Shubhra Gupta

In 1974, Pakistan’s vaulting nuclear ambitions were spiked single-handedly by an Indian spy. And now, in 2025, the chatter around nukes is back again. Will Pak succeed this time around? How will India deal with the new threat? That’s the thrust of Faruk Kabir’s five-part series, ‘Salakaar’, reportedly based on real-life agent Ajit Doval’s canny moves back in the 70s, which find a fresh airing. This is yet another show built on showing the Pakistani establishment, including its then-president, as violent clowns, and the Indians as whip-smart. But it’s hard to take this iteration (writing credits are shared amongst Kabir, Spandan Mishra, Srinivas Abrol and Swati Tripathi) seriously: a scene which is meant to drip menace, has the supreme leader Zia Ullah (clearly based on Zia Ul-Haq, played by Mukesh Rishi) turn up himself at the Indian embassy with a dinner invitation for undercover agent-cum-attache Adhir Dayal (Naveen Kasturia).

There’s much that’s similar between the 2003 Freaky Friday and the 2025 Freakier Friday, starting with the central body-swapping premise, and the return of two main stars, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. The films may be separated by more than two decades, but the vibe is very much the same: get the sentiments out, but keep it broad and light, and make things right. In the previous one, Dr Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and teenage daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) are at loggerheads by the former’s impending marriage, with the latter not thrilled at the prospect of a stepdad. This time around, it is the turn of former rocker-present celebrity events manager Anna’s Gen Z daughter Harper (Julia Butters) to be unhappy at the former falling hard for single hot dad Eric (Manny Jacinto), who is in possession of a daughter of his own, the very British Lily (Sophia Hammons), said girl being satisfactorily snooty and stand-offish, and therefore Harper’s enemy number one.

Often, a woman who finds the courage, and the words, to talk about an assault that’s happened to her, is asked why she is doing it ‘so late’. It’s easier to say ‘an’ assault, rather than ‘my’ assault because disassociation kicks in. Owning up to it becomes too much, and the only way to survive is to begin distancing from ‘the event’. All too often, it goes unaddressed, lying like an unhealed wound, pushing itself to the fore when the survivor least expects it. Debutant director Eva Victor’s ‘Sorry, Baby’ in which Victor plays Agnes, a professor in a small New England town, does have a Bad Thing happen to her. Her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who is visiting her when the film opens, was her grad school roommate, when it happened. In the film’s most chilling sequences, we are rendered spectators to the Bad Thing, at a remove. We see the tall, gangling, fresh-faced Agnes go into her thesis guide’s home at dusk: the lights go, hours elapse, and we wait, at a distance, as the camera stays unmoving and unflinching, for Agnes to come stumbling out, sit on the steps, wear her boots, and get into the car and drive back home, possibly the longest, and the most difficult, drive of her life.

I had nearly, and happily, forgotten most of the first Son Of Sardaar. Only when I saw Ajay Devgn in a nicely-tied turban looking lost in a ‘yeh kya ho raha hai’ manner, and the late Mukul Dev (this is his last film) and Vindu Singh roaming about aimlessly, that I had a flashback of the original. I wasn’t a fan of the first one. Part 2, with these three reprising their roles, accompanied by some new faces, strains to be a little better. But only just. Two elements have been added to the plot-what’s-that proceedings. One is a running India-Pakistan gag, in which a few characters are Pakistani, and they are not all ‘soorma-eyed’ terrorists (gasp). The other is a wonderful actor who should basically be given all the awards: a nearly-unrecognisable Deepak Dobriyal playing a trans person with brio, nearly runs away with the film. Or would have, if his character was given half a chance to do more than the all-over-the-place script allows him to.

The Ghaziabad-based Katarias have a sole earning member. Ajay (Rajesh Tailang) is a lawyer whose earnings, and patience, is stretched thin by the antics of his permanently bickering teenage children, Naina (Tanya Sharma) and her younger brother Bharat (Aditya Shukla). Ajay’s wife Sushma (Sheeba Chadha) handles the house, one eye on the never-ending work in the kitchen, and another on the sewing machine, which has been lying neglected for years. What if she opens a longed-for boutique? That would bring in much-needed extra cash. The kids join in, with a couple of madcap schemes. But nothing works. The squabbling siblings have to share a room, while the one that’s freed up, is rented out. The tenant (Keshav Sadhna) turns out to be a good-looking fellow, whom Naina starts batting her eyelids at. Turns out that he has troubles of his own, revealed in a most unconvincing manner.

A little group, sitting outside their tiny homes, is swapping stories. The tone is civil, but the matter at hand, clearly hypothetical, is deadly serious– about a group of starving humans turning into cannibals, and a victim who gets devoured. Someone says, ‘agar Dalit hota toh bach jaata, koi chhoota tak nahin’ (If it was a Dalit, no one would have touched him). This line hits hard. Or, it should have. But it stays a throwaway, and we don’t really feel the impact as much as we should have. That single dialogue encapsulates centuries of caste-discrimination and exploitation and the almost inhuman resilience that a group of Indian citizens have been forced to live with. But in Shazia Iqbal’s ‘Dhadak 2’, we hear it, and before we could absorb the enormous weight of it, it’s gone.

There are three people, bound by blood, at cross-purposes in Sarzameen. An Armyman whose love for his country knows no bounds. His son whose weakness is hard for the strict dad to handle. And his (the Armyman’s) wife, whose love is divided. Who will win? The father or the son? In either event, will the wife win, or the mother? Sarzameen is yet another addition to the line of recent films which wears its patriotism on its sleeve. This Karan Johar production tries to add an emotional wallop, giving us the enemy without and a conflict within, and that layer should have helped this film become more than the run-of-the-mill productions we’re being besieged with these days.

Krish (Ahaan Panday) is a hotheaded wannabe composer. Vaani (Aneet Padda) is an earnest wannabe journalist. We know this because Krish gets into a scuffle almost as soon as the film opens, and stomps off, leaving the chance of a lucrative gig behind. And Vaani (Aneet Padda) gets smirked at in her new workplace because she has no idea of how many Instagram followers she has as she has deleted her account. That these two very different characters will clash, meet, and come together is ordained, because this is a Mohit Suri film. That it will have soulful ballad-y music all over it is also expected, for the same reason.