Suchin Mehrotra

Samant’s film is a slick, playful thriller that knows how to have a good time, in the vein of the worlds of Sriram Raghavan or Vasan Bala. Meet deaf and mute sharpshooter Baby Karmarkar (Huma Qureshi, who also serves as producer, is in fine form). Alongside her “colleague” Manu (a sincere Marudhar Shekhawat), she’s a contract killer who works for a man known as Papa (It’s always good to see Chunky Panday taken seriously as an actor and not forced to squeak his way through some inane comedy). Papa, in turn, works for the nefarious builder Zafar Bhai (Sikander Kher is never not a joy to watch), who has Papa and his team take out any business rivals or minor obstacles to his shady dealings.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A pill-popping, alcohol-swigging, chain-smoking detective is forced back on duty to catch a killer terrorising a decrepit, dingy city. Before the bodies pile up, she must track down and stop the devil whilst confronting her own demons, wading through the ghosts of her past and navigating a moody murder mystery. The air is thick with despair and grief. The (female) victim was found mutilated. The list of suspects is long, ranging from shifty family members to shifty exes to shifty stalkers. Everyone’s fractured, broken, carrying a truckload of trauma.

Director Robbie Grewal’s series chronicling the origins of the Tata Empire’s iconic watch brand, for The Hollywood Reporter India. Based on Vinay Kamath’s book Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand, the show follows how, through the 70s and 80s, Tata executive Xerxes Desai (Jim Sarbh) founded Titan and built a world-class watch under the guidance of JRD Tata (Naseeruddin Shah). Suchin finds the Amazon MX Player series warm, deeply felt and immensely huggable, drawing an unavoidable comparison to Rocket Boys given the shared heart-first DNA. He argues that more than a corporate success story, this is a tale framed as a fable of national pride, but one that soars because of its delicate love for its characters rather than its milestones. Across six achingly sincere episodes, he cares about the Titan story because he cares about the figures behind it.

A privileged rookie lawyer teams up with a court stenographer to fight cases and seek justice for the underprivileged. System follows Neha Rajvansh (Sonakshi Sinha), a sincere but inexperienced public defender who has a lot to prove to live up to her name. Her father, Ravi Rajvansh (a functional Ashutosh Gowariker), is a hotshot advocate known for representing the wealthy and well-connected. To earn her place at his side, he expects her to grind it out as a ‘sarkari vakil’ and gives her a target: win 10 cases. To get there, Neha finds an unlikely ally in court stenographer Sarika Rawat (an excellent Jyotika).

“I thought we agreed to put this behind us,” a character says, defeatedly, to another in Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam 3, the apparently concluding chapter of one of the most thoughtful trilogies (and remarkably consistent series of thrillers) to emerge from modern Indian cinema. With the smashing Drishyam 2, which released directly on streaming during the pandemic, Joseph evolved a clever, unputdownable thriller into a ghost story. That is to say, a story about the ghosts of the past and how they haunt us. It became a story about a life of fear, and the weight of guilt and trauma plaguing Georgekutty (Mohanlal continues to carefully craft one of Indian cinema’s most enjoyable recent creations), his wife Rani (Meena George), and his daughters Anu (Esther Anil) and Anju (Ansiba).

Writer-director Pulkit has quietly become one of the most prolific filmmakers strutting around Hindi cinema these days. Red Chillies Entertainment’s blue-eyed boy has had four releases in the last two years, with two more currently in production. His finest work to date is his previous team-up with Netflix—2024’s Bhumi Pednekar-starrer Bhakshak. His latest, Kartavya, is a cousin of that film. Kartavya is not quite as concentrated, focused, and hardhitting as Bhakshak, but wrestles with similar themes of lone heroes taking a stand against injustice, systemic corruption, and the power structures that allow those at the top to prey on children.