Anuj Kumar

In the middle of ‘O Romeo, Afshan, the revenge-filled girl from a rich music background, tells Ustara, the razor-wielding contract killer of the Mumbai underworld, that she is from Muzaffarnagar, but her gharana is Gwalior. Ustara responds as if his home is Lucknow, but his gharana is Mumbai. The conversation is writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj’s way of reminding us that his home is Bollywood street, but his gharana is Shakespearana.

There has always been a gap between the Punjab we watch on screen and the one we actually experience off-screen. Of late, there has been an attempt to look beyond the lavish weddings, bhangra beats, and bucolic humour. Carrying forward the Maachis that Gulzar lit in 1996 and Gurvinder Singh nurtured over the years, Sudeep Sharma’s Kohrra is one such significant attempt to pierce through the miasma that hangs over the mustard fields.

This Valentine’s week, love floats in a pool infested with primal danger as Bejoy Nambiar blends genres to create a triangle between two contrasting social media influencers and a crocodile in Tu Yaa Main. Playing out like a nightmare with a message, when a privileged, polished Avani Shah and a gritty, ambitious rapper, Maruti Kadam, collide in Mumbai’s content scene, their calculated collaboration ignites a passionate romance that bridges class chasms and exposes raw vulnerabilities beneath curated personas. Beneath the swag, we discover that both are survivors who want to change their existing profile. She wants to escape her luxurious loneliness, and he is eager to climb the social ladder.

Over the years, carceral imagery has been an important creative device for shaping tales of confinement and social control. This week, Shambhunath Mishra (Sanjay Mishra), a prison guard struggling with financial burdens and personal isolation, forms an unlikely bond with Manju Singh (Neena Gupta), an inmate serving a life term for crimes she may not have committed. The intimacy amid isolation gets a jolt when one night a politically-connected predator disappears from prison, triggering an investigation. As a determined officer, Ateet Singh (Amitt K. Singh) takes charge, and elements of caste dynamics and power struggles surface, involving a strict but prejudiced superintendent (Kumud Mishra) and a perverted inmate (Akshay Dogra).

Mounted more than a decade ago as a challenge to the action-hero archetype, Mardaani‘s third instalment begins as a fiercely committed, unflinching crime thriller that delves deeper into the horrors of child trafficking and the begging mafia, delivered with raw brutality and social urgency.

A tale of damaged people caught in a psychological swamp, Daldal is a thriller that is more keen on uncovering the motivations behind the crime than on who committed it. The plot follows DCP Rita Ferreira (Bhumi Pednekar) investigating a series of gruesome murders while confronting her guilt-ridden past and a patriarchal system that projects committed female police officers as mere showpieces.

As Dhurandhar continues to tell cinegoers that Pakistan’s deep state views Hindus as pushovers, Border 2 arrives to underscore that the 1971 War stemmed from the neighbour’s belief that Indians are meek until confronted by Sunny Deol on the western front.

Those who have followed Vir Das’ comedy specials would know that he blends satire with observational humour better than most. He voices the experiences of the misfits, and his skits capture everyday absurdities arising from cultural clashes, racism, and jingoism. This week, Vir shifts stage, turning his pet peeves into an irreverent and frenetic parody of our times. Making his debut as a director, he turns up ‘in and as’ Happy Patel, a clumsy British spy with Indian roots. More at ease in the culinary terrain, perhaps because of his genetic composition, than picking clues, Happy is sent on a mission to Goa to rescue a British scientist from the clutches of a vicious crime lord, Mama (Mona Singh). Her favourite recipe is ‘cut-let’ and she is seeking a formula for fair skin. Happy mispronounces Hindi, and here lies most of the ingenuity in writing. Tum (you) becomes Tom and so on. On his crazy hunt for Mama, he rhymes with his Sikh handler (Sharib Hashmi) and loses his tasting finger to Mama and his heart to dancer Rupa (Mithila Palkar).