Shubhra Gupta

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.

To judge by appearance is a bad thing. This single line premise is stretched out over two and a half hours, leading to a film where you are left counting the moments where two people spark. The only nice thing about Do Deewane Seher Mein– please note, not Shehar–is that for a change a Hindi film doesn’t make you feel as if Shashank (Sidhant Chaturvedi) and Roshni (Mrunal Thakur) could be brother and sister. There is attraction, and they do act upon it, bringing their faces close enough for their lips to touch. Small mercies.

It was always going to be a tough act to follow. Kohrra, out in 2023, was an instant classic with its multi-pronged approach, gathering up the tangled skeins of personal and political, individual and societal, and love and longing, tethering everything to a small Punjab town. The plot was specific to its time and place but universal in the way it touched upon human frailties, while giving us full-bodied characters. Created and written by Gunjit Chopra, Diggi Sisodia, and Sudip Sharma, and directed by Randeep Jha, it was a triumph, and one of the best series I’ve watched in recent times. Sadly, I can’t say the same for this new season, which I’d been waiting for.

If you compare the two, the spiritual successor of the 2022 Vadh is better than the original, but as a stand-alone, Vadh 2 stops short on delivering on the promise it begins with. First off, though, props to the way the prison drama gives attention to all its characters, not just to the two main leads: Neena Gupta and Sanjay Mishra bear the same names, but, in an interesting turn, do not reprise their roles. In the first film, Shambhunath and Manju are middle-aged spouses, done in by the selfishness of an only son. In this one, the former works in Shivpuri prison, the latter is an inmate, serving life imprisonment for a double murder.

It’s 2029, Los Angeles. A detective finds himself in the hot seat, accused of murdering his wife. He has only 90 minutes to prove his innocence: the catch is, that it is an AI-powered justice system which is judge, jury, executioner, and if he can’t lay out sufficient evidence to clear himself, he will be executed. Blinking himself out of a stupor, Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) finds himself strapped to a chair, facing the beautiful Judge Maddox (Rebecca Fergusson). From all accounts in front of the judge, the detective was alone with his wife (Annabelle Wallis) for a length of time, during which she was stabbed with a sharp knife. Their daughter (Kylie Rogers) finds her mother lying in a pool of blood, and calls it in, and from then on, starts Chris’s ordeal.

Serial killers are flooding Mumbai. Just a couple of months back, Madhuri Dixit was hot on their heels in the web series ‘Mrs Deshpande’. Now it’s Bhumi Satish Pednekkar’s turn to do the same in ‘Daldal’. Both women have dark pasts, both confront their demons while navigating the quicksand of the present, in which good guys, bad guys and ill intentions wallow: by now, these tales, despite differences in plot and place, feel almost templated.