Rahul Desai

Jewel Thief — The Heist Begins is the sort of trashy, twisty Abbas-Mustan-coded pulpfiction that’s devised to trigger our dormant trust issues. Everyone is tricking everyone else: characters are tricking each other, the script is tricking its characters, the film is tricking its viewers, the action is tricking gravity, the viewers are tricking themselves. Even cities lie: Los Angeles pretends to be Istanbul, screensavers pretend to be Alibaug, Budapest pretends to be Budapest. Everything is a twist and everyone is a human smirk. A stylish thief is blackmailed by a gangster into stealing a priceless gem, and all that happens in his week-long heist — first in a Mumbai museum, then mid-air on a flight to London (imaginatively called SkyFly Airlines) — is unreliable: failure, success, love, betrayal. Luck is for losers. Is anything real? Perhaps only the cop who spends the film narrowly missing the thief and yelling: “He f*cking played us!”

In this day and age, the Hindi historical biopic is a loaded genre. The stories of kings, Gods, warriors, soldiers, politicians and revolutionaries are often (re)told to divide and incite modern society. So the very act of choosing a story of 19th-century social reformers in a colonised India is a refreshing one. Pratik Gandhi and Patralekha star as Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule, the spirited Maharashtrian couple who spent their lives fighting for the rights of oppressed castes and women. The film covers a span of 50 years till the late 1890s: from the early days of their activism for girls’ education to the anti-caste institution they became as pioneers of equality and progressive values.

A soldier is posted in a communally sensitive region. It’s a thankless and dangerous job. Colleagues die every week. Insurgents and religious fundamentalists lure youngsters into a life of arms and suicide vests. Market places and tourist spots remain unsafe. Gunshots and violent chases are met with a mix of nonchalance and resignation by the locals. This well-respected soldier empathises with the locals because he believes they’re somewhat in the same boat — caught in the crossfire between countries, politicians, perceptions, and narratives. Following a spate of high-profile violence, he becomes an outsider with a conscience. His patriotism is personal: justice for fallen comrades and innocent civilians, a quest for peace, and a distrust for central intelligence agencies and their bureaucratic ways. His mission to nab the mastermind unfolds despite the system, not because of it.

SINNERS stars Michael B Jordan as identical Black twins Smoke and Stack, who return to their hometown in 1930s Mississippi. It’s been 7 years, and their loaded backstory — a troubled childhood with a violent father; a World War I stint and plenty of PTSD; a brief return only to have their lives upended by tragedy; an escape to big city Chicago and an entry into the Al Capone gangster universe — bleeds into this film. None of it is shown, but every moment bristles with the unresolved baggage of history. Smoke’s reunion with his estranged wife, and occult ritualist Annie. Stack’s reunion with his white ex-girlfriend Mary. The brothers using their Chicago “blood money” to buy an abandoned sawmill from a former Klansman; their ‘recruitment’ of old friends to turn the sawmill into a rocking juke joint. A fleeting argument where Stack accuses Smoke of letting Annie “again” come between the brothers.

Kesari Chapter 2 is a strange film. Based on the 2019 book The Case That Shook The Nation, it dramatises the events following the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The story revolves around C. Sankaran Nair, the Indian lawyer who took on the British Raj in court to prove that the massacre was a carefully planned conspiracy. So, on paper, the patriotism it exudes is more of an old-school one — the kind detected in period dramas like Ae Watan Mere Watan (2024) and The Waking of a Nation (the recent SonyLIV show featuring a fictional version of Nair). I’d like to believe that these stories use the atrocities of colonialism as a medium to express the importance of dissent, free speech, secularism and anti-establishment courage in present-day India. After all, Nair’s fight is inherently one that challenges an oppressive rule and the systemic abuse of power.

Let’s start with a modern horror story. When the first season of Sacred Games dropped in 2018, there was a surge of hope for a newer dawn of storytelling. The OTT space felt primed to embark on go-for-broke adventures that Hindi cinema and television couldn’t: take risks, platform untapped talent, challenge the mainstream, exhibit genres and languages. But the rapid and predatory privatisation of this medium meant that — save for a handful of titles every year — the hope remained a mirage. Studios, flowcharts, eyeball races and formulas turned the streaming space into a land of the living dead, where art became the flesh-and-blood exception and not the zombified norm.

For a hot second in 2023, the Internet turned on Babil Khan. The young actor, son of the late Irrfan, became the rare nepo-kid who got trolled for saying all the right things. His viral take on romantic relationships — where he batted for gender equality and called out the chauvinistic phrasing of “getting girls” — was treated with suspicion; he was accused of being too rehearsed, too pretentious. Social media was flooded with scrutiny and jokes about performative wokeness and green-flag syndromes. To his credit, Khan leans into this persona for Logout, a cyber thriller in which he plays a famous and chronically online influencer on the brink of breaching the 10-million-followers barrier.

If Chhorii (2021) was an overlong, preachy and screechy horror film centered on female infanticide, Chhorii 2 is an overlong, preachy and screechy horror film centered on child marriage. In a post-Stree world, this social horror template feels a bit hollow without humour — like the cinematic equivalent of a gender studies student on a gap year. The sequel takes place seven years after the events of Chhorii, Vishal Furia’s Hindi remake of his Marathi movie about a pregnant woman (Nushrratt Bharuccha, as Sakshi) who walks away from a patriarchal and baby-killing village with the ex-wife (Pallavi Ajay, as Rani) of her murderous husband. If this sentence sounds complicated, never mind. Just remember that Sakshi is the hero because she went through hell and back to protect her girl-child.