) and dead unborn child.

You know how, in the middle of a film, a character suddenly does something impulsive and exaggerated and totally out of whack, and you instantly realise it’s a dream sequence? It’s not a great gimmick and you can see through it, so when the character wakes up, you can’t help but accuse the movie of cheating. The whole of Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai feels like that dream sequence. Except nobody wakes up and it’s endless; there is no movie at all. Anything happens, anyone happens, every moment unfolds like an unhinged prank. It’s also the kind of hallucinatory dream one might have after drunkenly rewatching Biwi No. 1 (1999) in 2026 and wondering what an update would look like. The title of this film is a line from a ‘playful’ song sung by a naughty husband cheating on his traditional wife with a model: “if I’m young, I will love”. If I’m a man, I will stray.

As a wise antihero once said: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain”. Who knew Harvey Dent was referring to one of TVF’s flagship shows in its fifth and greediest season yet? Gullak has been critic-proof for years, in the sense that it’s built to be liked and ‘felt’ as the cinema of middle-class existence; as storytelling that thrives on nothingness. If it doesn’t work for you, you are accused of not knowing the real India. If it’s too boring for you, you are not wired to handle the mundane colours of everyday life. They will have you believe that the genre is shaped by sweet dullness: the invisible moments between the lofty landmarks of living, the unremarkable and forgotten days between the scenes that stories usually show.

A middle-aged widow (Madhuri Dixit) finds herself in a ‘killer’ soup. She is stuck with the dead body of a next-door neighbour (Ravi Kishan) in her living room. It’s the middle of the night. The panic-stricken woman calls up both her Patna-based daughters — the older one (Triptii Dimri) who slaves away at her husband’s home, and the younger one (Dharna Durga) who’s desperate to go viral as an influencer. The two warring sisters arrive at their mother’s the next morning and wonder how to solve the crisis. When they ask her what happened, she narrates an over-elaborate adventure of self-defense. It sounds like a farfetched lie; they do not believe her. But they go about dealing with the body anyway. What follows is a quirky small-town dramedy that features the squabbling and spirited ladies, the man’s suspicious family, a kidnapping case, a lovelorn cop, an entitled husband, a bag of cash, an upcoming wedding, and a cryptic ransom call.

In theory, nothing about Made In India: A Titan Story is supposed to work. Starting with that corporate-core title. It’s hard not to be wary of well-mounted business success stories about brands and institutions that still exist. There’s the thinnest line between promotional productions and historical dramas. This six-episode series is adapted from Vinay Kamath’s book about the rise of Titan, the world-class watchmaking company founded by Xerxes Desai in pre-liberalisation India. It’s not exactly a rags-to-riches tale; it opens with Desai well into his career, and already an integral part of The Tata Group. It’s not your typical underdog tale either; Desai’s mentor is grand old J.R.D Tata himself, so even when Titan runs into its many bureaucratic and funding roadblocks, it’s not like the team has the odds entirely stacked against them. There’s also the ready-made patriotism angle; Titan unfolds to put the country on a map dominated by shiny Swiss companies. On paper, the series has all the ingredients of a persuasive marketing campaign. For a viewer, it’s the equivalent of trying to root for a nepo-baby in a landscape full of outsiders.