Shubhra Gupta

It’s raining spies everywhere you turn, but it’s in ‘Tehran’ that you actually get a sense of what the work entails– it could mean putting in long, hard hours in nondescript offices, and the field operations that are shown as fast-paced car-and-copter-chases in the movies is, in this John Abraham-starrer, mostly about learning how to hide in plain sight, even as the danger of betrayal looms at every step. Abraham plays Rajeev Kumar, an intelligence officer who gets embroiled in the dirty business involving two foreign nations, Israel and Iran, on Indian soil. A blast in New Delhi results in the death of a little girl, a bystander with zero stakes in the long-standing conflict in the Middle East, and RK finds himself moving from the periphery to the centre. It’s no longer about the job; it is now personal.

The hardest thing about this show is also the easiest. Once you accept the fact that heightened hokeyness is key to both the characters and the construct, you begin admiring the straight-faced seriousness with which everyone gets with the plan, with nary an eye roll or giggle in sight. Without giving too much away, and I suppose I couldn’t even if I wanted to, so outlandish is everything, the ‘andhera’ in the title turns out to be a malevolent entity which threatens to enslave human-kind. It has wriggly tentacles which probe and fasten, whisking victims away into a never-never land where they lie in suspension, neither dead nor alive, mere husks.

Rogue spy Kabir is back, and this time around, he has a bigger task cut out for him. Perhaps the most difficult, says his father-figure mentor Colonel Luthra, a description which turns out to be prophetic. Yes, the task, to keep us glued to the screen, which is the solo ask of a fast-paced actioner, turns out to be not just difficult, but impossible. I’m sorry to report that War 2, the sixth instalment of the YRF Spy Universe, is nothing but a glossy snooze-fest.

It’s not the fault of this series that it comes exactly a week after the one which had the same theme. Well, almost. Salaakar is about scotching Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions with the help of canny footwork by Indian spies : this week’s new show on Netflix, Saare Jahaan Se Accha, created by Gaurav Shukla and directed by Sumit Purohit, is exactly about the same thing. The intent may be the same but the treatment, thankfully, is vastly different: the beyond-terrible Salakaar, with Naveen Kasturia leading the charge, reminds you of a comic-book with none of the fun of the genre; this Pratik Gandhi starrer, on the other hand, takes things seriously, and that’s a good thing, more or less.

Shifting focus from panchayats and chikitsalayas, TVF takes the legal route to tell the story of a generational conflict revolving around small-town court kacheris. Is Harish Mathur, whose acumen in the court-room has earned him legions of fans, wrong to assume that his son Param will follow in his footsteps? Is Param right in wanting to forge his own path, which will take him far away from both his father’s chosen profession, as well as the land of his birth?

Weapons movie review & rating: There’s something so eerie about a little girl calmly narrating the events of a horrific night during which, exactly at 2.17 am, seventeen children from the same class got out of their beds, walked out into the dark streets, and vanished, that you don’t want ‘Weapons’ to let you off the hook. Not even for a moment. Writer-director Zach Cregger, anointed the new horror-meister with the 2022 ‘Barbarian’, returns with a small-town-mystery-disappearance which could feel like a trope– so very Stephen Kingian in its thematic concerns- which manages to stay fresh and compelling, but only up until a point.

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.