Suchin Mehrotra

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.

Two titans of cinema team up after aeons in Mahesh Narayanan’s Patriot, which is easily among the most eagerly anticipated Indian films of the year. If Mammootty and Mohanlal are in the same frame, powering the same narrative, crafted by one of our most celebrated filmmakers (Take Off, C U Soon, Malik), and that isn’t a thing to be excited about, I don’t know what is. It’s also interesting to consider what the term “spectacle” or “event film” means with respect to modern Malayalam cinema, known for producing India’s most refined and boundary-pushing mainstream cinema. It’s often said that hollow spectacle and empty movie star calories alone won’t fly for Malayalam cinema audiences. Even sweeping blockbusters need to be rooted in character and narrative—and offer something substantial, new, and evocative.