Saibal Chatterjee

A taut and tense thriller, Crazxy, produced by and starring Sohum Shah, whose choices as an actor have never been conventional, upends genre norms to deliver a 93-minute adrenaline rush that until it ends up in a small puddle of avoidable mush is absolutely riveting fare. Coming to think of it, even the somewhat mawkish conclusion is not wholly out of place in a drama that blends the emotional with the visceral. Crazxy wastes nary a scene in its sustained bid to generate intrigue and suspense centred on the conversations and choices of the protagonist, a successful surgeon with a volatile past making his way through a day on which everything that can go wrong goes horribly wrong. The film rests on a virtuoso solo act that sees Sohum Shah in the guise of a Delhi doctor pulled into a heart-pounding race against time to save his kidnapped daughter, a girl he heartlessly abandoned due to no fault of hers.

Shabana Azmi is the pivot around which Dabba Cartel, a female-driven Netflix crime drama series, swivels. She is in her element. That is half the battle won. Winning the remaining half takes a bit of doing. Happily, it isn’t entirely beyond the team behind and before the camera. Azmi pulls her weight without missing a beat. She is ably supported by a wonderful ensemble cast that includes Jyotika, Nimisha Sajayan, Sai Tamhankar, Lillete Dubey, Shalini Pandey and Anjali Anand. The writing, too, contributes more than its mite to the show by putting a vigorous fresh spin on the genre. Yet, there is no escaping the feeling that the seven-episode Excel Entertainment-produced series, created by Shibani Akhtar, Gaurav Kapur, Vishnu Menon and Akanksha Seda, could have been a little tighter at the seams and a bit lighter at the edges. It falls just a touch short of being an unqualified success.

A sham, short-term romantic dalliance in an elite, no-uniform Delhi school assumes serious overtones and flips and flops its way through predictable ups and downs. That is the crux of Nadaaniyan, a passably lively but spectacularly shallow rom-com produced by Dharmatic Entertainment for Netflix. The strictly superficial buoyancy that the film seeks to exude is as affected as the idea that the plot revolves around. Directed by first-timer Shauna Gautam from a script by Riva Razdan Kapoor, Ishita Moitra and Jehan Handa, Nadaaniyan sputters to life only intermittently, banking on the youthful charm and energy of the young lead actors. The film juggles sundry ideas from Karan Johar’s early blockbusters (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, K3G, et al) and updates them, without much originality, for the consumption of Gen Z social media addicts who would rather die than go off the grid.

A significant addition to the small canon of Indian media industry dramas, Crime Beat, like Scoop before it, is based on a book written by a journalist who was in the thick of the action that forms the core of the series. Even its fictional elements largely flow from fact. The Zee5 series is marked by realism, an attribute that stems from its abjuration of overt generic flourishes. The dialogues co-written by the author of the novel (The Price You Pay, published in 2013)—scribe-turned academic Somnath Batabyal—contribute conversational authenticity to the show. Crime Beat investigates the Delhi underworld, the media’s attritional brushes with it and with men in uniform charged with keeping crime in check in the city. The lines that separate the three domains from each other as well as from party politics are frequently blurred, even erased.

A marriage annulled returns to haunt a man all set to move on in life in the lovey-dovey company of another woman. Love quickly flies out the window when the ex-wife, with a massive axe to grind, decides to do everything in her power to queer the pitch and picks up cudgels against the bride-to-be. Isn’t that the stuff that zany rom-coms are usually made of? Yes, but only in an ideal world. Mere Husband Ki Biwi, caught in a yawning gap between intent and execution, gropes in the dark for inspiration and fresh ideas and finds none worth a mention. The breakup has left a sorry trail of bitterness and the new hookup is riddled with challenges created by the man’s messy past. That is an obvious boilerplate for a cocktail of emotional bedlam, romantic recriminations, and much triangular to-ing and fro-ing. It’s all sufficiently flighty and frothy and yet painfully tedious. To biwi or not to biwi? That is the question the film runs concentric circles around and does not formulate a convincing answer.

Leaping from the pages of 17th century Maratha history to the fantastical realms of Bollywood mythologizing, Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, son of the revered Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, receives no-holds-barred epic treatment in Laxman Utekar’s Chhaava. The burden that the film puts upon itself in the bargain takes a heavy toll on the eventual shape of things. Despite a pair of noteworthy performances from lead actor Vicky Kaushal and Akshaye Khanna as the antagonist, the film falls apart at the seams because it has little to hold it together apart from its unabashed obsession with excess. We accept that it is all right for the makers to take the title literally—it means lion cub. It, however, makes no sense to use that as an excuse to roll out an endless parade of growls and scowls in the service of battle scenes that go on and on.

The shaadi goes off without a hitch. But the suhaag raat in a luxury hotel suite is rudely scuttled by armed goons. As the new bride hopes to get the marital union to a warm start, the uninvited guests knock on the door. What happens next is nothing like anything that the lady would have anticipated. Ahead of her is a night to remember and, just as much, a night to forget. The intruders demand to know where “Charlie” is. The groom, scared out of his wits, has no clue what the gun-waving men are talking about. They will not take “I don’t know” for an answer. The woman isn’t one to take anything lying down, least of all the shenanigans of the thugs or the many avowed frailties of her husband. All hell breaks loose. That is how Dhoom Dhaam, a rom-com caper out on Netflix, kicks off (of course, not before a quick prelude designed to set the tone for the rest of the film).

Self-assured is one thing that actor Boman Irani’s directorial debut, The Mehta Boys, definitely is. It is a refreshingly unpretentious father-son drama that neither strives for gratuitous pace nor looks for pronounced complexity and yet manages to be not only thought-provoking but also emotionally involving. The director is also the lead actor and co-producer of the Amazon Prime Video film but he clearly isn’t weighed down by the workload. He maintains a firm grip on a narrative centred on a 71-year-old Navsari-based man coming off the demise of his wife and his fraught relationship with his only son, an architect who flew the coop a decade ago in pursuit of a career in Mumbai. The Mehta Boys, scripted by Boman Irani and Oscar-winning screenwriter Alexander Dinelaris (Birdman), isn’t crammed with high drama, surprise twists and radical themes. It has its share of emotive highs and performative crescendos but that does not deflect it off its clean, even and realistic arc.