Shubhra Gupta

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.

Racing towards a 24-hour deadline to submit a presentation which will hopefully get her into a top US university, Bani Ahmad (Kritika Kamra) settles down to it, but she hasn’t taken into account her family, and friends: the door-bell rings with an unexpected visitor, and within a few minutes, the trickle into a flood, and it’s full-blown mayhem. Anusha Rizvi’s second directorial feature, 15 years after rural satire ‘Peepli Live’, circles back to the city, with one day in the life of a Delhi-based comfortably-off Muslim family. It’s the kind of family we almost never see in mainstream Hindi cinema, because usually a Muslim character is safely tacked on to the periphery, biding his or her time for when the script bothers to remember them, and even that kind of tokenism has been steadily erased over these past years.

An early scene sets the tone for this eight-episode SonyLIV series, when an unlikely bunch of footballers became a beacon of hope for the strife-torn Kashmir valley in 2016. Sohail (Ayyub), who has left his compromised journalistic job to help create a local football team, fetches up in a very Delhi sarkari outpost, and within a remarkably short while, convinces a babu to sign off on permissions required to set up a club. Anyone who has had any dealings with the sports ministry, or any other ministry for that matter, will know that these things take months, sometimes even years, of gentle persuasion and other means, to get anything done.

Love, lust and betrayal were the key elements of Chutney, the short film Tisca Chopra had produced back in 2016. Watching Saali Mohabbat reminded me strongly of that short– watch it if you haven’t– written and directed by Jyoti Kapur Das, which had begged to be a full-length feature narrative in the way it peeled back the dark layers that hide behind a seemingly normal household in Ghaziabad. The arrival of a perky young thing creating ripples in a marriage is not a new idea, but Chutney refreshed it with an interesting slate of actors: Tisca herself in the lead as the toothy plain-faced woman with a sharp brain, accompanied by Adil Hussain and Rasika Dugal.

Benoit Blanc is back, and this time it’s with a proper bang, after last outing’s disappointing thud. Fancy yachts and self-obsessed billionaires made for a very dull sleuthing turn indeed. For this third go round, Johnson goes full gothic, combining it with a closed door murder, and the result is wonderful: I was glued to the screen all the way through. You wouldn’t really call Jud (Josh O’ Connor) a failed priest, but he’s done something in the past which he shouldn’t have , and now he has to atone for his sins by going off to a small parish in upstate New York run by the commanding monsignor Jefferson (Josh Brolin) who keeps his small flock tightly leashed, helped by the devout Martha (Glenn Close) who, like the others, seems to be in his thrall.

What happens when a freshly-divorced dude decides that he wants to become a single papa? Gaurav Gahlot (Kunal Kemmu) and wife (Isha Talwar) have an amicable parting: he desperately wants a baby, she doesn’t. So when a baby appears out of the blue, our GG does the only thing his heart has desired for a long time: give the tyke his name, and bring him home. Except, he does it the other way round, and all hell breaks loose in GG’s conservative Punjabi household when the delighted scion appears with his tiny bundle, heading down the road towards formula and diapers and colic and sleepless nights.