Rahul Desai

Needless to say, the creators of Gram Chikitsalay — a five-episode dramedy that revolves around an urban doctor (Amol Parashar, as Dr. Prabhat Sinha) who arrives to take charge of a derelict PHC (Primary Health Center) in rural Jharkhand — are also the creators of Panchayat. In recent interviews, they mentioned the term “Village Cinematic Universe,” a grounded TVF version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the YRF Spy Universe. The irony of the commodification of small-town life (featuring Gullak, Kota Factory, Aspirants) is lost on most, but that’s a formal complaint for another day. The streaming platform, Prime Video, is already a step ahead: its release of Dupahiya (a motorbike goes missing in a…Bihari village) in March marked the expansion of the ‘Cutesy Village Universe’ franchise: a nice cast, colourful personalities, curated nothingness, grassroots commentary, cultural tokenism.

If you’ve followed Hindi web shows long enough, you’ll know that “fun & frothy” is streaming lingo (and euphemism) for “empty, expensive, glossy, puerile, performative and garishly produced young-adult-but-Bollywood-scale entertainment”. It’s a very specific subgenre of designer nothingness — the storytelling equivalent of a brown mannequin at a MET gala whose theme is ‘Sexy and Flawed’. Think Four More Shots Please!, Eternally Confused and Eager for Love, Mismatched, Jee Karda, Call Me Bae and now, The Royals: a series so frothy and stretched that a dust storm wrecked my room, the wifi broke, I fell violently ill and a war broke out in the real world during its 8-episode run.

Rich Girl meets Poor Boy. An affair brews. She is a powerful politician’s daughter; he is her driver’s son. They elope. A fleeting romance mutates into star-crossed love. Her family is not impressed. The sinister search begins. You know this young couple is doomed, because the trauma of watching the first segment of Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) and Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat (2016) is still fresh. It’s a tragedy as old as time.

As a genre, the horror comedy has reached a stage in its afterlife cycle where its ghoulish spirit is haunting theatres and vowing revenge against empty seats. The latest distorted entity is called The Bhootnii, an anti-film posing as a campus comedy set in a university that merges shots of Mumbai’s St. Xavier’s College with the abandoned studio lot of Om Shanti Om (2007) and the miscellaneous cultural energy of Rok Sako To Rok Lo (2004). It stars Mouni Roy as a jilted ghost named Mohabbat who yearns for the love of the student who accidentally summons her after a bad breakup by yelling “Where is my mohabbat?” in front of a tree haunted by her. He wanted to scream at the Virgin Tree (don’t ask), but drunkenly reached the wrong yard on a rainy night. Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually typing these lines in 2025.

All things considered, Costao is not your cookie-cutter Bollywood biopic. It stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Costao Fernandes, the plucky Goa customs officer who killed the brother of a powerful minister in self-defense while trying to bust a gold-smuggling operation in 1991. This incident happens around 30 minutes into the two-hour-long film. At this point, he goes on the run; the Goa police as well as the politician’s goons search for him. The CBI soon puts him on trial for murder, and the gangster plans cold-blooded revenge. He is even attacked in a medical room by henchmen disguised as doctors. Most stories would stage his fight for innocence as an extension of this moment — as a tense battle for survival. One can almost imagine a high-pitched climax where he uncovers proof, exposes the smugglers, wins the case and clears his own name.

There are two ways to process a movie like Raid 2. First, relatively — as the latest star vehicle in a mainstream Bollywood landscape gasping for air, originality and audiences. The bar is lower than working-class spirits on a dry day (Raid 2 releases on Labour Day). By this yardstick alone, the film is alright. It’s not bad. Watchable, even. The sequel to Raid (2018) — which continues the retro adventures of painfully honest IRS officer Amay Patnaik (Ajay Devgn) — sticks to the basics: a colourful supporting cast (to offset a stiff hero), Amit Sial and Saurabh Shukla in full form, a bad guy (Riteish Deshmukh) pretending to be a messiah, a pulpy score, a raid-redemption-rise story, loads of money and gold and gotcha grins and one-liners.

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.