Shubhra Gupta

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.

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.