The Third Day is now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. (Photo: HBO)With movie theatres still closed all over the country, people are relying heavily on OTT platforms for entertainment. This week, streaming platforms have a few new films and shows that will surely entertain the audience.
Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is finally streaming on Netflix. Starring Konkona Sensharma, Bhumi Pednekar, Vikrant Massey and Amol Parashar, this film is directed by Alankrita Srivastava of Lipstick Under My Burkha fame. The movie premiered at the Busan Film Festival in 2019 and was initially scheduled for a theatrical release, but is now being released online due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In an earlier interview with indianexpress.com, Alankrita spoke about films releasing on OTT platforms and said, “I think at this hour, it is a good option to release films on the OTT platform. I also feel OTT is a space that is democratic and open to newer talent. It is hard to find distribution in theatrical space for newcomers. So, in that sense, OTT is a medium where we can show our work.”
She added, “Cinema doesn’t become any less if it is watched on a smaller screen. There’s scope and hope for OTT and theaters to co-exist.”
ZEE5 original film London Confidential is out. The film stars Mouni Roy, Purab Kohli, Kulraj Randhawa, and Sagar Arya. It is set in London at the peak of India-China tension, and there is a possibility of a virus infecting the countries. A missing RAW agent could have the details of it all, but the spies here need to get the details before it is too late.
Ratched, starring Sarah Paulson in the lead role, also released today on Netflix. The supernatural thriller series is based on the popular character from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and is kind of an origin story for the character’s journey. The series also stars Cynthia Nixon, Charlie Carver, Judy Davis and Sharon Stone among others.
An endearing family drama, This is Us weaves a charming tale of a dysfunctional family. A beautiful show where characters seem to have a life of their own instead of being controlled by the strings in the hands of the creators. The show does have its dark moments, but its essence is that of love and family.
A romantic anthology series that dramatises the real-life love stories from the New York Times’ column of the same name, Modern Love explores love in all its forms.
Larry David plays his own fictionalised version in this HBO series. The show is uproariously funny, and it really brings out the talent of the writer behind Seinfeld.
A Series of Unfortunate Events is based on the book series of the same name by Daniel Handler who uses his pen name Lemony Snicket to write the books. The story follows three Baudelaire children – a baby girl, a boy and his elder sister. The children have a fortune to their name, but a certain Count Olaf (played with a patent delight by Neil Patrick Harris) would like the fortune to himself. He will kill the children if that is what it took. The devilish Count is assisted by even nastier minions.
The standard yet thrilling zombie apocalypse series has a woman being separated from her daughter. She goes on a journey to find her, determined to be reunited come hell or high water.
Netflix’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Victorian-era Gothic horror novel was a surprisingly clever, well-performed piece of entertainment. While it was a considerable departure from the source material, it remains an interpretation that Stoker himself probably would have been proud of.
Based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s stories, which also inspired a hugely popular series of open-world RPG video-games, the world of the witcher resembles Westeros (from Game of Thrones) in many ways. For one, it is a gritty, dirty world full of violence, sex, and so on. For another, there is no clear division of good or bad like in most fantasy tales. However, The Witcher boasts of a lot of magic and fantastical creatures, which George RR Martin’s novels shied away from. The hero itself, Geralt of Rivia, is a mutated human with superhuman abilities. Game of Thrones in comparison had magic, but only on the periphery, at least in the first few seasons.
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.
A low budget film that tells the story of screenwriter Emily V Gordon and her husband and comedian Kumail Nanjiani, who have also written the story together. This is a no-holds-barred story that does not gloss over anything a relationship is - messy, sometimes infuriating and perplexing, but beautiful and worth it nonetheless.
While the sunny Los Angeles is not as compelling a setting for horror as the dank streets of Victorian London, The City of Angels, Showtime horror series Penny Dreadful's spinoff, is surprisingly good, with a nice amalgam of contemporary social issues and the supernatural.
HBO's miniseries The Third Day is an effective mystery that rises above its premise's trappings largely due to Jude Law's superlative performance, capable direction and cinematography.
Aligarh is an important film that, like Haider, handled a sensitive matter masterfully. Manoj Bajpayee delivers an absolutely storming performance as a homosexual professor who is persecuted just because of his sexual orientation. Bajpayee’s work is complemented quite well by Rajkumar Rao as an enthusiastic real-life young journalist Deepu Sebastian (who incidentally worked at the Indian Express then).
Set in Kashmir in the 1990s, Haider tackled many sensitive matters pretty deftly without being too judgmental. It was another triumphant entry in Vishal Bhardwaj’s glorious line of Shakespeare adaptations set in Indian context (Maqbool and Omkara drew inspiration from Macbeth and Othello respectively) and was based on one of the most famous works by the Bard: Hamlet. With a taut storyline, strong performances particularly by Shahid Kapoor as the titular character, Haider was relentlessly absorbing.
In Margarita with a Straw, Kalki Koechlin’s character is a teenage girl who is not afraid to express her sexual urges and finds herself enjoying getting intimate with both men and women.
One of the few films that dared to take oppressive societal mores that restrict personal independence head on, Masaan was a surprisingly swell directorial debut by Neeraj Ghaywan. It dexterously wove two independent storylines that run parallel and hardly met. Richa Chaddha once again demonstrated why she is a force to be reckoned with by getting into her role with a professional ease. Vicky Kaushal, then a newcomer, was pretty convincing as a shy and awkward small-town boy.
Directed by Prakash Jha, Pareeksha stars Adil Hussain, Priyanka Bose, Shubham Jha, Sanjay Suri. The Indian Express critic Shubhra Gupta gave the film 2.5 stars and wrote, 'Prakash Jha knows his Bihar. The accents, the cadences, the characters, including the gold-chained festooned ‘sahukar’ and the entitled ‘sahebs’, feel right. An underdog-as-winner is an always-in-demand subject; a little less exposition would have made this well-intentioned film better.'
They Shall Not Grow Old is a World War II documentary directed by Peter Jackson. It is an extraordinary experience, which has rightly earned plaudits around the world. Jackson, best known for directing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has used modern post-production techniques, both visual and sound, including new voice-acting, and colourisation to bring alive World War II in all its terrible glory.
Anurag Kashyap’s first release Black Friday is a riveting tale based on the 1993 bombings that shook Mumbai. Though the film was not a commercial success, it has gained a cult status over the years. Kashyap through his actors recreated the actual events as faithfully as possible. Kay Kay Menon, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vijay Maurya and Aditya Shrivastava among others gave spectacular performances in the film.
This Anthony Mackie and Samuel L Jackson starrer may not hit all the right spots, but it does a good job in carrying the message across. Also, it is mighty entertaining most of the time (the star power does help) and even handles race pretty well. I would personally love to see Mackie and Jackson together more.
If there is one thing to be said about Apple TV+ content, the executives in charge are going out of their way to be audacious. Dickinson is another example. The series is about the 19th-century American poetess Emily Dickinson. Though it is set in that era, it has modern sensibilities and tone (as the show’s logline boasts), and the result is an interesting series fit for the post #MeToo world. It is irrelevant whether you have any experience with Dickinson’s work. That is not the point. But this series may inspire you to check her poetry.