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Boston Strangler | Cast: Keira Knightley in Boston Strangler| Cast: Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon | Director: Matt Ruskin | English | Disney+Hotstar

Most of my paycheck goes to the babysitter,” says Keira Knightley’s Loretta McLaughlin, working as a hungry reporter at a Boston newspaper. She is talking to her colleague, Carrie Coon’s Jean Cole, about the three-ring circus of husband, children and work. The movie is set in the early 1960s but six decades later, the struggle for working women remains the same. It is accentuated when you’re on the trail of a murderer who is as a careful as he is deranged. In the early ’60s, there was a series of killings of single women, young and old, in and around Boston, which became notorious as the Boston Strangler’s work. The killer had a signature style, decorative, almost orderly, and a similar MO, posing either as a maintenance man or a modelling agent. The movie is about the two women who tracked that story over three years and went on to have long careers in journalism. It is a heady world where they come up against ingrained misogyny, patronising colleagues, stonewalling policemen, but they stick through it, and stick together, to write the stories of their lives. Shot sombrely, dressed beautifully (by our very own Arjun Bhasin) and imbued with an elegiac touch, Boston Strangler takes its place in the small subset of fine journalism movies

Why watch it : With its endless cigarettes and its countless whiskies, it takes us back to the heyday of print journalism

 Darkness Visible

Gaslight} Cast: Sara Ali Khan, Vikrant Massey, Chitrangda Singh Director: Pavan Kirpalani Hindi | Disney+Hotstar

Look at this face, Look at my million dollar face.” That from one of the many princelets in Gaslight is one of the few unintentionally funny dialogues in this mystery. Set in a palace in Gujarat, a princess returns home to meet her father after her mother’s suicide and her own accident that left her paralysed. Nothing is as it seems. The raja is missing, his second wife is sultry but seemingly solitary, the help is as hunky as he is forward, there is an enigmatic police officer, and a gypsy who seems to be channeling the dead. All in all, it’s a campy affair shot almost entirely at night, and with bucket loads of water. Some revelations are unexpected and Sara Ali Khan is at her royal best, as only a descendant of the powerful Begums of Bhopal can be. It’s good to see the younger women in Mumbai films breaking out of the decorative trap and doing action sequences as well as the men. There are only so many screen weddings and parties one can dance at.

 Why watch it : Sometimes spooky old palaces do make the best setting for a series of scares

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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