Shubhra Gupta

Some films are bad. Some are terrible. And some are pure torture. The Vvaan falls neatly into that third category, in which I struggled to find a single redeeming feature, and failed spectacularly. When we first come upon a Mumbai-based engineer (Sidharth Malhotra) and his wife (Tamannaah Bhatia), childless but certainly not loveless, they are a) singing songs in a large sea-side bungalow, b) fetching up at a quack who hands out potency powders and c) participating in a hideous racist-colourist joke. The Vvaan never recovers from this early blow. Nor did I, as the film kept drawing me deeper into an off-colour, off-putting mix of so-called fantasy and folklore, of the kind that involves dark forests and their resident guardian devis, and evil spirits which devour those who dare walk into their domain after dark.

Have we finally reached a level of comfort around legit adult themes like love and lust? Going by the thrust on female desire, and the importance of physical intimacy in keeping a relationship alive in Lust Stories 3, it would appear to be so. Hallelujah. The first edition, out in 2018, felt radical in that it could even use the word in its title, given the insistent prudery surrounding all things sexual in our films. And there was enough in those initial four shorts — hard to forget The Curious Case Of Kiara Advani and the Silent Vibrator — to keep us invested, and interested in what would come next. Except part 2, in 2023, was mostly a dud, with the exception of the episode in which Konkona Sensharma as director and actor teamed up with the excellent Amruta Subash for a hot intersection between class and desire.

It’s been a while since Bollywood attempted a full-on goofy spy saga, leaning into it with the right degree of silliness, and made it work. ‘Vibe’ is a vibe, and I’m here for it. It’s not so much a spoof, but a goof-off, and that’s what makes all the difference. Hardik (Kunal Kemmu), whose name leads to the predictable jibe about hardness and nether male regions, which Hindi cinema writers have made much of for years, is a fool who enjoys being one. He is a slacker, and therefore a doper, but haha, inside him hides the smart coder, who only needs that one nudge to make him better.

In some of her better films, Meghna Gulzar’s determined wading into morally complex territory has left us questioning our beliefs about right and wrong. Her best work remains ‘Talvar’, in which the murder of a 14-year-old girl laid bare the hypocrisies in the way we judge young adolescents and parenting, which neatly carved out the pro-and-anti maxxers: the questions swirling around the murder still haunt us. In ‘Daayra’, the director attempts to take the discomfort several notches higher. The plot appears to have been based on the killing of four Hyderabad men who were taken to the spot where they had allegedly raped and killed a young woman. Meant to be a re-creation of the crime, it ended up in the deaths of all the suspects, leaving in its wake the thorny question: who decides the quantum of punishment?

At the outset, let me confess how keenly I was waiting for this Reacher spin-off, with his favourite team-mate Neagley at its centre: the fierce ex-Armywoman who went on to become a PI in Chicago, has been a staple in the best Reacher adventurers, and has livened up things everytime she shows up in the show. In her first solo outing, Maria Sten’s Neagley fills the screen with her presence, the creators Nick Santora and Nicholas Wootton wisely surrounding her with an interesting ensemble from the get-go: smart cop Hudson Riley (Greyston Hold), an equally smart secretary Renee Birdwhistle (Adeline Rudolph) and homeless orphan Keeno (Jasper Jones), who get enough to do together and on their own.

Based on Arvind Adiga’s 2011 novel Last Man In Tower, Ben Rekhi’s film of the same name keeps its focus on the main thrust: shark-like developers swooping in on the crumbling parts of Mumbai, swatting aside low-stakes initial reluctance with the promise of fancy high rises. The last man in the way of builder-tycoon Dharmen Shah’s (Boman Irani) rapacious intention is retired teacher Yogesh Murthy (Manoj Bajpayee), who just wants to live out the remaining of his life in familiar surroundings, in a flat which houses the memories of his dead wife.

Haiwaan vs Insaan, monster vs human, that age-old conflict in the movies, gets a refresh in Haiwaan, with Priyadarshan re-upping his own 2016 Malayalam hit Oppam. Here Saif Ali Khan plays the sightless Shyam, up against Akshay Kumar’s murderous Parshuram, in a film which stays largely faithful to the original. In Priyan’s world protagonists and antagonists are always arrayed in black and white, with lashes of heavy-handed humour thrown in. The mix works in some of his movies, mostly his loud comedies in which the cast is tasked with delivering dialogues when not hanging off cliffs: Haiwaan is the usual mix of genres in Priyadarshan’s films, in which tonal switches abound, the first half setting up the premise of an innocent man being imprisoned for a crime he didn’t do, and the second turning into an unintentional comic police procedural.

The arena is Bundelkhand, not Chambal, but Timanshu Dhulia knows his terrain. And that familiarity makes Ghamasaan stand out from the series of films shot on locations created on sets, their artifice seeping into the story-telling: the best part of this conflict between cops-and-robbers is the authenticity of the place, and the people. Maharaj (Arshad Warsi) is Bundelkhand’s Bandit King, as opposed to Phoolan, Chambal’s Bandit Queen (in which Dhulia was casting director) , as well as Paan Singh Tomar (which Dhulia directed, turning it into one of his, and lead Irrfan’s, best collaborations) from the same area who famously gave us that line about ‘baaghis’ and ‘dakaaits’.