Shubhra Gupta

A small town in South India. A religious festival drumming up nightly fervour. A crime most foul. Red herrings. Confused cops. These elements which made the first season of ‘Suzhal: The Vortex’ such a gripping watch are back in Season 2, except the town is different, and the crime, this time around, is revealed from the get-go: a local lawyer is found dead. Was it suicide, or murder? Two of the lead actors are back, too. Kathir as the cop Sakkarai, is under a professional cloud for something he did in the previous season, and Aishwarya Rajesh as Nandhini, the young woman who slayed her demon in its satisfactory climax, is awaiting trial. Sakkarai has strong filial ties with slain lawyer Chellappa (Lal), and as he delves deeper, past secrets rise to the surface, and everyone connected to the victim comes under the scanner.

Crazxy movie review: The stuck-behind-a-steering-wheel/closed-phone-booth character, hellbent on saving a loved one from dire consequences, has been used in a few films. In ‘Crazxy’, Sohum Shah plays a surgeon, on track for a crucial meeting, poleaxed by a phone call which changes everything: he needs to rapidly regroup and think on his feet, to prevent calamity befalling a member of his family. At 93 minutes, the film is fashioned as an edge-of-the-seat thriller, and Shah’s Dr Abhimanyu Sood does his best to put metal-to-pedal, while fielding calls from a bunch of increasingly agitated people: ex-wife (voiced by Nimisha Sajayan), current interest (voiced by Shilpa Shukla), boss of his hospital (voiced by Piyush Mishra), and a senior teacher (voiced by Tinnu Anand) at his daughter Vedika’s (Unnati Surana, on screen briefly) school, who is empathetic to her special needs.

Dabba Cartel review: A group of Thane-based women come together to fend off multiple elements that are stopping them from being themselves. Sweet housewife Raji (Shalini Pandey), her dour mother-in-law Sheila (Shabana Azmi), mouthy domestic worker Mala (Nimisha Sajayan), unhappy wife-cum-entrepreneur Varuna (Jyotika), smart real-estate agent Shahida (Anjali Anand), all very different from each other, find common cause through an unlikely enterprise: the modest business of daily dabbas with ‘ghar-ka-khana’ laced with a little kick, turns into a ride whose rising profit comes with thrills and danger.

Superboys of Malegaon is inspired by Faiza Ahmad Khan’s terrific 2008 documentary ‘Supermen of Malegaon’, on a subset of residents of Malegaon who had become famous for turning their home-grown spoofs of Bollywood blockbusters into a profitable cottage industry. The filmmakers give credit to the original at the end of their film, which in essence, is a feature film with many elements borrowed from the documentary, which in turn was based on the remarkable enterprise on display in a small Maharashtra town afflicted by communal tensions and poverty, and about the power of dreaming.

Reacher is many things. Ex-US Army. Tall. Large. Loner. Drifter. But he’s no grifter: he means what he says, even if sometimes he comes off as pedantic. But when he tells wealthy rug merchant Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall) that wherever he, Reacher, goes, trouble seems to find him, he is just stating facts. In a sedate university town of Maine, trouble once again finds our favourite former military cop, and Season 3 of the eight-part show called, simply, and aptly, ‘Reacher’, is off and away. This one is based on Lee Child’s seventh bestseller ‘Persuader’, developed for TV by Nick Santora, and written by Scott Sullivan. Good cops, bad guys, shoot-outs, car crashes, sudden kills, the staple elements of the best-selling author’s page-turners, all show up.

The film has a catchy title. You go in with a bit of hope, given that director Mudassar Aziz’s previous ‘Khel Khel Mein’ had a few nice moments, but that one was a remake. Here it has been written by the director, and you encounter, over two-and-a-half hours, tropes, flat scenes, and characters who come and go. Which is a pity because the lead characters appear to have taken their jobs seriously. It is no surprise that the two ladies playing romantic rivals, Bhumi Pednekar as Prabhleen Dhillon, and Rakul Preeti Singh as Antara Khanna, make you look. Plus, and this is a surprise, Arjun Kapoor as Ankur Chaddha isn’t half bad as the hapless guy stuck between the two loves of his life. They just needed a better film.

At the end of 161 minutes of Chhaava, based on the high-points of the life of Sambhaji Maharaj, the son of Shivaji Maharaj, you are left with two chief thoughts. How do you pull off a film which talks up a historical figure not as well known as his illustrious parent, without us wondering: how much is fact, and how much fiction? And the other, which is the reason you manage to sit through this ultra-loud, ultra-violent re-creation of a slice of the 17th century Hindustan is the total commitment on display by its lead actor to the titular character: Vicky Kaushal becomes Chhaava (‘son of a lion’), whose story the film adapts from the Marathi novel of the same name by Shivaji Sawant.

If you married ‘Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin’ with a zillion iterations of the odd-couple and lovers-on-the-run and heist movies, you would get Dhoom Dhaam, a film which borrows from all these elements, while straining every nerve to be novel. The trouble with skimming tropes is that your film, even with a fresh pairing, and despite a few flourishes, ends up more or less trope-y.