Shubhra Gupta

n Stephen King’s novella ‘The Running Man’, which came out in 1982, the dystopia felt unreal. King conjured up a staggeringly unequal world, whose rich live in guarded enclaves, the poor are corralled into slums, and a child could easily die of the common flu if her parents cannot afford the drugs.

If there’s one director who has taken a deep dive into the unlovely world created by toxic masculinity, it is Kanu Behl. His debut feature Titli, which remains his best work, gave us a corner of Delhi most of us had no idea about– a father and three brothers whose family business is car-jacking and violent disposal of bodies, if the need so arises. And if a paternal figure is anything like the one in Titli (played by the director’s own father), it stands to reason that the sons will be like him.

De De Pyaar De, out in 2019, was a startling first for a mainstream Bollywood film, presenting the idea of a much-older man and a young woman as a perfectly viable romantic option. It isn’t as if Hindi cinema hasn’t toyed with the May-December idea before but not to the extent of getting firmly behind the coupling of a distinctly fifty-plus grey-flecked Ashish Mehra (Ajay Devgn) and a spry 26 year old Ayesha (Rakul Preet Singh), who meet cute in London, fall for each other, and start living together.

A third season of a well-regarded series, especially when both the previous seasons have been equally sharp, has two ways to go: up or down. I’m happy to report that Delhi Crime Season 3 is as taut and gripping as the ones that preceded it – well done, Vartika Madam Sir, and co. Season 3 comes three years after the previous one, and this time around DCP Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) currently posted in Silchar, Assam and her trusty colleagues, Bhupender Singh (Rajesh Tailang), Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal), Jairaj Singh (Anuraag Arora), Vimla Bharadwaj (Jaya Bhattacharya) and a couple of others are up against the tough-as-nails human trafficker Badi Didi (Huma Qureshi) whose supply chain extends from Rohtak to Bangkok.

Season 4 of Maharani is largely a mix of the old laced with a bit of new, in terms of actors joining the ensemble. But the tone of the series, created by Subhash Kapoor, and directed this time by Puneet Prakash, is the same: wily netas double-crossing each other mainly in Delhi and Patna with sidebars in other state capitals, family feuds, and personal and professional rivalries. It’s tempting to speculate if the new season has dropped just in time with the on-going elections in Bihar: whatever, it does inject a bit of spice into a show in which tonal similiarity and the length of each episode is becoming a challenge.

Jatadhara movie review: Ghostbusters. Tantrics. Demons. Jatadhara picks up on elements made popular by the current rash of supernatural thrillers–Kantara, Stree– for a Sudheer Babu film which has Sonakshi Sinha making her Telugu debut. Pre-interval, Jatadhara meanders about setting up scenes between the believers and the naysayers. Shiva (Sudheer Babu) packs devices which are meant to go beep in the presence of spirits. He uses these liberally wherever he is, whether it is in the ruins where he bumps into pretty damsel Sitara (Divya Khossla), or sneaking into a tantric ritual where no such instruments are allowed.

There’s something sinister going on in Baramulla, with young children disappearing without a trace. DSP Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is dispatched to the picturesque Kashmir town to investigate, and when he arrives at the house allotted to him, along with wife Gulnaar, and children Noorie (Arista Mehta), and Ayaan (Rohaan Singh), he is pitchforked into a situation he’s never handled before.

Given the mad popularity of Colleen Hoover’s novels featuring good-looking adults navigating complicated inter-personal lives, and all the hoo-ha around ‘It Ends With Us’, the first Hoover novel to be filmed, which managed to say something important about domestic violence despite the schmaltz, I had expectations of ‘Regretting You’. ut I should have been warned: just what exactly does ‘regretting you’ mean? In my head, it kept sitting around like ‘Forgetting You’, which is also what this film, based on a Hoover book of the same name, could very easily have been called.