Sat, May 11 2024

Raj Acharya’s eight-episode series, adapted from Jerry Pinto’s novel, works best as a generational character study of masculinity

Raj Acharya’s “Murder in Mahim” – the eight-episode police procedural streaming on JioCinema, suffers from an adaptation problem, the most unfortunate flaw currently ailing Indian long-format storytelling. The story, about the violent murders of lower-class sex workers, is adapted from Jerry Pinto’s eponymous novel and the show is helmed by Vijay Raaz and Ashutosh Rana, two formidable acting powerhouses capable of elevating any script.

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Wed, May 8 2024

Joel Edgerton takes on himself in this Apple TV+ series adaptation of a sci-fi book that takes a little too long to get going.

“Are you happy with your life? Or have you ever wondered what else you could have been?” This is the setup and the premise of Dark Matter—the new Apple TV+ sci-fi series—that’s been created by the very author who wrote the novel, Blake Crouch. It’s a rarity in the world of TV adaptations. Unlike what the title might imply, Dark Matter essentially explores the infinite possibilities of the multiverse. The choices we make, and the roads not taken. There are a bunch of heady ideas floating through the series—some are given the treatment they deserve, though others are not tackled as deeply as they could have. The characters, outside of the protagonist, also suffer. Crouch does expand on the book’s rather straightforward third act in the final two episodes.

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Thu, May 2 2024

After two duds in a row, director David Leitch rights the ship with an all-out blast of a movie that’s fuelled by the explosive chemistry between its gorgeous and extremely talented leads.

Filmmaking can be incredibly complex but sometimes, all you need are two beautiful people who light up the screen together. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are proof. On The Fall Guy—the new action comedy mystery romance movie from Deadpool 2 director David Leitch—the two showcase movie star charisma from the moment we first lay eyes on them. You can’t help but fall in love. They share incredible chemistry, the kind that pulls you into the film and makes you forget everything. Their mutual magnetism is so powerful that you’re always looking forward to the next time they will be in the same frame whenever they are not. The back and forth between them goes down so smoothly—it helps that Gosling has excellent comedic timing, as everyone saw in last year’s Barbie.

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Wed, May 1 2024

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Netflix series flunks in every department, bar opulence.

With Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar—the new eight-episode miniseries about the life of courtesans, set in the eponymous district of pre-independence Lahore—Sanjay Leela Bhansali has been handed the biggest budget Netflix has ever greenlit for an Indian series. By industry estimates, at over ₹200 crore (about $24 million), it’s more than double what it spent on the highly-awaited second season of Sacred Games, Netflix’s first-ever Indian original. That’s huge. More so as budgets have dried up across the country, with the streaming wars—and as a result, the Golden Age of TV—waning.

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Wed, May 1 2024

Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s big-budget streaming debut, is yet another high-profile Netflix failure. A summation and culmination of Bhansali’s lifelong ambitions, the show represents everything that is wrong with his sensibilities and style-over-substance storytelling. We discuss the show’s flawed understanding of feminism, aestheticisation of female suffering, and haphazard structure. We also talk about why the immaculate visuals and costumes that Bhansali is known for don’t contribute to his narratives.

Tue, April 30 2024

Elisabeth Moss and Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight deliver a spy show stretching across Europe and three intelligence agencies grappling with a terrorist threat. But it’s not as thrilling as it needs to be, and the commentary rarely hits the right beats.

Deep into its six-episode run, The Veil—the new Elisabeth Moss-led spy thriller miniseries from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight—showcases the best version of itself. The Veil hits at the double standards of the West through a conversation between a British intelligence operative (Moss) and a suspected ISIS commander (Yumna Marwan, from Little Birds). The former accuses the latter of being a terrorist, as she’s been covertly planning to blow up thousands of people, and that she’s choosing to do it willingly, not being coerced into it as she might have her believe. In response, Marwan’s character rightly points out how the West does the same—and continues to do so—in the East, occupying, razing, killing, and destroying. But that it’s only a tragedy when it happens on their land.

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Sat, April 27 2024

With Zendaya leading a stellar trio, director Luca Guadagnino concocts a heady mix of jealousy, ambition, and attraction. It’s terrific.

The director of Challengers, the 52-year-old Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, is an ardent student of desire. In all its forms. Guadagnino spent much of his thirties and the first half of his forties with his spiritually connected, self-described Desire trilogy of films—ending with the tender, wondrous and deeply-felt Timothée Chalamet-led Call Me by Your Name. He expanded on the coming-of-age theme with his sensitive and sensual eight-part HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are. It can get weird, too, as it did with the cannibalistic teenagers—Chalamet among them—in the love-amidst-the-horror of Bones and All. But never has Guadagnino’s work been so propulsive, so enticing, and so engrossing before. That is what he accomplishes on Challengers.

