Tatsam Mukherjee

Babita Singh (Nimisha Sajayan) or ‘Baby’ as colleagues, friends and family call her, is the last person one might look towards to deliver justice. Daughter of a cop who died in the line of duty, Baby was given her father’s job on compassionate grounds. A deputy to a greasy cop, SI Sethi (Rajesh Kumar), who asks her to shoot a ‘reel’ making an entrance on his motorbike in the film’s first scene, Baby would do well to simply hold on to the job. And yet, by sheer curiosity, she finds herself days away from being a part of on-field investigations, moved from mundane paperwork at the station. It’s unusual because Baby has been raised to be a generous, stoic Indian woman – (relatively) caged in her domestic life, where her agency comes with a million terms and conditions. She willingly subjects herself to patriarchy, like it’s a badge of honour

For the most part, Jason Hehir’s Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter moves along expected lines, like any other sport-celebrity documentaries. The 39-year-old tennis icon talks about the early years, the turmoil of professional tennis as a junior, and his eventual ascent to stardom. The hostility from fans of the Federer-Nadal rivalry, who treated him as an unwelcome entity, as he dominated the 2010s. It’s still familiar territory for most tennis fans.

There is enough in the opening stretch of David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street to echo the Spielbergian blockbuster: the ‘80s American suburbia, chirpy adolescents on bikes, irritable siblings at the dining table and a seemingly-happy family unit led by parents going through a marital hairpin bend of their own. Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) aspires to be a novelist and she is secretly working on something that seems borrowed heavily from her own family life. In the novel, she is considering a divorce. In real life, her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), has just been laid off. He is working as a pizza delivery person, something Denise is not very happy about. However, as much as she tries to bury her disappointment, something extraordinary happens, forcing the family to reckon with their inner cracks.

A.R. Rahman has been trusted to do the heavy lifting in the climaxes of his recent films. The wailing vocals at the end of Chhaava (2025), Arijit Singh blazing through the title track in the climax of Tere Ishk Mein (2025) or the wistful ache of ‘Tere Paas Main’ (sung by Deepali Sahay) making Main Vaapas Aaunga (2026) a pristine tearjerker. Even in Rajkumar Santoshi’s Batwara 1947, Rahman shows up in the final minutes of the film, this time with a guttural hum by the man himself. The effect isn’t nearly as visceral as his last few films. Rahman’s score and songs for Batwara 1947 feel half-hearted compared to his work in the other partition drama from a few months ago. That nearly-there-but-not-quite feeling around Rahman’s music is what I might also say about my reaction to Santoshi’s film on the whole.

In Gurvinder Singh’s Rehmat, no guest is turned away. Whether it’s an alleged militant, or an out-of-state traveller, everyone is offered the respectful hospitality one associates with Punjab. Singh’s film opens with a prologue text noting the chapters of violence Punjab has witnessed during its many socio-political upheavals, and has left its scars. Especially the partition of 1947, and the insurgency of the 1980s. It might have contributed to the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) for an entire generation, and yet it’s this dichotomy that seems to be at the heart of Singh’s film: a state full of traumatised civilians don’t let bitterness get in the way to greet an unannounced guest. It’s probably not a coincidence that the title of Singh’s film translates to ‘grace’.

Near the end of Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I was reminded of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (in my eyes the best Spider-Man film). It’s a scene where the superhero (Tobey Maguire) has prevented a train from derailing. Using all his might, tensile strength and will-power, he faints after the act. About to collapse, he’s caught by those inside the train. His unconscious body surfs over a sea of New York commuters, after which he’s carefully laid down. It’s the first time the city sees him without his mask. Similarly, in Cretton’s film, Spider-Man (Tom Holland) needs to be saved by the very city he’s spent his life defending. In a genre that thrives on an individual saving the world, I was touched to see a hurt, vulnerable ‘hero’ extending his hand (ever so briefly) to the city’s finest. It’s no surprise both scenes, championing community values, take place in films centred around the ‘friendly, neighbourhood superhero’.

Eventually, Sharanya Rajgopal’s Musafir Cafe settles into the cosiness of a novel found in a railway station bookstall. Those unintimidating 200-page paperbacks, which one buys for an overnight journey. Here, it happens in the seventh episode of this eight-episode series. Sudha (Vedika Pinto) is a pretty, impulsive, recklessly-ambitious girl from Bhopal – a version of a metropolitan idea of a small-town firebrand. The kind who discovered ‘Carpe Diem’ in her adolescence and never looked back. She has a job offer from Mumbai, which she reluctantly accepts.

Is there a director working today who has been able to consistently match the crescendo of the last minutes of a Christopher Nolan film? Since Memento (2000) – barring Insomnia (2002), the only remake Nolan has made – the final stretch of most Nolan films could bring corpses to life. In fact, I think one of the most crucial tricks behind his popularity, his ‘prestige’ if you may, might be his ability to finish strong. His weakest film, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), after plodding along for 164 minutes, ends with a spectacular five-minute montage tying all the loose ends of the Batman trilogy. The montage is so good, it almost made me forget what a clunky film I’d seen. In The Odyssey, Nolan delivers his usual rousing climax, but the knockout punch comes a few scenes before. Odysseus (Matt Damon) is talking to his wife, Penelope (Anna Hathaway), for the first time in 20 years. After spurts of flashbacks about the Trojan war peppered through the 173-minute film, this is the first time Odysseus looks back on his storied invasion in the most clear-eyed manner.