Anuj Kumar

Someone who loves exploring the intricate relationship between bodily functions and life’s larger purpose, after Piku and October, director Shoojit Sircar turns to a real-life cancer survivor to tell a middling tale of resilience and reform. A hot-shot marketing man, Arjun Sen’s (Abhishek Bachchan) career comes to a sudden halt when he is diagnosed with multiple malignancies. After initial bouts of denial, he doesn’t surrender to fate, refuses to become a statistic, and enlists himself in a long-drawn battle with the disease. Soon, we discover his relationships are not in the best of health either. At work, he is a cut-throat. At home, he is divorced and has a daughter (Pearle Dey/Ahilya Bamroo) to raise who suspects him of indulging in some sort of drama to evoke empathy. In the hospital, he comes up with diagrams and googled information lest his doctor (Jayant Kriplani) take him for a ride.

Once a purveyor of Bollywood entertainment, director Nikkhil Advani of late is exploring drama surrounding real, epochal events – life-altering situations where the decisions are not made based on right and wrong, but on the pretext of consequences. A slippery ground to navigate, he got it right in Mumbai Diaries set against 26/11 terror attacks in the metropolis and doesn’t disappoint in Freedom At Midnight either.

In the festive season, director Anees Bazmee tells cinegoers to bring in the popcorn and he would deliver the comic twists. This Deepavali, the director lights up a green cracker that leaves a purple patch in the air but in a bid to be progressive, he fails to keep his traditional comedic pot on the boil and underutilises powerhouse performers like Madhuri Dixit and Vidya Balan to light up the screen.

For a long time, one believed that a compelling cinematic narrative shows more than it tells, and expresses more than it explains. However, the recent content spurt on OTT platforms seems bent on cerebrating the opposite. Do Patti is yet another addition to the long list of films that skip theatres for a streaming service. It reduces the art of storytelling to a mere artifice for meaningful cinema. These films end up delivering the message but little else.

Coming from a background in writing low-brow comedy skits for television, director Raaj Shaandilyaa has this knack for creating funny characters rooted in mofussil towns that generate mirth by engaging in rollicking repartees. His broad humour emanates from deep observation and understanding of the cultural mores of a conservative society coming to terms with socio-economic liberalisation in the 1990s. However, Shaandilya’s skill to combine the comic sketches into a wholesome screenplay is still a work in progress, resulting in a disappointing outcome.

A cautionary tale on cybercrime and artificial intelligence, CTRL works like a ready reckoning on online behaviour for social media junkies and feels like it has been designed to showcase the budding talent of Ananya Panday. Many of us have yet to recover from the shenanigans of Bae when director Vikramaditya Motwane unleashes the effervescence of Ananya in yet another variant of the coming-of-age template for Gen-Z.