Tatsam Mukherjee

Netflix’s Lust Stories is the only anthology to have made it to its third season, and there might be good reason. For a society as repressed as ours, sex brings out adequate intrigue on the part of the audience, assuring a base viewership. Meanwhile, by constantly shuffling filmmakers, the interpretations remain fresh, and sex becomes a capsule to be filled with commentary on inequities, female desire, and a rarely spoken language in an otherwise verbose film industry. Lust Stories 3 features a line-up of directors, which audiences will forever be curious about: Kiran Rao, Vikramaditya Motwane, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj. The results are middling to positive. But one thing I genuinely appreciated about all four films, is their intent to showcase the length and breadth of Hindi cinema, and its varying aesthetic, refusing to paint Bollywood as a monolith – which it has begun to seem like, given its over-dependence on star-led spectacles. Also, I enjoyed the music in all films, complimenting the sensibility of the respective mise en scene.

A lot of what I like about the Mirzapur franchise can be boiled down to its title theme by John Stewart Eduri. The sound of blacksmiths at work, a minimal bass and synth line, with some light orchestration. Nothing else exemplifies the workman-like focus and the leanness of the early seasons like Eduri’s score. After three seasons of diminishing returns, the show has been rebooted into a feature film, in a parallel timeline when the events of season one concluded. Kaleen Bhaiya (a role that propelled Pankaj Tripathi to stardom in the streaming space) strategically protects his Mirzapur throne, a primary bastion to power in Purvanchal. His son Munna (Divyenndu) is too volatile to automatically be entrusted with it.

At the height of the #MeToo movement in 2018, something I read seared itself into my brain. “Men should be grateful that women are asking for equality. Not revenge.” For all the patronising tone at home, casual sexism at the workplace, catcalling on the street, groping in public transport, full-blown sexual assaults/attempts in most known/unknown corners of the city, the isolation and gaslighting that takes root after – I’ve often wondered why women still speak to men. In fact, why don’t they start their day by attacking the first man they meet? It’s an urge buried deep within Elizabeth Merriweather’s Furious – a first-rate serial killer mystery, which reveals itself as a reckoning of female rage at its most unvarnished, unbridled and intricate.

“It’s going to be a bildungsroman…” Tony (Dominic Sessa) announces at the dinner table “… a coming-of-age novel.” He’s talking about a novel he has pitched at a prestigious scholarship interview. His father (Rich Sommers) is excited, his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) is more circumspect. He’s almost certain he will be chosen for the scholarship, after which he will embark on his journey to be what he already believes is a crucial part of his identity. “I’m a writer,” our 19-year-old protagonist says while introducing himself at a bar in an earlier scene. As we all know now, the debut novel (Kitchen Confidential) would only arrive 25 years later. Before Anthony Bourdain became a renowned chef and a worldwide phenomenon – he was just a kid. An arrogant, entitled, insufferable young man, who thought the world owed him a stage to showcase his brilliance. He was also an incessant and effortless liar. In Matt Johnson’s film, we meet Bourdain when he’s – as the title suggests – Tony, and follow him over an eventful summer. His mother calls him Anthony, which the rebel can’t stand. Hence, he goes out of his way to ask people to not call him that.

Maybe, it’s not a compliment to start out comparing a film to Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s works. I can imagine how Toxic might have been pitched as something that ‘subverts’ Vanga, which is not quite the case. My most guttural response to it was, a Vanga film if it learned therapy-speak. This might be a reductive and over-simplistic response, but having mulled over it, this comes closest to my purest reaction to this (knowingly) campy, indulgent, loud, sweeping film, which has something most cash cows drop at the first slight inconvenience: a clear conscience. It has all ingredients that we’ve come to associate with pan-India blockbusters from the last decade – multi-ethnicity actors, cramped world-building, gargantuan action set-pieces, dialogues delivered like ad catchphrases, racy sex scenes featuring multiple women, and a three-act structure for key sequences – which means we’re subjected to the “hero’s entry” a dozen times.

For the most part, Jason Hehir’s Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter moves along expected lines, like any other sport-celebrity documentaries. The 39-year-old tennis icon talks about the early years, the turmoil of professional tennis as a junior, and his eventual ascent to stardom. The hostility from fans of the Federer-Nadal rivalry, who treated him as an unwelcome entity, as he dominated the 2010s. It’s still familiar territory for most tennis fans.

There is enough in the opening stretch of David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street to echo the Spielbergian blockbuster: the ‘80s American suburbia, chirpy adolescents on bikes, irritable siblings at the dining table and a seemingly-happy family unit led by parents going through a marital hairpin bend of their own. Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) aspires to be a novelist and she is secretly working on something that seems borrowed heavily from her own family life. In the novel, she is considering a divorce. In real life, her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), has just been laid off. He is working as a pizza delivery person, something Denise is not very happy about. However, as much as she tries to bury her disappointment, something extraordinary happens, forcing the family to reckon with their inner cracks.

A.R. Rahman has been trusted to do the heavy lifting in the climaxes of his recent films. The wailing vocals at the end of Chhaava (2025), Arijit Singh blazing through the title track in the climax of Tere Ishk Mein (2025) or the wistful ache of ‘Tere Paas Main’ (sung by Deepali Sahay) making Main Vaapas Aaunga (2026) a pristine tearjerker. Even in Rajkumar Santoshi’s Batwara 1947, Rahman shows up in the final minutes of the film, this time with a guttural hum by the man himself. The effect isn’t nearly as visceral as his last few films. Rahman’s score and songs for Batwara 1947 feel half-hearted compared to his work in the other partition drama from a few months ago. That nearly-there-but-not-quite feeling around Rahman’s music is what I might also say about my reaction to Santoshi’s film on the whole.