Udita Jhunjhunwala

There are movies that make you jump out of your seat, and then there are movies that make you sit very still, your shoulders slowly tightening, waiting for something terrible to happen. Heart of the Beast belongs to the latter category. Brad Pitt leads this affecting survival drama in which the bond between a retired soldier and his service dog becomes the heart of the story. Director David Ayer’s film is remarkably spare. There is very little dialogue, few characters and, for long stretches, just Brad Pitt and Odin, a German Shepherd, navigating an unforgiving wilderness. Yet the film rarely feels empty. Its silences become part of the storytelling, allowing the landscape, the sounds of the forest, Jared Michael Fry’s evocative score and the two central performances to carry the weight.

Prime Video’s new Hindi original film centres on Shyamili ‘Shy’ Das (Aarushi Bajaj), a college student who has her entire life mapped out. Shy has absorbed the rules of The Perfect Woman, a book that promises to show women how to get life right. Plan A revolves around Shy’s future with boyfriend Mayank (Piyush Khati), the heir to a business empire, and an imagined version of herself that bears little resemblance to her actual existence. Shy has no Plan B.

Mirzapur: The Movie has the peculiar challenge of starting in the middle of a story, a set of relationships and a world that its audience already knows intimately. There are no introductions, no explanations, no time wasted telling us who these people are, what they want and what they mean to each other. They arrive on the big screen with histories, grudges, loyalties and complicated equations that audiences have watched unfold over three seasons of Mirzapur. During the movie’s 197-minute running time, writer Puneet Krishna’s screenplay begins to introduce a new plot and new players, and what initially seems like an elaborate exercise in fan service gradually finds a life of its own.

Before Anthony Bourdain became the chef, author and TV host who taught an audience to eat, travel and look at the world with curiosity, he was Tony, a 19-year-old who didn’t quite know what to do with himself. “I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain wrote of himself in Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 memoir. It is an unusually unsparing assessment, and very much the man we meet in director Matt Johnson’s coming-of-age film about the young Bourdain. Johnson and his co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe take their ideas and inspiration from early chapters of the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, particularly Bourdain’s experiences in Provincetown, while taking cinematic liberties to shape it into a comic drama. Tony is less interested in recreating a life than in capturing a formative moment.

Some films return because they have a story left to tell. Others return because they want to revisit a memory. Awarapan 2 sits somewhere in between—revisiting a 2007 film that underperformed theatrically but slowly acquired a second life on television, streaming platforms and through Emraan Hashmi’s enduring image as Shivam Pandit. Nearly two decades later, the sequel continues that story while also serving as a re-entry into its mood.

Schools have long served as fertile ground for stories, but few recent series have captured the joy, absurdity and quiet idealism of a government school quite like Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya. Sharing the gentle spirit of Panchayat and Gram Chikitsalay, this easygoing seven-part show is funny, sharp and only occasionally sermonises. Created and executive-produced by Biswapati Sarkar and Sameer Saxena under the Posham Pa Pictures banner, the Hindi-language Prime Video comedy feels like a natural extension of the storytelling both have come to be associated with through shows such as Maamla Legal Hai and Home Shanti. Saxena has also helped shape the observational worlds of Gullak and Kota Factory. This latest series brings a similar specificity and humour to a struggling government school in the Delhi region. Sarkar and Saxena also pop up in brief cameos.

Set between Bhopal and misty Mussoorie, the Netflix series Musafir Cafe follows three lives that become entwined through chance encounters and life-altering choices across time and distance. Software engineer Chander (Vikrant Massey) longs for a life that finally feels like his own, while the fiercely independent divorce lawyer Sudha (Vedika Pinto) is determined to shape her future on her terms. Completing the trio is Preeti (Mahima Makwana), whose wanderlust complements her quiet resilience. Created and written by Sharanya Rajgopal and directed by Ruchir Arun (Little Things, Ghar Waapsi), the series draws on characters from Divya Prakash Dubey’s Hindi novel of the same name. At times, Musafir Cafe feels like it could have been a breezy, crisp film.

There’s a genuinely interesting film hidden inside Baby Do Die Do. It just takes far too long to reveal itself, and even then, it refuses to answer the questions that matter. The film opens with a fractured family: a deceased father, an emotionally volatile mother, twin girls, one of whom is deaf and mute. A late-night adventure results in tragedy leaving Baby alone and vengeful. Right away the questions start building—how did the girls suddenly pick up a puppy in an abandoned hotel? It’s the first of many questions the film, co-written by director Nachiket Samant with Jasmeet K Reen and Parveez Shaikh, never answers.