Wakaalat From Home is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The weekend is here and it’s time to catch up on all the new web series and movies which were released during the week.
This week, ZEE5 released two movies, Pradeep Sarkar directorial Arranged Marriage and Priyadarshan’s Anamika. Arranged Marriage features actors Ali Fazal, Patralekhaa, and Omkar Kapoor in the lead roles. It explores the relationship between families involved in a marriage. Anamika follows the story of a woman who finds love outside her marriage. It stars Aditya Seal, Pooja Kumar, and Harsh Chhaya.
Also, Vikrant Massey and Shweta Tripathi Sharma starrer Cargo started streaming on Netflix. Disney Plus Hotstar presented the second season of its hit web series Hostages. Amazon Prime Video released its original web series titled Wakaalat From Home. It features Sumeet Vyas, Nidhi Singh, Kubbra Sait and Gopal Datt in the lead roles.
In her review of Hostages season two, The Indian Express’ Ektaa Malik wrote, “Predictable to the T, season 2 is at least eight episodes too long. The suffering lasts for full 12 episodes with a runtime of 40-minutes each. Made with the idea of being a slow burn, the show gives one a headache instead, which by the tenth episode morphed into a full-blown migraine.”
She added, “Hostages has a cast encompassing good actors from almost three decades — right from Kanwaljit Singh, Shweta Prasad Basu, Ronit Bose Roy, Dino Morea, Shibani Dandekar, Amit Sial, Dalip Tahil and Divya Dutta. But getting the right people is only half the work done, the actors need something to work with. The script and the writing lets them all down.”
So, if you don’t know what to watch today, we are here with some binge-watch recommendations that will surely keep you hooked. Scroll through this blog and find out what you can watch on ZEE5, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, SonyLIV, Voot Select, Disney Plus Hotstar, MX Player and other OTT platforms.
This FX series has everything in its favour - colourful characters, dark humour, varied settings (every season takes place in different places and times), and excellent writing. Cops face solo gangsters or gangsters with families and your sympathies are dragged all over the place. You think things like -- why did this charismatic rascal had to be a bad person, inherently? There is a character played by David Thewlis in the third reason who is the repelling-yet-compelling sort -- a perfect representation of the show as a whole, I think.
With Permanent Roommates which came out in 2014, The Viral Fever delivered one of the first web series in India. The five-episode series follows the story of Mikesh (Sumeet Vyas) and Tanya (Nidhi Singh) who have been in a long-distance relationship for three years. It begins when Mikesh moves from the US to India and ends up with an engagement ring at Tanya’s door. Seeing him at her door, Tanya gets confused if she really wants to take things ahead with him or not. You might have seen Vyas in various web shows, but with his portrayal of Mikesh, the actor struck gold. Developed by Biswajit Sarkar, Permanent Roommates is a must-watch show for its fun, authentic and relatable story.
The web series stars Ritwik Bhowmik, Shreya Chaudhry, Naseeruddin Shah, Atul Kulkarni, Kunal Roy Kapur, Sheeba Chaddha and Rajesh Tailang. The show revolves around Radhe, a classical performer, and popstar Tamanna. It follows with their budding romance as they collaborate professionally and the conflicts that arise from their union. The 10-part romantic-drama has been directed by Anand Tiwari of Love Per Square Foot fame.
This show created by Jonathan Nolan is basically about artificial intelligence. The writing is good, and that is no surprise considering that people like Nolan and JJ Abrams are involved in the show. Lost fans would find themselves at home, not because the two shows are in any way similar, but because Michael Emerson is at the top of his game in both shows. Person of Interest streams on Amazon Prime Video.
An underrated show of the time when the Palace of Versailles was being built, and the court was being moved from Paris to Versailles. The show offers insight into the politics of the time and how kings dealt threats, internal and external.
A horror series, The Returned is the adaptation of 2012 French series Les Revenants. Inhabitants living in a small American town get shocked when the people who had been dead begin to reappear. The performances are solid and the pace, while slow at first, improves with time.
A Stephen King adaptation, the events in HBO's miniseries The Outsider are kicked in motion by the rape and murder of a child. All the circumstantial and DNA evidence and eye-witness reports point towards Jason Bateman’s Terry Maitland, a baseball coach with easy access to kids. But he says he was at a conference outside town during the incident, and there is footage affirming his claim. Ben Mendelsohn’s Detective Ralph Anderson is tasked with the investigation.
