Rohit Vats

The dark underbelly of Mumbai has shifted its business base to the illegal drugs trade in recent webseries themes. Netflix’s latest offering Dabba Cartel, directed by Hitesh Bhatia and presented by Excel Entertainment, mixes two popular tracks—drugs and dabbawallahs—in one, and the result is, frankly speaking, fantastic. With six episodes of nearly 45-minutes each, Dabba Cartel has everything you would need for a good timepass—nice tempo, well-paced and a great ensemble. Plots thickens with each episode and new characters are introduced to keep you hooked. And, at the end of everything, you’re left wanting for more! Shabana Azmi, Jyothika, Shalini Pandey, Nimisha Sajayan, Anjali Anand, Sai Tamhankar, Gajraj Rao, Jisshu Sengupta and Sunil Grover form the primary cast which drives this saga of guts and greed. The makers have avoided any judgmental tone and treat the drug business as any other survival business. More than well written, the characters are well-placed in the story that revolves from chawls to housing societies to farmhouses.

Sub inspector Hathi Ram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat) of Jamna-paar police station has become more confident in life after the adventures of the first season. He finds himself entangled in a political murder that takes place in Delhi with its roots in Nagaland. He, along with IPS Iqbal Ansari ( Ishwak Singh), goes into the interiors of North East India to find out a complex society striving for power by any means. So many factions, so much greed and so bizarre situations. They meet Barua (Tillottama Shome) as the local police authority and begin a chase that’s forcing them to move in circles. At least, this is what happens in the first four episodes I watched after the show started streaming on Thursday night.

This review is based on the initial three episodes of the new Netflix show titled Black Warrant, based on a book of the same name by journalist Sunetra Choudhary and former Tihar Jail superintendent Sunil Gupta. However, going by the detailing shown in these episodes, there are chances of the rating going even higher eventually. Confession in the beginning: I haven’t read the book, which has given me a fresh perspective that is mostly driven by the entertainment quotient of the show. If you’re not looking for the mismatch between the book and the show, then you’re mostly looking for the right tempo and pace. Seconds into the show and you meet the lead of the biographical drama, jailer Sunil Gupta, a docile-looking but gritty middleclass boy with empathy in eyes and a hesitant body language. Wait a minute, have I not seen this full of potential actor somewhere before?

The Indian spin-off of Prime Video’s American show Citadel, titled Honey Bunny, tracks the making of super-agent Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra). Though Priyanka is not in the series, it’s about her parents Honey (Samantha) and Bunny (Varun Dhawan) and they become Citadel agents. The little Nadia (Kashvi) is very much present throughout the series and shows early inclinations of being a tough girl. While Honey is a struggling actor, Bunny is a stuntman who lives a double life of an agent under Baba (Kay Kay Menon). The time period is somewhere around 1992 and the play areas are Mumbai, Belgrade, Nainital and Bucharest. As expected, Baba and his ace killer KD (Saqib Saleem) are after Honey’s life even after eight years in 2000, but as the sentiments would go, Bunny returns to be the wall between death and life.

Rohit Shetty is probably the biggest showman in Bollywood right now. With Singham Again and the idea of a cop universe, he has pulled off the biggest mainstream casting in the last 25 years. With at least five top commercially viable actors—Ajay, Akshay, Ranveer, Deepika and Kareena—he has made the canvas of Singham Again so big that it is most likely to become the ‘go to’ movie of this year.

For psychological thrillers, it’s a given that we live in a broken world, a place with predators lurking around. Usually isolated from civilisation, literally and metaphorically, such a space evokes fear, horror and then survivalist tendencies. A new Netflix film Don’t Move portrays a similar canvas where a 30-something Iris (Kelsey), grieving the accidental death of her child, has lost the will to live, but she surprises herself with the fightback she still has in her when a family man-cum-ruthless kidnapper Richard (Finn) enters the scene.

There are twin sisters—Saumya and Shelly—played by Kriti Sanon in a beautiful Uttarakhand town with paragliders covering the blue sky. What a sense of relief in this confusing weather. Defused lighting and a lot of touch ups to bring out the best facial features of good-looking leads ensure a soothing start of a tale which harps on the childhood animosity of the twins. They both have their eyes set on a baby-faced yet quite violent Dhruv Sood (Shaheer Sheikh), which eventually leads to a cop and criminal chase led by Vidya Jyoti aka VJ (Kajol) to a point where the real purpose of law books and its practical usage would be discussed.

I watched emerging filmmaker Shishir Jha’s festival hit Tortoise Under The Earth (Dharti Latar Re Horo) a couple of months ago in Goa. Thanks to other tasks at hand, I willingly gave the film enough time to settle down in my memory, in such a way that I could reminiscence about it, preferably laden with nostalgia. I mean, what better way can be there to acknowledge a talented young filmmaker! Not even watching the trailer of the film to remind myself of the film’s exact plot was a conscious decision, something that could impact the original perspective I might have formed the first time. If certain visuals and sounds stay with me for all these weeks, rather months, then it’s probably going to have a similar effect on others as well.