Anuj Kumar

High in the Himalayas, where the wind murmurs through timber and stone, sits a village that time forgot and the world walked away from. This is the stage for Vinod Kapri’s Pyre(Chita), an elegy carved in the lines of timeworn faces and the vast, aching silence of mountains. It is a story born of memories from Uttarakhand’s ghost villages, where the young have shifted to the heartless cities, leaving only the old to watch over a crumbling community. At its heart, Pyre is a poem to the endurance of love. It follows an elderly couple bound by shared devotion and bickering, and the tenuous hope of their son’s return. With the patience of a documentary and the soul of a tragedy, Kapri creates a meditative piece of minimalist cinema where soaring peaks serve as both a majestic sanctuary and an indifferent prison.

Crime sagas traditionally use women as passive anchors. Going beyond the template of mothers, sisters and daughters, Akka centres on an 800-year-old sisterhood that controls the criminal underworld and gold trade in the fictional South Indian region of Perunuru. Dressing progressive thought in a commercial gaze, the Yash Raj Films’ series seems to tweak genuine subversion into pulpy, mass-market dialoguebaazi, ultimately strengthening the very systems of oppression it claims to dismantle. But a deeper look suggests the narrative emerges from a cynical school of thought which argues that when women assume absolute power, they inevitably mirror the behavioural patterns of their male counterparts.

A corrupt yet efficient cop is a lethal paradox but a rare breed in Hindi cinema. Most films give us clean heroes or cartoonish villains in uniform, even though our police stations have plenty of specimens like Ajay Nivrit (Manoj Bajpayee). Few Indian filmmakers understand the inner workings of our law enforcement agencies as well as Neeraj Pandey. He operates in a fertile space where raw reality meets gripping fiction. In Gajab Raat, the writer-producer collaborates with director Ritesh Shah to look beyond cinematic stereotypes and show the power of an investigating officer if he decides to follow procedure. Originally titled Ghooskhor Pandat, which sparked controversy, the makers shifted the title to the generic Gajab Raat, pulling the character out of a specific identity to address broader institutional corruption. A chameleon, Ajay, regardless of surname, is a quintessential Delhi cop who could have spent his formative years in Darbhanga, Kochi, or Pathankot. He doesn’t compromise on law; he negotiates to mould it according to his interests. Together with his immediate boss, SHO Rana (Rajiv Gupta), he manipulates the system to nurture his farmhouse dreams. One night, even before the dust settles after a raid in a cheap hotel, the dynamic moves from a lucrative extortion plan to a dark, high-stakes national security crisis.

A Pakistani spy loses his memory and unwittingly starts working for Indian intelligence. Sometimes, a single-sentence logline is enough to trigger an urge to watch a film. Writer Aakash Kaushik, making his directorial debut with an espionage satire, nails that hook. Memory is perhaps a spy’s biggest asset. He assumes a new identity, but what happens if the operative sheds his original personality altogether? It opens floodgates for creative possibilities. When Bilal Ahmad (Ayushmann Khurrana), a Pakistani mole who has infiltrated an Indian security agency, loses recollection of his true role in a sudden blast, the script flips the spy action genre on its head.

The dastardly attacks of 26/11 have been covered in Indian cinema from multiple angles. This week, director Avinash Arun takes us into the systemic battle that followed, through the singular biographical lens of Ujjwal Nikam, the special public prosecutor popularly known as the man who sent Ajmal Kasab to the gallows. The choice creates a persuasive anchor. As we know the legal battle is a slow, faceless machine, by focusing on Nikam, Avinash gives that dry institutional process a human pulse.

At a time when investigative journalism is making news, Reporting Live exposes the high cost of illegal sand mining. The sand mafia has deep roots in the institutional architecture, but its corruption is often exposed by stringers and is buried in the inside pages of newspapers until a journalist is mowed down or a whistleblower is burnt alive. Drawing from real events, the film follows Sandhya Yadav (Parineeti Chopra), a field reporter for the Mumbai-based Hindi news channel Azaad Bharati, hunting for a primetime story. Alongside her pragmatic video journalist, Vinod Sharma (Deven Bhojani), she is dispatched to cover an infrastructure disaster in Visargaon, where the sudden collapse of a bridge claims the lives of school children.

For over a decade, Vijay Salgaonkar used cinematic logic along with the shared memory of October 2nd to build an impregnable fortress around his family that the law simply couldn’t touch. But every perfect alibi has an expiration date. Drishyam The Conclusion marks the moment director Abhishek Pathak cuts the umbilical cord to the Malayalam mothership and finds its feet in the grit and grandeur of the Hindi heartland. What distinguishes the franchise from a standard police procedural is its investigation of manufactured hyperreality. A story doesn’t need to be true; it just has to feel credible. It plays on a fundamental rule of human psychology: people believe what makes sense to them.

A timely critique of patriarchal definitions of consent and female agency, Pooja Meri Jaanworks like a companion piece to films like Pink and Article 375. Operating beneath the veneer of failed romance and a courtroom thriller, the narrative interrogates the limits of male obsession and the sharp societal backlash faced by a self-actualised woman asserting her autonomy. The plot follows Pooja (Mrunal Thakur), a young woman whose firm rejection of her longtime friend Aniket’s (Vikram Singh Chauhan) romantic advances triggers a chain reaction that upends her life.