Saibal Chatterjee

Honey Trehan’s Satluj (Punjab ‘95 with another name but everything else intact) has finally emerged from censorship hell without losing any of its intrinsic fire. That is no mean triumph. It is a reason why the film, out on Zee5 after a four-year battle for CBFC clearance, must not be missed. But that, to be sure, is only of many reasons. Satluj is a powerful political film that pulls no punches. It is unwaveringly focused on what happens when the state and its police force trample upon the very laws and individual rights that they are charged with protecting. The result is an unsettling film that packs a massive wallop. Yes, Satluj isn’t easy to watch but it is the sort of film that, despite its length, does not let you look away. It demands absolute attention and a willing engagement with the burden of its arguments.

The hired killer in Baby Do Die Do is a woman. She is deaf and mute to boot. She can neither hear anything that anybody says nor spit out her rage in the form of words. She executes her chosen targets in utter silence with an umbrella that is actually a gun. Pretty much like the umbrella in a rain-soaked Mumbai, nothing is what it seems. The pivotal elements in Baby Do Die Do are intriguing all right but do they give the film an edge that serves its purpose? They do only sporadically. Huma Qureshi (who has also produced the film with her brother Saqib Saleem) fronts Baby Do Die Do with the ‘quiet’ confidence that the role calls for. She is unwaveringly consistent. The film is anything but.

An action-comedy that never finds its way out of the woods, Welcome to the Jungle jangles along mindlessly down a messy path. It delivers chaos, cacophony and confusion in bushels. Like it or lump it. The film gives an unwieldy cast the kind of freedom that only a muddled, overstuffed screenplay can. The actors stop at nothing, hamming it up like there is no tomorrow. While they have a ball, and then some, the Firoz Nadiadwala-produced film, directed by Ahmed Khan (who has toted up quite a few sequels and takes over the reins of this one from Anees Bazmee), lurches merrily from one massive wobble to another.

A Gen Z rom-com with a millennial soul and the heart of an overgrown child, Cocktail 2 is a hit-or-miss mix of tips about life, love and uncharted adventures in Sicily that do not fully dissolve into the breezy, pulpy potion that the film seeks to serve up. The pearls of wisdom that it bandies about stick out rather awkwardly as another menage e trois led by a young man in an open relationship navigates the ebbs and tides of the heart and the desires of two women who are polar opposites. Coming 14 years after Cocktail, which was about two equally dissimilar ladies making impulsive choices, right or wrong, and holding up a mirror to the wayward ways of an entitled, commitment-phobic philanderer, the follow-up scampers in a different direction and winds up (along with its three principal characters) in a place where confusion runs riot.

This movie would have us believe that its eponymous protagonist pulled India out of a major financial crisis and set the nation on the path to economic liberalisation in the early 1990s by making impossible calculations and moves. It gets both its math and its motive all wrong. Disappointing? That would be an understatement. Governor, propelled by an acting masterclass from Manoj Bajpayee that is sadly wasted on a vehicle whose wheels are terribly misaligned, is a disaster. The film spins a gossamer-thin yarn, and the kite that it seeks to send soaring in the air struggles to stay afloat.

She has had a choppy ride at the box-office of late. Her last four Hindi releases (Thalaivi, Dhaakad, Tejas and Emergency) underperformed big time. Could Bharat Bhhagya Viddhaata, a female-centric film set in a hospital under a terror attack, be the throw of the dice that could turn things around for Kangana Ranaut? The actor spares no effort, leading the charge with admirable restraint in a survival thriller that does well to never get ahead of itself. It stays well within and thrives on the limits that it sets for itself. On her part, Ranaut, whose banner Manikarnika Films is the lead producer, ensures that she does not become bigger than the film, which often tends to be the bane of Bollywood movies that are bankrolled by stars.

No matter how contrived and conventional they might get at times, madcap comedies like Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai have a way of trundling along no matter how frequent and imposing the roadblocks in its path are. There are plenty of them here and they do get in the way of the film becoming the pure, old-fashioned laugh riot that it aspires to be. The title is drawn from a song in David Dhawan’s Biwi No 1 (1999), but Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai, which the veteran director has announced will be the final film of his long and eventful career, does not roll off the tongue as smoothly as a Hindi film number usually does.

The protagonist of Bandar, a scrappy and uneven prison drama directed by Anurag Kashyap and written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, learns the hard way that the law is an a** and its victims are monkeys in their own circus. Played by an intense Bobby Deol, the man falls prey to an unrelentingly brutal system that blurs the line between innocence and culpability and makes the process as harrowing as the punishment. Bandar is a grim, frequently confounding portrait of a lawless prison for undertrials that turns the toughest of men into amoral wrecks caught in a distressing struggle for self-preservation and dominance.