Shubhra Gupta

Season 4 of Maharani is largely a mix of the old laced with a bit of new, in terms of actors joining the ensemble. But the tone of the series, created by Subhash Kapoor, and directed this time by Puneet Prakash, is the same: wily netas double-crossing each other mainly in Delhi and Patna with sidebars in other state capitals, family feuds, and personal and professional rivalries. It’s tempting to speculate if the new season has dropped just in time with the on-going elections in Bihar: whatever, it does inject a bit of spice into a show in which tonal similiarity and the length of each episode is becoming a challenge.

Jatadhara movie review: Ghostbusters. Tantrics. Demons. Jatadhara picks up on elements made popular by the current rash of supernatural thrillers–Kantara, Stree– for a Sudheer Babu film which has Sonakshi Sinha making her Telugu debut. Pre-interval, Jatadhara meanders about setting up scenes between the believers and the naysayers. Shiva (Sudheer Babu) packs devices which are meant to go beep in the presence of spirits. He uses these liberally wherever he is, whether it is in the ruins where he bumps into pretty damsel Sitara (Divya Khossla), or sneaking into a tantric ritual where no such instruments are allowed.

There’s something sinister going on in Baramulla, with young children disappearing without a trace. DSP Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is dispatched to the picturesque Kashmir town to investigate, and when he arrives at the house allotted to him, along with wife Gulnaar, and children Noorie (Arista Mehta), and Ayaan (Rohaan Singh), he is pitchforked into a situation he’s never handled before.

Given the mad popularity of Colleen Hoover’s novels featuring good-looking adults navigating complicated inter-personal lives, and all the hoo-ha around ‘It Ends With Us’, the first Hoover novel to be filmed, which managed to say something important about domestic violence despite the schmaltz, I had expectations of ‘Regretting You’. ut I should have been warned: just what exactly does ‘regretting you’ mean? In my head, it kept sitting around like ‘Forgetting You’, which is also what this film, based on a Hoover book of the same name, could very easily have been called.

It’s been a few hours since I’ve finished cringe-watching ‘Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat’, and I still can’t believe Bollywood is making these films in 2025. I had been hearing about the buzz around the film, and my show was nearly full, which is a change from the usual near-empty theatres I encounter on the first day of the film’s release. And when it started, with Harshvardhan Rane and Sonam Bajwa, getting down to a romantic tangle, I thought I was in for something fresh and inviting. But I was so, so wrong.

Yet another Maddock stable offering, with the by-now familiar fix of the natural and supernatural, risque humour, in-house jokes, meta-movie references and item numbers, Thamma goes one better, by giving us not one but two of those. And a heavier star slate than before, with a combo of Ayushmann Khurrana and Rashmika Mandanna, playing a pair of star-crossed lovers whose romance is overseen by betaals and bhediyaas and other mythological creatures. But I have to sadly report that the law of diminishing returns has clearly set in, in the work of a director who gave us the comparatively perky ‘Munjya’ and ‘Kakuda’: there is so little that engages in this crowded canvas, written by Niren Bhatt, Suresh Mathew and Afrun Falara, that the result is a pair of hurting ears and glazed eyes.

Exactly twenty years back, Arshad Warsi had played an upright cop in one of his finest films, ‘Sehar’. We had seen him in mostly comic roles up until then, and this ramrod straight policeman was a welcome departure, posting notice that he could do serious as well as jokey, turning him one of those performers whose presence invariably betters the movies they are in.

It’s Sankyukta Das’s last day at work at her cop station; she is headed to another city, and a desk job, which will give her more time with her husband-and-daughter-and-mother, all of whom gets pushed aside when it comes to the most important thing in her life: the work at hand. This, as it turns out, in the first part of the show comprising six episodes, is the discovery of a dead girl in a local politician’s campaign car. Family commitments will have to wait, as Sanyukta dives into assembling her team, while having to deal with barely-hidden barbs from a smug new entrant to her team Jai Kanwal (Surya Sharma), who thinks he knows better.