Shubhra Gupta

By rights, the re-uniting of Priyadarshan and Akshay Kumar, the haunted palace, and fresh shenanigans of past and present bhooths should have been a rollicking affair, with the 2026 Bhooth Bangla boasting many of the same elements which made the 2007 Bhool Bhulaiyaa film such a hoot. Remember that fast-paced plot which combined old myths and new superstitions, Akshay’s adventure-seeking ghostbuster coasting on his comedic persona, and Vidya Balan’s terrifying Monjulika? Not everything landed — Priyadarshan’s capers are typically a harum-scarum tumble of characters and situations which seem to have been conjured up on the spot — but there was something about the way all those crazy energies came together that has made the film so much of a nostalgia bomb.

Matka King review: ‘Matka King’ is loosely based on the infamous exploits of real-life cotton trader Ravi Khatri, who created a highly addictive gambling game out of the humble earthen pot in the Bombay of the 60s. Vijay Varma plays Brij Bhatti, whose sharp brains and an endless capacity to keep his eye on the end result, refuses to labour under his canny seth (Gulshan Grover) when push comes to shove: slowly but steadily, his efforts take him out of his chawl, where he lives with his younger brother Lakshman (Bhupendra Jadawat), wife (Sai Tamhankar) and little boy, to spiffy mansions and fancy boudoirs of the rich and famous.

This Telugu-Hindi thriller, meant to be a fast-paced romance between two good-looking people from opposite sides of the tracks, proves a few things: plots trying to be new shouldn’t feel familiar, it’s never a good idea to waste Prakash Raj, and that Anurag Kashyap needs to act a lot more, as he literally saves this film from sinking. It’s good to have Adivi Sesh back in action, building on his kinetic Kshanam-Goodachari persona. But his conflicted convict Hari, out for revenge against the love of his life (Mrunal Thakur), whom he holds responsible for his ruin, is overwrought. More underwhelming is Thakur as Saraswati, the upper-class, upper-caste woman whose idea of showing her lover a good time is to teach him how to drive on a straight road.

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.