Shubhra Gupta

A doctor comes to a village, there to discover a place where a familiar mix of innocence and craftiness is at play, where a quack has a bustling practice, and where he, the well-intentioned doc, learns life lessons. Replace Amol Parashar’s doctor with Jitendra Kumar’s sachivji, and you will get the set-up for Panchayat, TVF’s much-loved show, with so little difference as to be negligible. But given that clueless shehari babus having to check their privilege can make for an entertaining ride, there will always be similar shows.

Within a few minutes of the film’s opening, I asked myself: what am I doing here? Two hours, ten minutes, and what seems like a lifetime of groaning-and-moaning later, I have zero answers to that one. Horror comedies may be the flavour of the season after the ‘Stree’ jamboree, but even its part 2 was nowhere close to the delightful original. In this new film, we get a ‘The’, emphasising that this is not your random garden variety of bhootni, but a very specific one, with a double i to boot. Ergo, this one will stand apart. Which it does. It proudly and flagrantly stands apart from any vestiges of plot and production values, forget about sense and sensibility.

There are flashes of familiarity in Black, White and Gray—Love Kills in the broad thematic connections it is attempting at, between young lovers on the run, and the obstacles that come in their way. Patriarchy, parental opposition, class differences, power structures, are all present in this crime drama, reminding you of several others that have come before. But it stands out in the way it takes us along the ride, joining and erasing the dots, while creating vivid portraits of its characters and societal mores. I watched the six episodes of about 40-45 minutes each in a single gulp, because it got me invested in the people it was tracking, and wanted to know what happens next. Yes, there are contrivances — the structure of a documentary filmmaker speaking to ‘real’ people, with a parallel track being played out by those standing in for them, is the biggest of them all — and a few slack, improbable patches, but they are not deal breakers.

Seven years after the original ‘Raid’, IRS DCP Amay Patnaik (Ajay Devgn) returns to create yet another storm in a den of corruption. This time around, he’s in Bhoj, a town ruled by Dada Manohar Bhai (Riteish Deshmukh), whom the locals worship. Dada Bhai, in turn, worships, literally, at the feet of his Amma (Surpriya Pathak): he’s the obedient son, and the clean-as-a-whistle ruler. It’s only Amay, the sharpest card in the income tax department, who suspects that there is something jet black in this very white ‘dal’, and starts stirring the pot vigorously, hoping for the real picture to emerge.

Honest customs officer up against a wall of corruption. Costao, based on the real-life story of Costao Fernandes who fought with all his might to stall gold-smuggling in the Goa of the 90s, has Nawazuddin Siddiqui in a role that’s worthy of his talents, but a script which is distinctly lacklustre. A film that starts with a voiceover alerts you to the fact that the writers couldn’t find a more original way to tell their story. In this instance, Costao’s loving daughter is made the conduit, and the film becomes as much tell as it is show.

An intensive search-and-combing operation which results in the capture of a dreaded terrorist in Srinagar could be the one-line theme of several similar films in the past. The difference with ‘Ground Zero’, which calls itself a ‘work of fiction based on real-life events’, are two-fold. First, it releases the same week of the Pahalgam tragedy, whose consequences will be felt for a long time to come. Second, it steers clear of the disturbing jingoism that has been part and parcel of such films, focussing instead on the tough life of the BSF jawans and other security forces in the conflict-stricken Kashmir valley Emran Hashmi plays BSF officer Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey, who managed to locate and take out terrorist kingpin Ghazi Baba and his accomplices in 2003. It was a time when PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee had visited the valley, in the midst of rising terrorist activities: there are glimpses of the 2001 attack on Parliament in the film.

Can a film featuring Saif Ali Khan and Jaideep Ahlawat and a diamond bigger than the Ritz turn out to be a shockingly banal bauble?That’s not a trick question. It is something I’ve been asking myself since I finished watching ‘Jewel Thief A Heist Begins’, a face-off between a too-cool-for-school jewel thief (Saif Ali Khan), and a nattily-turned out mobster (Jaideep Ahlawat) who has a thing for pulping humans with his bare hands. Given that heist films are a dime a dozen, the least one can expect when you’ve got these two leads, fully capable of generating fizz, is to give us flash and pizazz and non-stop thrills, because that’s what the best high-stakes, high-on-adrenaline ‘heere-ki-chori’ films are about.

In the 19th century Maharashtra, Jyoti Rao Phule and his wife Savitri Bai lit the flame of female education and all-round empowerment at a time when girls were married off when they were barely more than children, forced to bear and rear their own children for the rest of their lives. In an early scene, we see little Savitri learn how to read with the help of the much-older Jyotiba, and how that changed her, and made her aware of her world. The release of this bio-pic, whose opening credits claim that it is based on detailed research, was delayed because of ruffled Brahmin feathers, but nothing in it feels like a figment of the filmmakers’ imagination. It feels like an accurate if sanitised representation of social realities of that time, during which the British were playing their own crafty games of keeping the ‘natives’ in check, by using the rampant caste discrimination to keep dividng and ruling while holding out the carrot of conversion to Christianity.