Tatsam Mukherjee

Like it happens with the follow-up for any successful show, I entered the Squid Game 2 with a fair bit of trepidation. What worked in the first season was the shock value of the setting that posits the innocence of childhood games, sophisticated Western classical music with a kind of savagery few would be able to stomach. Where unsuspecting debt-ridden civilians are lured onto an island to play a series of games – for which they stand to win an obscene amount of money, or pay for it with their life. A cruel, but clinical simulation of our lives in a hyper-capitalist society, the appeal of Squid Game lay in how it studied human nature – especially the ones with limited means, who are driven to take desperate measures. How far would you go to survive/get paid? As the first season showed: to any length.

Nothing screams ‘crisis’ in Hindi cinema right now more than Salman Khan showing up in his second ‘star cameo’ of the year – hedging his bets between two cinematic universes; hoping at least one of them works. Something works. This is not a spoiler, given how the film’s PR and fan accounts are enthusiastically ‘leaking’ his entry scene on social media. Khan’s films proudly flaunted their ‘critic-proof’ status for a long time, but have looked increasingly silly in the last five years. Apart from YRF’s spy universe, Khan’s Chulbul Pandey has announced himself in the Rohit Shetty cop universe, and now alongside Varun Dhawan in the Baby John universe – where he’s called (what else, but) Agent Bhai Jaan. It looks like even Bollywood’s loosest canon is looking to diversify his portfolio, fervently praying to make windfall gains from one franchise. The devil-may-care swagger has been replaced with the caution of a star unsure of his place.

I couldn’t help but be left with the feeling that there’s an enjoyable disaster film somewhere within Rahul Dholakia’s Agni, which surely owes a debt to The Burning Train (1980). There is more than one echo of the Ravi Chopra-directorial, where the spectacle is foregrounded by professional rivalry – Danny Denzongpa and Vinod Khanna’s in the 1980 film; emulated by Pratik Gandhi and Divyenndu’s characters in Dholakia’s directorial. The innate Bollywood melodrama after an unexpected death, the high-voltage social commentary and righteous anger fuel both spectacles. Both Chopra and Dholakia’s film balance a strong ensemble, offering everyone their moment, and yet Dholakia’s film fails to stick its landing. It might have to do with what Hindi films have become in 2024 – too self-conscious, cautious, and reverential towards any uniform.

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL) establishes its Mumbai DNA early on. A visibly-tired Anu (Divya Prabha), an upstart nurse in a city hospital, is jotting down details of a patient. Age? “24… oh no sorry, it’s 25,” a young woman says, holding on to her child. “Pfft!” reacts Anu, showcasing her mild annoyance for having to strike out what she’d written earlier.

“Will you dance at my wedding?”, a young Reya (Pearle Dey) asks her visibly-ill father, Arjun (Abhishek Bachchan), sitting in their backyard. Arjun used to be a high-flying, pragmatic, proud ad executive in Los Angeles, till one day he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. It’s a loaded question – especially for a still-squeaky voice. The initial prognosis gave Arjun 100 days to live. But he’s somehow lived his way through a few months, maybe even a year. While he awaits future surgeries, many things hang in the balance for Arjun, preventing him from giving Reya an answer. The scene ends with the father-daughter’s heavy silence, staring into a distance.

What happens when you take one of the most irreverent filmmakers of our times, and force him to be sombre, sincere and melodramatic? The result is a film like Gladiator II. It’s not to say that the sequel doesn’t have the campy goodness of the original, especially in the turns by Denzel Washington playing Macrinus (a gladiator-turned-influential figure in Rome), Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger playing Emperor twins Geta and Caracalla (a more sadistic version of Romulus and Remus), but there’s something amiss.

The choices in Citadel: Honey Bunny sing less frequently compared to other undertakings of the Raj & DK filmmaker duo. An offshoot of Amazon Prime’s gazillion-dollar spy franchise pitted against the silliness of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, etc., Raj & DK’s latest carries the baggage of an over-embellished universe tensely fitted into a studio-approved runtime. Like its American counterpart helmed by the Russo brothers, even the Indian version spans six episodes with a duration of 40-50 minutes each.

A lot of the splendour in Sean Baker’s Anora lies in its treatment – where we might be shown one thing, but deliberately made to feel something else. For example, the film opens with a discomfiting panning shot featuring barely-clothed exotic dancers performing with neon lights around them. However, Baker scores this scene with a loud, winsome techno song taking what is a distressing visual of young women forced to work a job that fetishises them, and drains the self-pity out of it.