Shubhra Gupta

When Hathi Ram Chaudhary says in his world-weary manner, ‘hum toh paatal lok ke permanent niwasi hain’, he’s not just addressing a character in the series. He’s plunging us into the nether-world again, and we dive right in, willingly. The first season of Paatal Lok (2020), directed by Avinash Arun and created by Sudip Sharma, quickly become a benchmark, in the way it lifted a familiar world — weatherbeaten-but-idealistic cops pulled into cases of murder and corruption in high places — by singular story-telling, and characters that stayed with us. I’ve sorely missed my favourite cop, entire lifetimes imprinted in the craggy lines of his face, in the interim. Welcome back, Chaudhary sir.

The deep bonds between a horse and their human have been at the centre of many wonderful films. Azaad, which has two men, senior and junior, vying for the affections of a beautiful beast, should have been double the fun. But this one, which launches Ajay Devgn’s nephew Aaman and Raveena Tandon’s daughter Rasha, turns out to be so dated that it appears to have been made in a time lag. First off, the setting has been lifted from ‘Lagaan’– cruel zamindars helping pompous Englishmen lord over cowed villagers — with the addition of a few floggings, and loud proclamations of banishing the villagers to ‘Africa’ as bonded labour.

‘Black Warrant’ is a seven-part series based on a book of the same name about an insider’s account of his time at what has been dubbed ‘the biggest prison in Asia’, Tihar Jail. The volume is co-authored by Sunil Kumar Gupta, who joined Tihar in the early 80s, and journalist Sunetra Chowdhary; the show, directed by Vikramaditya Motwane, cherry picks some of the most sensational cases that unspooled during Gupta’s watch, as he grew from a wet-behind-the-ears rookie to an experienced jailer, without losing his humanity. Gupta, credited with starting Tihar’s first legal aid cell for poor, illiterate under-trials, is played by Zahan Kapoor. The actor, who debuted in Hansal Mehta’s 2022 terrorist drama ‘Faraz’, is given enough time here to grow into his role. Within a few minutes of the opening, his slight frame and smiling, soft ways — unlike his colleagues, he doesn’t cuss a mile a minute, nor does he use brute force on the inmates — are underlined more than a few times, and it’s quickly apparent why. His character, who doesn’t quite fit the job description — maintaining order in a rough-tough jail — is a familiar device used to impart chunks of information. And it is to Kapoor’s credit that he becomes more than just that device which is pressed into service through the series; he inhabits his character with conviction.

Cyber crime is in the crosshairs of Sonu Sood’s ‘Fateh’, in which he plays an In and As role: the name of the film is his, which means victory. So how much of a win is the 127-minute film, the actor’s debut directorial? Sood has mostly played strong supporting roles up until now; this one has him as hero, front and centre. That’s one thing checked off from any actor’s wish-list: solo hero in an action movie, the guy with the gun, leading from the front.

Parama : A Journey With Aparna Sen is a lively portrait of an artiste, with conversations that the director conducts with his subject, and her subjects. It begins, aptly, with a sequence from Sen’s first directorial, ‘36, Chowringhee Lane’, a 1981 film that brings alive a slice of Calcutta long since vanished. Violet Stoneham, played unforgettably by Jennifer Kendal, is an Anglo-Indian-school teacher-spinster who lives alone. An accidental meeting with a former student and her boyfriend injects warmth and colour into her drab life, but the change is sadly short-lived. Ghosh and his team take Sen to the building — the kind in which the lifts didn’t work, the bare tangle of electricity wires hanging dangerously low over the staircase — in which the film was shot, and we hear her reminisce about how one of her best films, and one whose portrayal of loneliness still aches, came together.

India’s answer to ER/Grey’s Anatomy is here: Doctors, which is as straight-forward a title as you can get, is about just that, a bunch of medics, ranging from eager new residents to rockstar surgeons, as well as other denizens– nurses, interns, administrators– who make up a busy hospital. It takes a couple of episodes for the 10-part show to get into the groove, which gives us an insider’s look at medical practitioners going all out in high-stress emergencies, as well as dealing with those who are struggling with terminal diseases. These are humans who are also doctors. We see them as people, with their strengths and weaknesses, but who do not compromise when it comes to saving the lives of their patients.

At a late stage in the film, Rajpal Yadav’s character, who plays a side-kick to the hero, gets the best line of Baby John: comedy is serious business. It was about the only time I heard a ripple of laughter in the preview theatre. It is the kind of punchline that masala movies use to bring the house down. And it says a great deal about Baby John, which weighs in at a punishing 164 minutes, that a comic’s dialogue gets more taalis than the hero’s ‘taqia kalaam’ line: ‘par main toh pehli baar aaya hoon’.

In an unspecified North Indian hilltown boarding school, a girl comes of age. That overused phrase ‘coming-of-age’ is a misnomer when it comes to mainstream Hindi cinema: the years between thirteen and eighteen are those where contradictory impulses leap between synapses, with mind and body taking off in opposite directions, and explorations of both taking you into spaces where you’ve never been before.