Shubhra Gupta

Last year Bollywood’s Republic-Day gift was Fighter, which zoomed in, checking several patriotic-movie boxes: brave Indian fighter pilots, going up against favourite enemy Pakistan, displaying valour and camaraderie. This year, it is Sky Force, coasting on the same elements, except this one is a thinly-disguised account of a real life incident during the 1965 Indo-Pak conflict, in which a squadron decimated a fleet of modern American jets housed at Pakistani base Sargodha, in an operation the film calls Sky Force.

An honest-to-a-fault, maths-whizz ticket collector gets embroiled, unwittingly, in the doings of a greedy banker: this one-line premise may have sounded exciting on paper, but the execution comes off contrived and clunky. Madhavan plays Radhe Mohan Sharma, who brings his affable self and a razor sharp brain to his job, whose first encounter with a comely cop (Kirti Kulhari) isn’t exactly a meet-cute. She rebuffs his offer of an orange bought from a fruit-seller at the station: ‘main chori kiye santare nahin khati’, she says.

One of the chief things that emerges from this four-part mini-series on the Roshans, is that, despite being part of so many memorable films via music, direction, production and performance, their contribution to Hindi cinema was not celebrated enough. Part of the pleasure of watching this kind of show is the straight-up access: apart from the Roshans themselves — Rajesh, Rakesh, Hrithik and close family — everyone from Shatrughan Sinha, Shah Rukh Khan, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Karan Johar, the Akhtars, Javed, Farhan and Zoya, Abhishek Bachchan, singers Asha Bhosle, Suman Kalyanpuri, Sudha Malhotra, Usha Mangeshkar, Kumar Sanu, Sonu Nigam, and several others are all here, speaking about their relationship, professional and personal, with the Roshans.

The much-delayed, riding-on-controversies ‘Emergency’, written and directed by Kangana Ranaut, is finally out. The long disclaimer states that the biographical feature ‘draws information from the life and real life events of one of the most respected politicians and former prime ministers, Smt Indira Gandhi’. And then it follows up the standard caveat of ‘creative liberties’ having been taken in the dramatisation, with a most un-standard sentence: ‘the filmmakers fully acknowledge and respect other perspectives and viewpoints’. This unexpected dissonant note pretty much sets the tone of this film in which Ranaut has played the role of Indira Gandhi, which swings from showing her as a young woman growing into an autocratic leader, to a weak, vacillating mother under the influence of Sanjay, her ‘bigda hua beta’, and back again.

When Hathi Ram Chaudhary says in his world-weary manner, ‘hum toh paatal lok ke permanent niwasi hain’, he’s not just addressing a character in the series. He’s plunging us into the nether-world again, and we dive right in, willingly. The first season of Paatal Lok (2020), directed by Avinash Arun and created by Sudip Sharma, quickly become a benchmark, in the way it lifted a familiar world — weatherbeaten-but-idealistic cops pulled into cases of murder and corruption in high places — by singular story-telling, and characters that stayed with us. I’ve sorely missed my favourite cop, entire lifetimes imprinted in the craggy lines of his face, in the interim. Welcome back, Chaudhary sir.

The deep bonds between a horse and their human have been at the centre of many wonderful films. Azaad, which has two men, senior and junior, vying for the affections of a beautiful beast, should have been double the fun. But this one, which launches Ajay Devgn’s nephew Aaman and Raveena Tandon’s daughter Rasha, turns out to be so dated that it appears to have been made in a time lag. First off, the setting has been lifted from ‘Lagaan’– cruel zamindars helping pompous Englishmen lord over cowed villagers — with the addition of a few floggings, and loud proclamations of banishing the villagers to ‘Africa’ as bonded labour.

‘Black Warrant’ is a seven-part series based on a book of the same name about an insider’s account of his time at what has been dubbed ‘the biggest prison in Asia’, Tihar Jail. The volume is co-authored by Sunil Kumar Gupta, who joined Tihar in the early 80s, and journalist Sunetra Chowdhary; the show, directed by Vikramaditya Motwane, cherry picks some of the most sensational cases that unspooled during Gupta’s watch, as he grew from a wet-behind-the-ears rookie to an experienced jailer, without losing his humanity. Gupta, credited with starting Tihar’s first legal aid cell for poor, illiterate under-trials, is played by Zahan Kapoor. The actor, who debuted in Hansal Mehta’s 2022 terrorist drama ‘Faraz’, is given enough time here to grow into his role. Within a few minutes of the opening, his slight frame and smiling, soft ways — unlike his colleagues, he doesn’t cuss a mile a minute, nor does he use brute force on the inmates — are underlined more than a few times, and it’s quickly apparent why. His character, who doesn’t quite fit the job description — maintaining order in a rough-tough jail — is a familiar device used to impart chunks of information. And it is to Kapoor’s credit that he becomes more than just that device which is pressed into service through the series; he inhabits his character with conviction.

Cyber crime is in the crosshairs of Sonu Sood’s ‘Fateh’, in which he plays an In and As role: the name of the film is his, which means victory. So how much of a win is the 127-minute film, the actor’s debut directorial? Sood has mostly played strong supporting roles up until now; this one has him as hero, front and centre. That’s one thing checked off from any actor’s wish-list: solo hero in an action movie, the guy with the gun, leading from the front.