Suhani Singh

When Arun Khetarpal (Agastya Nanda) receives a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, filmmaker Sriram Raghavan has already hinted to the audience how he will be tackling the heroics of the Param Vir Chakra-awardee protagonist. He’s essentially telling you to keep the hankies ready. Ikkis isn’t a straightforward biopic of a young, enthusiastic army officer who dreams of fighting and beating the foe. When Khetarpal brings his golf clubs to the training camp and defiantly declares to his senior that he will put them to use in Lahore after victory, he gets a beating down: a war decides whether a fool is a braveheart or a braveheart is a fool. In his second on-screen outing, Nanda plays out Khetarpal’s innocence and righteousness well. Joining the Indian Army, he confidently tells his colleagues that his aspiration is to sacrifice his life.

Bani Ahmed (Kritika Kamra) wants to write. With just 12 hours to submit an application that may land her a job in the United States, she finds herself interrupted by the doorbell. Continuously. Each subsequent ring sees the arrival of a member of the Shamsuddin clan. There’s her easily gullible and recently divorced cousin Iram (Shreya Dhanwanthary); an over-intellectual ex (Purab Kohli) and his latest young girlfriend; another cousin in Humaira (Juhi Babbar Soni); inquisitive and opinionated aunts (Dolly Ahluwalia and Farida Jalal); another cousin and his bride-to-be. Simply said, Bani just cannot catch a break.

Seeing Rashmika Mandanna in the Telugu film The Girlfriend draws a mix of both pleasure and disconcertment. For the first half-hour or so, her Bhooma Devi seems eerily reminiscent of Animal’s Geetanjali, for she finds herself in a relationship so quickly that it doesn’t even dawn on her whether she wanted it or not. Does Mandanna realise the parallels drawn, one wonders. The Girlfriend, though, is in no mood to show Bhooma and Geetanjali as soul sisters. Not what Bhooma endures but what she realises—a tad slowly—is where The Girlfriend becomes the relationship horror that will leave audiences, especially women, uncomfortable with the warped notion of romance.

The Maddock Horror Comedy Universe (MHCU) had to stumble sooner or later. With Thamma, the universe—with its creatures and legends—has got its first weakling. This is a surprise because the creative brains of MHCU are the same. There’s chief writer Niren Bhatt, in Thamma teaming up with Suresh Mathew and Arun Falara; Aditya Sarpotdar of Munjya fame in the director’s chair; and Dinesh Vijan and Amar Kaushik (the latter is director of both Stree films and Bhediya) as producers, alongside Sachin-Jigar as composers. But this time around, the combo of scares and laughs struggles to register.

Filmmaker-actor Rishab Shetty had set himself a lofty task after the unprecedented blockbuster success of Kantara (2022), particularly in its Hindi-dubbed version. Much like Prashanth Neel (KGF, 2018-22) and Sukumar (Pushpa, 2021-24), Shetty, too, expanded the universe of his pan-India franchise. Only instead of going forward, he chose to go back in time to establish the origins.

There’s a moment of great wisdom in Sunny Sanskari ki Tulsi Kumaari (SSKTK) as a father tells his daughter, a teacher no less, of the great significance of self-respect in relationships as well as in life. The father then disappears, never to be seen. The daughter hearing the pep talk intently is Ananya (Janhvi Kapoor) who is on her way to attend the wedding of her ex Vikram’s (Rohit Saraf) in Udaipur. The next 100 minutes or so she spends entirely negating what her dad spoke about as she pretends to be in love with Sunny (Varun Dhawan) who is there to break-up Vikram’s wedding with his own ex Ananya (Sanya Malhotra). The jilted lovers hope their amorous antics would make their exes jealous and eventually return to them.

Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa) and Mohammed Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) are besties with dreams of becoming police constables. Clearing the police recruitment examination, though, is not simply about earning a livelihood and supporting their families but a way to garner respect in a society that trivialises them for their background and identity.

Trust Malayalam cinema to come up with a fairly ingenious multiverse rooted in Indian folktales and legends in Lokah Chapter 1, and trust the makers to have the protagonist as a kickass superheroine in Chandra (Kalyani Priyadarsan). Inspired by Yakshi, an enigmatic, powerful female figure from Kerala folklore, director and co-writer Dominic Arun turns her into a vampire with red tresses and on a mission to do the right thing. Survival is dependent on a regular supply of blood, living in the shadows and biting into baddies the world over for centuries. Once in Bengaluru, Chandra catches the wandering eye of Sunny (Naslen), who lives in a building opposite hers. Thankfully, love is not high on the cards of Lokah. Instead, the film impresses with its world and character-building as Arun focuses on a wonder woman with a tragic past and one whose mission—at least in her new home—is to smash the patriarchy.