Netflix’s new travel series Dark Tourist is about a certain kind of tourism in which travellers steer clear of the usual tourist attractions and instead opt for more morbid places. You know, those related to death, massacre, nuclear fallout and other macabre stuff. gave me a concrete idea about this type of tourism. It is hosted by New Zealand journalist David Farrier. Farrier is a pretty nice presenter. He is self-effacing and amiable and prone to understating things – not somebody you would expect to host this kind of show. But it works.
Hugh Grant is a great actor, and A Very English Scandal is easily one of his best performances. Oh, and Ben Whishaw is good too. A three-part miniseries created by Russell T Davies and directed by, A Very English Scandal is set in 1960's England and is about politician Jeremy Thorpe (Grant) who begins a whirlwind homosexual affair with a young stable hand, Norman Scott (Whishaw). After Norman threatens to expose the affair, Jeremy makes a (bad) plan to murder Norman.
Based on an intriguing what-if premise, The Man in the High Castle is an alternate reality TV show. In this world, the Axis powers won and the United States was carved up between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Common Americans live under two foreign, oppressive regimes and they are resigned to their fate... until the people come across another reality -- our reality -- according to which things could be better.
This one is among the weirder and eccentric shows. Frodo of Lord of the Rings movies, Elijah Wood, plays an everyman whose life is turned into a veritable whirlwind by a flamboyantly British "holistic" detective; holistic because he believes everything in the universe to be interconnected. And indeed, he has a seemingly preternatural ability. The feel of the show is like from one of the more strange comic-books from the 80s came to life. The story is loosely based on the writings of the great Douglas Adams.
The classic Doordarshan TV series based on RK Narayan's charming small-town based stories still holds up well. Relive your childhood (if you watched Malgudi Days as a child, that is) with this series.
This HBO miniseries is executively produced by two giants of American cinema, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who bring their experience of Saving Private Ryan to Band of Brothers, which is an exquisite and sensitive portrayal of a company of soldiers.
Directed by Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind is inspired by the life of genius mathematician and Nobel prize winner, John Nash. Nash accepts secret work in cryptography (code-breaking), but in doing so, his personal life and mental well-being take a nightmarish turn. His work on game theory in mathematics proved to be a game-changer, but his genius was overshadowed by schizophrenia. A Beautiful Mind went on to win four Academy Awards including Best Picture.
Chernobyl, a miniseries based on the nuclear disaster of the same name, is scarier than any horror story in existence, precisely because it did happen in the past and a similar event can happen in future. Human incompetence, after all, has no limits.
Avrodh: The Siege Within, streaming on SonyLIV, recounts the planning that went into the Indian government’s decision to avenge the killing of 19 soldiers at an Army base camp in Uri with surgical strikes on terrorist launch pads across Line of Control (LoC). Though the plot of the nine-episode web series is similar to 2019’s National Award-winning film Uri: The Surgical Strike, it is starkly different in its treatment. Unlike many military dramas, Avrodh is not marred by jingoistic dialogues or scenes. Helmed by Raj Acharya, the series starred Darshan Kumaar, Amit Sadh, Neeraj Kabi, Madhurima Tuli, Vikram Gokhale, Pavail Gulati and Anil George.
If you are looking to watch something light-hearted and fun, Ayan Mukerji directorial Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, starring Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Aditya Roy Kapur, Kalki Koechlin, Evelyn Sharma and late actor Farooq Sheikh, is the perfect pick. The film, with its elements of friendship and romance, is a coming-of-age love story.
The Sopranos is said to be the greatest television series of all time. It was this show that really made HBO the place of prestige television that it is today. It is safe to say that without this David Chase creation, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and other such iconic shows would not exist. Based in New Jersey, The Sopranos revolved around a fictional Italian-American mobster Tony Sopranos, played by late James Gandolfini.
Jersey is an inspirational film about an out-of-work 36-year-old man, played by Nani, who after facing a lot of backlash decides to prove his worth by doing the only thing he knows - playing cricket.
This shot-at-home web series is headlined by an ensemble cast including actors Sanjay Kapoor, Arjun Mathur, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Shweta Tripathi Sharma, Rukhsar Rehman, Lubna Salim, Indraneil Sengupta, and Dibyendu Bhattacharya. The story revolves around the Gujral family whose life turns into a nightmare after Sahil Gujral, played by Arjun Mathur, goes missing. While initially he is said to have died from coronavirus, later it seems there’s more to his death than what meets the eyes. Sahil’s sister (Shweta Tripathi Sharma) and father (Sanjay Kapoor) make efforts to find out about the mysterious death in the family.