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Mon, April 22 2024

Fri, April 19 2024

The sequel—Part Two: The Scargiver—ought to benefit from a defined focus but mucks it up with frivolous scenes, the worst possible dialogue, and by routinely prioritising exposition over its horridly underdeveloped characters.

Rebel Moon was just the worst. Zack Snyder—the director, co-writer, and (strangely) also the cinematographer—spewed lore as if he was penning a Wikipedia article, not a movie. It was apparent that he had no idea what it took to flesh out characters and develop their interpersonal dynamics. Snyder displayed an utter inability with the camera, too. Rebel Moon looked like it had been shot on a giant parking lot with its endless horizons and poorly applied VFX. All this despite having the easiest of templates: a movie about gathering a team of galactic warriors. So, unless Snyder decided to scrap and reshoot the whole thing in four months—a trailer for Part Two: The Scargiver was appended to the end of Part One: A Child of Fire, after all —the sequel was never going to be a big improvement over the first one.

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Sun, April 14 2024

A live-action video game adaptation from the makers of Westworld—is the right mix of goofy and self-serious but is found lacking in crucial departments.

For about a decade and a half, Todd Howard—who has led direction on every major Bethesda video game since 2008, including the award-winning action role-playing titles Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—resisted the idea of a Fallout television adaptation. Howard rejected multiple pitches as none of them were “quite clicking” for him. But that changed when Jonathan Nolan—creator of the sci-fi series Westworld, co-writer of The Dark Knight, and a self-professed fan of the Fallout games—rang him up. Howard was impressed: “It was very clear that he had played the games and loved them and had a vision for what it could be on the screen.” The deal was announced in 2020, and a little less than four years later, Fallout the TV show has arrived on Amazon Prime Video.

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Fri, April 12 2024

Imtiaz Ali’s call for artistic freedom—and the price you must be willing to pay—doesn’t always have the power or focus it needs.

What is decency? And who gets to define it? In a country where taking offence and sentiments being hurt has morphed into a crutch and a pastime, the boundaries of what’s appropriate shrink every day. But this isn’t anything new. Intolerance has always been widespread—it’s now just easily disseminated. In the eighties, that’s how singer-songwriter Amar Singh Chamkila earned the moniker Elvis of Punjab. (A line in the movie takes it too far and calls him “the Elvis of Punjab, US, UK, and Canada”, which is funny on another level because, you know, Elvis is American.) It was given for his popularity, for shattering multiple sales records over his short life, but it applied to how society was enraged by the content of his lyrics. A sentiment that likely led to his assassination at the ripe age of 27.

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Fri, April 12 2024

Is Amar Singh Chamkila a long-awaited return to form for director Imtiaz Ali, or is it another let-down from the once-promising filmmaker? We discuss the film’s inventive approach to the music biopic genre, if not narratively then at least formally. We also talk about Diljit Dosanjh and Parineeti Chopra’s central performances as the slain husband-wife folk singer duo and address the ‘Hindi gaze’ that Ali brings to this inherently Punjabi tale. Along the way, we also discuss the nature of high and low art and the film’s many defences of Chamkila’s controversial music.

Sun, April 7 2024

Prithviraj Sukumaran’s brilliantly measured performance in Blessy’s deeply personal tale of a working-class man’s escape from slavery is one of the most powerful acts in Malayalam cinema

There is a poetic aspect in author Benyamin’s novel reaching the hands of director Blessy. In the journey of Najeeb Muhammad, a Malayali immigrant in West Asia, who gets abducted by one of the region’s many slave owners, there is an element of miserablism that resonates with the cinematic inquiry Blessy has been conducting over the last two decades. His films, in essence, are excavations of grief from the depths of unfortunate ordinary men who go from one tragic situation to another. In Thanmathra(2005) and Kalimannu (2013), the human body becomes his primary work material. Pain and suffering are visceral in these films, animated without any subtlety to pierce into the viewer’s consciousness. In Aadujeevitham, Blessy finds a goldmine.

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Tue, April 2 2024

Aattam, the latest Malayalam-language gem that further solidifies the industry’s artistic stronghold on the cinema landscape of the country, offers an inventive spin on the whodunnit genre. We discuss the film’s gripping narrative, ambitious social commentary, and director Anand Ekarshi’s bold voice. We also talk about the many moral quandaries that the movie puts its characters in, and how willingly it invites audiences to gaze inward and participate in the proceedings. We also debate the merits of its final moments, which we compare and contrast with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.