Alia Bhatt's Darlings to Shefali Shah's Delhi Crime Season 2: The best of OTT in August

August was a dry month for OTT. No matter how hard I tried, I found Maharani’s Season 2 as redundant as paani puri without the paani. Puri, I know, was a banned name among moviegoers after Liger. Netflix gave us some respite with Darlings. In a down-in-the-dumps month, let’s look at the bright spots. Darlings (Netflix) [caption id=“attachment_11150201” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Darlings[/caption] Quite easily the digital event of the month in India, Darlings is the kind of fey feisty funny fearsome and fulfilling film that confuses, confounds and delights, all thanks to debutant Jasmeet Reen’s insanely dizzying premise about two plucky women, mother Shefali Shah and daughter Alia Bhatt, and their revenge on the latter’s violent husband. The narrative did lose control towards the end. But Darlings succeeded in being more than just a routine wife-beating man-baiting exercise. With Gangubai Kathiawadi scoring in theatres and Darlings on OTT Alia is quite the screen queen. Darlings, Alia rocks. Delhi Crime 2 (Netflix) [caption id=“attachment_11150211” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Delhi Crime 2[/caption] Movie-watchers of refined sensibilities consider Shefali Shah the Shabana Azmi on OTT. With two back-to-back successes on the digital platform in August, Darlings and then Delhi Crime Season 2 , Shefali, in-spite of an unwarranted visit from Covid-19, rocked the month. Delhi Crime’s top-cop Vartika Chaturvedi is a woman in control. Like Mrs Gandhi she wears the pants in her team . Driven by a dexterously written script the second season of Delhi Crimes succeeded in being a worthy follow-up to the first, which is saying a lot. Criminal Justice: Adhura Sach (Disney-Hotstar) [caption id=“attachment_11150231” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Criminal Justice 3[/caption] Applause Entertainment’s legal drama now in its third season, draws its life force from the central performance by Pankaj Tripathi . His Madhav Mishra is the kind of down-market lawyer no South Mumbai crime-accused would employ unless desperate. Mukul (Aditya Gupta, overacting all the way) is a juvenile murder-accused. Madhav plunges into the complex case of a high-profile child star Zara’s murder, and comes up with a few surprise which you will see in the weeks to come by, since the platform in all its wisdom, has decided to stream one episode every Friday. By the time the truth about Zara’s murder is revealed her screen-parents Swastika Mukherjee and Purab Kohli may have torn each other apart in frustration. Who knows! There is no telling about the closure of whodunits. This one gets it right. Crash Course (Amazon Prime Video) [caption id=“attachment_11150241” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Crash Course[/caption] Initially, this one looked like more of Kota Factory. But as we got into its rhythm, we saw that there was more to this series than what met the eyes initially. The rivalry between two coaching institutes and the struggles of the students to stay afloat in a suicidally competitive environment, added up rather smoothly to give us an engaging series on ’educational ambivalence.’ Kota, un-Kota. Mind The Malhotras (Amazon Prime Video) [caption id=“attachment_11150251” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Mind the Malhotras[/caption] If I didn’t know any better I would presume that Mini Mathur and Cyrus Sahukar are an actual couple. But no. They are intelligent actors who know how to ingest their characters with the right doses of credibility without making them look like overprepared actors playing a squabbling pair. Stormy marriages are never entertaining to watch, unless the writing is peppered with precocity and perspicuity. Mind The Malhotras gets there, though sometimes not fast enough. There is enough here to make Mind The Malhotras a winner. Dr Arora Gupt Rog Visheshagya (SonyLiv) [caption id=“attachment_11150261” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Dr Arora Gupt Rog Visheshagya[/caption] When I was in college, there was film called Gupt Gyan pretending to be a gynaecological expose but actually a sleazy excuse for some lowbrow voyeurism, which was a big hit. This series appears to follow in the gupt (secret) roguish tradition . It comes up with some bright moments, thanks to the wonderful Kumud Mishra who can breathe life into a corpse. Most of this series conceived by the once-wonderful Imtiaz Ali, is as dead as a doorknob. Men who ….errr….can’t perform troop into Dr Arora’s office. The trouble is, neither can this series, though Kumud Mishra can. What happened to Imtiaz Ali? Midlife crisis? Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram