Udita Jhunjhunwala

At 164 minutes and 50 seconds, Welcome to the Jungle doesn’t just overstay its welcome, it practically moves in. The third film in the Welcome franchise arrives with a gargantuan ensemble cast, an enormous budget and plenty of spectacle and songs. What it delivers is a chaotic, overstuffed comedy with very little jungle and an awful lot of mangled storytelling. The film opens with Johnny Lever’s character, Dubey, saying ‘This is Welcome’ three times, followed by ‘Teen baar welcome or Welcome 3’. If you want to qualify the tone of humour, it’s summed up right there—pedestrian, over-stated, self-congratulating.

After Mentalhood in 2020, Karisma Kapoor returns to the OTT space with the seven-episode series Brown. As the titular Rita Brown, Kapoor steps firmly outside her comfort zone with this crime drama. Director Abhinay Deo, best known for bringing a slick visual style and muscular energy to thrillers and action films, makes an intriguing foray into neo-noir territory. Adapted from Abheek Barua’s novel City of Death, the show is set in Kolkata and uses the city’s unique character to tell a story that is part murder mystery, part police procedural and part examination of fractured relationships and unresolved trauma. Told through a mix of Hindi, Bengali and English, the series follows Rita Brown (Kapoor), a once-respected homicide detective whose life has unravelled since solving a notorious double murder years earlier. Now battling alcoholism and carrying the burden of a troubled past, she is pulled back into active duty and tasked with solving the murder of Ahana Jaiswal, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family. Assigned to work alongside her is Inspector Arjun Sinha (Surya Sharma), a sincere and committed officer carrying wounds of his own. Together, Rita and Arjun are drawn into an investigation that uncovers layers of deception, secrets and uncomfortable truths.

Pati Patni Aur Woh Do belongs to that familiar subgenre of Hindi comedy where men create catastrophes through lies and cowardice, then expect applause for surviving the consequences. Ayushmann Khurrana plays Prajapati Pandey, a forest ranger introduced with the kind of exaggerated masculinity the film both mocks and indulges. When on a mission to trap a roaming leopard in Prayagraj, where Mudassar Aziz locates the chaos, Prajapati is described as a “leopard Casanova.”

The shepherd in question is George (Hugh Jackman), who dotes on his flock to the extent that he has named each one of them. Jackman gives George a comforting warmth. His scenes reading murder mysteries aloud to the sheep, despite insisting they understand nothing (but they do), establish the film’s gentle absurdity early on. After his sudden and mysterious death, the animals—grief-stricken and shocked by the loss—begin to step up to solve the case of George’s murder. For this, they also need to leave the meadow and cross over into the nearby town of Denbrook. Local policeman Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) and junior reporter Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), who recently arrived in Denbrook, lead the investigation. But the movie increasingly belongs to the sheep themselves, particularly Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George’s favourite ewe, who becomes the emotional and moral centre of the story. Her line, “Sheep don’t die, they turn into clouds,” is delivered with such simple sincerity that it forms the film’s defining sentiment.

Set against the restless, neon-tinged underbelly of Chandigarh and soundtracked to Punjabi rap, Lukkhe wants to be many things at once. The Prime Video show created by Agrim Joshi and Debojit Das Purkayastha is a rap saga, a crime thriller, an addiction drama and a story about broken young people trying to regain their footing. Intoxication, violence and tragedy are embedded in this world. Remorse, revenge and redemption follow.

The original 2006 film adapted from the novel by Lauren Weisberger, was a glossy workplace comedy that quickly became much bigger than its premise of a stressed assistant navigating fashion’s most terrifying boss. Inspired by Weisberger’s own experiences in magazine publishing, the David Frankel-directed film presented a sharp, endlessly quotable pop culture favourite with influence that stretched beyond cinema into fashion, and internet meme history, with Miranda lines like “That’s all” and “By all means, move at a glacial pace.”

Glory is loaded with familiar but strong elements: a murder mystery, a revenge arc, a dysfunctional family from Haryana, the competitive world of Indian boxing. The Netflix series created by Karan Anshuman and Karmanya Ahuja and directed by Anshuman and Kanishk Varma begins with the death of an Olympic hopeful being coached by Raghubir (Suvinder Vicky). Raghubir’s daughter is critically injured during the assault. News of this incident brings her estranged brothers Ravi (Pulkit Samrat) and Dev (Divyenndu) back to their hometown. Before long, the brothers return to a cycle of violence, ambition, vengeance and unresolved history.

At 174 minutes, Priyadarshan’s Bhooth Bangla arrives weighed down by both its runtime and its ambitions. The film, with a screenplay by Priyadarshan, Rohan Shankar and Abilash Nair and story by Aakash Kaushik, attempts to revive the director’s signature blend of slapstick comedy and supernatural intrigue. What it delivers instead is a sprawling, uneven narrative that depends heavily on nostalgia while offering little that feels fresh.