Shubhra Gupta

Somewhere in merry England lives Happy, a nice guy who can assemble a nifty sandwich which pleases his British dads enormously. They go ummm, chewing beatifically. He can also execute a mean on pointe, in his powder-pink ballet shoes. Everything seems to be going swimmingly with the lad, but all of a sudden he has this feeling of something ‘missing’.

There was a time when the bad guys in Bollywood used to be mainly smugglers. Remember that word sardonically mouthed by the lanky Anthony Gonsalves? ‘Biscuit’, he says, in an iconic Amar Akbar Anthony scene, and we see exactly what he’s referring to: a briefcase filled with shiny gold ‘biscuits’. That was back in the restrictive 70s, when everything had to be smuggled in. Post-liberalisation, with foreign exchange freely available and international travel becoming easier, villainy shifted to other spheres. Or at least that’s what the movies showed us.

One of my favourite scenes in this second season– and there are several– has Jawaharlal Nehru sitting by himself in a large high-ceilinged room. Sardar Patel has just left, with yet another contentious issue left hanging in the air. For a series which leans so heavily into conversation and constant cross-talk, a man alone with his thoughts has weight, giving us time to understand from the comfort and privilege of hindsight, just how hard won our freedom was, which came to us at that famous stroke of the midnight hour.

Ikkis movie review: “Ikkis,” responds a young soldier when asked his age by a senior officer, his face thickly smeared by birthday cake. Twenty-one, when you come properly of age. Second Lt Arun Khetarpal did not live to be 22: he fought with his last breath on that climactic December day of the 1971 Indo-Pak war, becoming the youngest Army officer to be awarded a Param Vir Chakra. Rather than just a straight-up war film about a young man’s exemplary courage, Ikkis is also an exploration of the harrowing fallout of conflict. And that makes Sriram Raghavan’s latest, co-written by him, Arijit Biswas and Pooja Ladha Surti, stand out from the overwhelmingly jingoistic, disturbingly violent features of the past few years.

Anaconda movie review: Help, the ssssnake is back. Not just any old wriggly creature, but the giant anaconda, which is out hunting humans again in the jungles of South America. Those who’ve seen the 1997 original, starring Jennifer Lopez-Owen Wilson-Jon Voight-Ice Cube and the reptile with a monstrous maw, will remember just how scary it was. The relentless chase– this is a snake which hunts in water, over land, and on tall tree-tops– was all kinds of scary with people falling off boats, thrashing in the jaws of the snake, turning the water bloody.

Several questions confront you as soon as you get into this rom com which marks the end of 2025. What do you do when the two leads who are meant to do the usual squabble-make-up-make-out thing exhibit zero chemistry from the get go? What happens when the film looks like a full-blown advert for a European country — Croatia in this instance — where the first half is set? What can you do when the characters look like they’ve been cobbled together without a thought of whether they gel as a family?

‘Yahan par hathyakaand hua hai, force bhejiye.’ Small town cop Jatil Yadav and his trusty phatphatiya are back, solving murders most foul. The Lucknow-Kanpur axis is very much present in this spiritual sequel of the 2020 thriller Raat Akeli Hai, as are several key characters, but the ensemble is much bigger, with multiple bodies this time round.

A serial killer is on the loose in Mumbai, targeting his victims with a coil of lurid green rope, arranging them in different poses in different locations. A grizzled cop (Priyanshu Chatterjee) with a long memory remembers a much older series of killings 25 years back in Pune, whose perpetrator has been in prison for that long. Are these copycat killings? But who would know about those murders, carefully buried in dusty case files? Cue Mrs Deshpande (Madhuri Dixit) who is whistled up by the senior policeman to help them crack this case, whose victims seem to have no connection to each other other than a striking similarity in the modus operandi of their murders. She’s been far away from Mumbai, in Hyderabad central jail, being a model prisoner, suspiciously good, in fact.