Member Reviews

Neighbour duo Lolita (Debchandrima Singha Roy) and Shekhar (Gourav Chakrabarty) have unending claim on each other. Despite a marriage in haste, they parted ways because of Shekhar’s prejudices and Lolita’s pride. In Parineeta, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s classic takes a makeover in Aditi Roy’s series on Hoichoi.

What sort of a spy movie is Sudhanshu Saria’s Ulajh? It begins as a Raazi (2018) in pantsuits: patriotic female protagonist, driven by loyalty and legacy, enlists to serve her country on foreign turf. Indo-Pak diplomatic relations, as fraught and fragile as they were in 1971, inform the narrative stakes. Both films hail from Junglee Pictures, and the editor, in each case, is Nitin Baid. If that weren’t enough, the new film even has a song with ‘watan’ in its title — plastered, ineffectually, over the opening credits and thereby fast forgotten.

Gyaarah Gyaarah, out on ZEE5 and adapted from the Korean series Signal, is a time-warping thriller of the dour, soulless kind. Tumbling across timelines, director Umesh Bist always makes sure to hold his audience’s hand. Bland letters appear on screen to indicate the precise date, year, location. Lest we lose our bearings, the pop-culture references are even more plain: Dil for 1990, Kapoor & Sons for 2016. This is a fairly unimaginative way to summon a period, to evoke a mood. It’s unlike the scene in Back to the Future where Doc in the 1950s exclaims to Marty, who’s traveled back from the 80s, “Ronald Reagan! The actor?! Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?”

‘South Queen’ Trisha Krishnan forayed into OTT with the Telugu web series, ‘Brinda’, directed by Surya Manoj Vangala. While the web series started premiering on SonyLIV on August 2, there have been low-key promotions for whatever reason. At a time when there are many web series on multiple platforms, ‘Brinda’ stands apart. This is truly one of the web shows that deserves more promotion. Brinda (Trisha Krishnan) is a newly appointed sub-inspector, who is moody and hardly gets treated as equals at the police station. She goes to work, struggles to sleep and is quite smart. When her superiors, including Sarathi (Ravindra Vijay), want to close a murder case as suicide, she smartly points out that it’s a murder. This smart work lands her in trouble as her boss always tries to put her in place because she’s a woman. But Brinda is someone who will not take it with a pinch of salt. She teaches him a lesson.

Around halfway of the second episode of the latest season of The Test, drama erupts. English batter Jonny Bairstow ducks a bouncer, the ball goes to the keeper and the batter walks out of the crease. Pretty much a normal thing that happens during a Test match, you’d think. But there’s tense music in the background, almost like you know something is going to happen.

‘Raayan’ is a special milestone in Dhanush’s career. It marks his 50th film as an actor and his second film as a director (after ‘Pa Paandi’). For his 50th film, he donned the hat of a director, actor and writer. Has he exceeded the second time as a filmmaker with ‘Raayan’? Let’s find out! Kathavarayan aka Raayan is forced to take care of his two brothers and toddler sister after their parents vanish for two days. This marks the beginning of Raayan’s struggle. His motto is to survive in this cruel world. He fears no one, not even death. Raayan, along with his siblings, escape grave danger from their village and land in North Madras, where they find a home.

28 years ago, director Shankar and Kamal Haasan gifted ‘Indian’ to the Tamil audience, who still celebrate it like it’s their own. Almost three decades later, the film (read: corruption) still remains relevant. But, Kamal Haasan and Shankar wanted to bring back Indian thatha (grandfather) aka Senapathy to brush up on all the corrupt activities that we’ve seen so far in umpteen movies, not just in Tamil cinema but across other languages. Chitra Aravindan (Siddharth) and his three friends run a YouTube channel called ‘Barking Dogs,’ which focuses on parodies and political satire. They end their calls with ‘Let’s bark!’ (If you think this is absurd, hold your horses). After realising that their videos, despite receiving lakhs of views, had little impact on the audience, the team starts a campaign called ‘Come Back Indian.’ According to them, only Indian Thatha, aka Senapathy, could put an end to corruption.

Manikbabu (Chandan Sen) lives a lonely life. He is first chased and then romanced by a whiff of cloud that only he can see. What do we see when we look at the sky? Manikbabu sees a whiff of cloud that refuses to leave him. He decides to embrace that celestial piece of cloud in his life. This lonely man and his quirky environment – his noisy ceiling fan, his rooftop greenhouse, the hanging lizard in the bathroom, the pile of files on his office table, and so on – tell a lot of hitherto bottled-up stories. The film is a collage of those chronicles.

It was evident, even before Varun Sharma clambered onto the roof of a car, unfastened his fly and shot out a tall projectile of piss, that Wild Wild Punjab was not a serious film. But is it even that wild? The aforementioned scene is probably the looniest thing that happens — a nod, perhaps, to Fukrey 3, which had an entire pee-based plotline dedicated to Sharma. The rest of Simarpreet Singh’s film is oddly strained and docile, a blur of ham-fisted hi-jinks and inane one-liners. “Respect, dude,” someone tells Sharma’s character, a compliment I cannot extend to the film.

“The past is not dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. Everything in Barzakh — images, ideas, sounds — responds to that famously Faulknerian sentiment. The title refers to a kind of limbo, an earthly purgatory, where the dead move amidst the living. The six-part series has been shot in the ravishing Hunza Valley, in Northern Pakistan, and is drenched in a despairing, deciduous beauty. Characters converse in pseudo-spiritualistic fragments and heartsick hokum (and also do shrooms). Mountains, as usual, hold the key to everything. Watching the series, I found myself nervously wondering if, across the border, the director Imtiaz Ali was paying attention. What if he feels a little bested, and takes it up as a challenge?