Shubhra Gupta

Ramakant (Rajkummar Rao) is not just a kanjoos. He is the kind of maha-kanjoos who feels like he’s won a lottery if a telephone company returns the six rupees he insists it owes him. Six, yes, count ‘em. His comely wife Shilpa (Sanya Malhotra), addicted to crime shows, hates the fact that they live in a building society full of senior citizens, one of them being a Mrs D’Souza (Seema Pahwa), who can be sweet-talked into reducing their rent.

This Marathi language feature involves a pair of former lovers accidentally bumping into each other in Tokyo years after their painful parting. The meeting between Toh (He, Lalit Prabhakar) and Ti (She, Mrinmayee Godbole) causes facades to be peeled off, re-opening old wounds: can these two forgive each other, and is forgetting on the cards? Directed by Mohit Takalkar and written by Irawati Karnik, Toh Ti Ani Fuji is the kind of grown-up relationship drama which feels fresh, contemporary and urgent: as Toh and Ti are drawn to each other, trying to see how they fit in, we see just how complex the thing between two people can be, where ‘extreme hatred and extreme love’, as one of the two puts it, can appear to be the two sides of the same coin.

Maths nerd Agastya aka Gast (Mihir Ahuja) has his heart set upon seeing his single mom Vinita aka Vinnie (Mona Singh) ‘settled’, so he’s in search of that perfect algorithm that will lead to a perfect match. In all the adding and subtracting, he forgets that humans are still the sum of their gloriously imperfect parts. No artificial intelligence can crack ‘em. At least not yet, fingers tightly crossed.

It isn’t as if the people responsible for the action set-pieces haven’t gone all out in this one, with bombs and guns blasting away, jeeps careering around vast stretches of sand, men — as ever, scant place for women in this all-male ensemble – swarming everywhere, stabbing, shooting, killing. But except for a couple of sequences, where the adrenaline gets pumping, the rest is pretty ho-hum: imagine a character actually saying ‘we don’t have problems with Pakistan as such, only those Pakistanis who are terrorists’ or words to that effect. Haww, whatever happened to all that Islamophobia? The poor ISI chap is the only one left spouting anti-India sentiments, the rest are content to blow each other up. And that vaunted inclusion of ‘Bada Sahab’, standing in for the dreaded Dawood Ibrahim, is a bit of a bore: sometimes, the more hype, the more the expectation, the more of a let-down it is.

Marathi chamber drama Tighee (Three Of Us, or Us Three) features veteran Bharati Achrekar, familiar to Hindi film audiences through her impactful supporting roles, helming a story about simmering familial tensions, traumatic pasts, and the promise of a better future. She plays the terminally ill Hemlata — mother to two fractious daughters, Swati (Neha Pendse) and Sarika (Sonalee Kulkarni) — back home one last time.

Abhilash (Naveen Kasturia), SK ( Abhilash Thapliyal) and Guri (Shivankit Singh Parihar) – is back for a third time, the three friends picking up where they’d left off in the previous season.The deep personal ties, forged through intense studying to crack the UPSC — the hierarchy graven in stone within the civil services, with the IAS on top — the squabbles and the warmth of the years spent propping each other up in Old Rajinder Nagar and Mukherjee Nagar rented holes-in-the-wall, have given way to a complicated professional life, which is not as rosy as it was cracked up to be.

To be honest, I went into this show because of Vineet Kumar Singh, In and As Alakh Pandey, who is world-famous as Physics Wallah, the teacher whose one-point agenda was to teach, baaki sab baad mein. Directed by Pratish Mehta, and written by Abhishek Yadav, Vernaali, Sandeep Singh Rawat, Hello Bachchon puts its love for Physics front and centre. In these times, when the importance of scientific temperament itself is under such pressure, to have a series outline its beliefs so clearly is heartening.

A mid-level Armyman up against the powerful mafia in a small town in North India: this one-line premise spreads across a fast-paced two-hour film, bringing alive the menace of a decaying town and its mai-baaps (overlords) in a way that Hindi cinema had forgotten about, and giving us a seasoned actor in his prime showing how it is done. Subedaar reminds me of the kind of old-fashioned crime thriller fronted by a hero clashing with the corrupt system, and individuals, that used to give mainstream Bollywood its heft. This Suresh Triveni atmospheric directorial brings back that mojo, even if it can’t quite stave off its occasional bumps.