Saibal Chatterjee

In an industry overwhelmingly dominated by men, Nayanthara is a rarity. A “lady superstar” who earned her spurs the hard way and went on to upend many an established showbiz norm, she has over the years fronted numerous big South Indian films that have ridden on her crowd-pulling prowess. This self-produced Netflix documentary seeks to capture the rise and rise of Nayanthara in the face of several reverses. It isn’t an objective account but, notwithstanding the limitations of its format, Nayanthara: Beyond The Fairy Tale is entertaining and insightful.

Its ambition is sky-high. Kanguva seeks to derive power from the elements (wind, water and fire), the ambitious merger of two timelines separated by a millennium, and the immense magnetism of lead actor Suriya. Nothing wrong with that of course, but the building blocks would have come together far more effectively had the writing and treatment been more organised and coherent.

In Freedom of Midnight, showrunner and director Nikkhil Advani, working with a script by a team of six writers, blends solid historicity with elements of fiction and imagination to bring to the screen the agonizing final leg of India’s freedom struggle. The SonyLIV drama series produced by Emmay Entertainment and StudioNext, is crafted with utmost diligence. It blends grandeur with intimacy, swept with precision, sustained gravitas with an acute awareness of the timeless contemporaneity of political decisions of far-reaching consequences made in an era of great upheavals by the architects of a free nation forged in fire.

It hits the ground running all right but the mission of sustaining the momentum is an abject failure. Much of what Citadel: Honey Bunny attempts to do proves way too much for a script that, even at its best, can only laboriously inch its way forward - and backwards. Citadel: Honey Bunny is an Indian spinoff of Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel Spyverse that was birthed last year in an espionage thriller series fronted by Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden and executive produced by the Russo brothers. While it has its share of action, it runs low on intrigue and suspense.

Identical twins of the kind that we encounter in Hindi popular cinema are always temperamentally polar opposites. The pair in Do Patti, a Netflix film directed by Shashanka Chaturvedi, is no exception - they look the same but are dissimilar in disposition and demeanour. The film, however, deviates from the larger narrative template that governs the genre. Mumbai movies may have stumbled upon a degree of freedom thanks to the advent of the streamers, but old habits die hard. Do Patti, scripted by Kanika Dhillon, has an old trope at its core. It, however, eschews the usual confusion-caused-by-mistaken-identity construct.

Conjuring up a life that plays out in a virtual space - in other words, setting up a gauzy existence that floats in a dimension far removed from the real and the tangible - has its wages. Vikramaditya Motwane’s inventive, sparky CTRL examines the nature and extent of the toll that burrowing into a rabbit hole of constructed personas and enhanced engagements can extract.

Bhuvan Bam’s Vasant Gawde, Mr. Vardaan to the world owing to his ability to see events before they come to pass, is back seeking to make a killing from the prescient news updates that he receives on a mobile phone app. This time around, the Taaza Khabar protagonist is either on the backfoot or, worse still, down on his haunches. His plight necessitates desperate measures as he faces new challenges hurled at him by a man who will stop at nothing. But the show, notwithstanding a series of dramatic confrontations, struggles to skirt around the pitfalls of an idea that is beginning to wear thin.