Saibal Chatterjee

A spitfire, Rani Mukerji meets her match in Mardaani 3 in the strikingly vivid form of Mallika Prasad, who slips into the garb of the first female antagonist of the franchise with effortless ease. The frequently electrifying on-screen face-offs between them bring the best out of both performers. In the bargain, the film acquires an edge that is infinitely sharper than that of the two previous films in the series. Mardaani 3 isn’t necessarily any different from all the crusading Singham-style cop movies that Bollywood produces, but it stands apart nonetheless, not just from the crowd but also from its two precursors because of the crackle and clarity of the tale.

Mounted on a grand scale but filmed largely in and around real military locations and installations, Border 2 is a longer, brighter, and more ballistic and variegated replica of the original war drama released in 1997. In tone and texture, however, it isn’t the same. The surface sheen of Border 2 reflects the significant distance that Mumbai’s commercial cinema has travelled in terms of filmmaking technique in the 28-year interregnum. It is bolder and louder than Border could ever have been given the times in which it was envisaged and executed.

For the protagonist and narrator of Taskaree: The Smuggler’s Web, rectitude is heroism. There are other traits, too, that define the Customs officer - courage under fire, bravado in the face of danger, and quick thinking in the midst of systemic sloth. Customs superintendent Arjun Meena (Emraan Hashmi) possesses all the above qualities in abundance, in addition to his ability to lead by example. But nothing is more important to him and his handpicked colleagues than probity. So much so that one team member disowns his family and fiancée because of their failure to understand his principles.

In her fifth outing and first collaboration with actor Sivakarthikeyan, director Sudha Kongara crafts a relevant but way less than scintillating Tamil period drama that, notwithstanding the numerous censorial excisions it has suffered, makes full use of all the ingredients one expects from a star vehicle targeted at a mass audience. The balancing act is by no means easy and Parasakthi frequently teeters on the edge of a pulpy precipice. To her credit, the director, who is also the film’s co-writer with Arjun Nadesan, does not let the commercial aims of the project overly blunt the edges that the emotive subject matter imparts to it.

Not the sort of Bollywood war movie that goes all guns blazing and tom-tomming the virtues of battlefield bellicosity, Ikkis conserves its firepower and spreads it out judiciously over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. The strategy, sustained all the way through, serves Sriram Raghavan’s film, which is a marked departure from his neo-noir thrillers, well. It hits its intended targets more often than it misses.

Flip, frivolous and not as much fun as it aspires to be: that about sums up the first half of Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri. If you get through that phase of the film without switching off, the rom-com, post-intermission, stumbles with intent into family drama territory. The turnaround is as striking as it is surprising. The emotional core that Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri finds in the second half pushes the narrative out of a monotonous loop and towards a radical new direction. But that is not to say that everything that the film attempts, lands.

There is nothing remotely majestic about The Raja Saab, a mangled horror fantasy that borders awkwardly on the comedic and is frequently in danger of making a laughing stock of itself. Matters are aggravated manifold by the film’s inordinate length, which only serves to take it further and further away from where it should have ended up. Given the glaring gap between intention and execution, it would be easy to dismiss The Raja Saab - this reviewer watched the Hindi dub, replete with verbiage that reek of obsolescence - as a load of argle-bargle without any attenuating factors.

In his sophomore venture, Daayam (Inheritance), Prasanth Vijay tiptoes gently and noiselessly into the inner world of a girl dealing with the premature death of her mother. The result is a subtle, mellow study of bereavement and its upshots. The independent Malayalam-language film makes a sharp departure from the conventions of the coming-of-age genre. It uses the muted and delicate narrative approach of the kind that marked the director’s critically acclaimed 2017 debut, The Summer of Miracles.