Ishita Sengupta

Bollywood is many things. The ugly, sweeping, mimicked moniker is an industry and a genre. It is a person and a personhood, a lifestyle and a livelihood. Over the years, multiple films have attempted taming the beast and dissecting, in varied ways, the mechanics of the space. If Farah Khan depicted an origin story of sorts in Om Shanti Om (2007) then Zoya Akhtar offered a more intimate portrayal of the industry through the lens of outsiders. Aryan Khan’s directorial, The Ba***ds of Bollywood lies somewhere in between. The seven-episode series has the campiness of Khan’s film and the conviction of Akhtar’s debut, culminating eventually as a show that deftly straddles emphasis with frivolity.

In India, the concept of godmen — spiritual leaders elevated to the status of demigod — has spawned a series of narratives. Fiction (Aashram ) and non-fiction (My Daughter Joined a Cult, Cult of Fear: Asaram Bapu, etc) alike have responded to the peculiarity of the culture. Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s new film, Bayaan, a loosely wound police procedural that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a frustrating reiteration of the template. To be fair, Bayaan is largely effective and well-made with slight exceptions. The plot is rooted in Rajasthan, where a godman, ‘Maharaj’ (Chandrachur Singh), runs an ashram full of young girls. When one of them tips off about his sexual abuse, a Delhi-based police officer, Roohi (Huma Qureshi), is assigned to the case. She might be a novice, but she knows the way. Her father (Sachin Khedekar) has been in the profession for a long time and is celebrated by peers. Mishra’s film outlines the way in which an anonymous tip opens a can of worms for the godman, only for Roohi to realise that she, a privileged urban woman, inhabits a world as compliant as that of the rural women.

In Anurag Kashyap’s Monkey in a Cage (Bandar), provocations arrive early. When a man held in custody is asked to sign papers, he refuses because he cannot read the document. “It’s in Marathi”. The cop’s retort flies back: “If you want to stay in Maharashtra, you have to know Marathi”. Later, there is an elaborate jail song, condemning everything from religion to caste-based divides. Kashyap has been angry for a while. The filmmaker’s rage has been so palpable that it percolates from social media posts to his films. His last couple of original works have been topical indictments — each more incensed than the other, and defined and undone by fury. At this point, his anger is a knotty glaze on his films — impossible to ignore but also distracting. The pattern has been so consistent that baiting seems to be the intent and the whole point. His latest, Monkey in a Cage, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a more obvious step towards that direction.

In films, the presence of three is inherently fodder. The arrangement can be disruptive, but it is mainly used by makers to arrive at familiar resolutions. In her wonderfully assured directorial debut, Poetic License, Maude Apatow flips the script. She takes three people, resists settling for sweeping endings and shakes things up for fun. It is a lovely detour that is consistently rewarding. Ari (Cooper Hoffman) and Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman) have been friends for a while. As students, their lives have been mostly spent on campus. Things, however, are about to change. The erudite Sam has his eyes set on a finance job, while Ari, the rich young boy prone to wearing LED face masks at leisure, is still trying to figure things out. A poetry class together becomes their latest way of hanging out. But when Liz (Leslie Mann) sits with them in class, their attention to each other wavers a little. There is only one problem: Liz is a married woman with a daughter. Her professor-husband’s new job at the university brings her to a quiet town from Chicago, as she sits with them in a poetry class to audit.

On paper, It Was Just an Accident bears the blueprint of Panahi’s work where complexity arises from an innocuous incident. A regular pitstop proves to be pivotal. It turns out that the onlooker, Vahid (a wonderful Vahid Mobasseri), has a traumatic history of knowing the man looking for help. In fact, not only does he know him, but so do a lot of people — a wedding photographer, a woman about to get married, a man still traumatised with his past. Turns out, the man in question is an officer of the state who had tortured them when they were in jail. But here’s the catch: no one is really sure. They were blindfolded when they were imprisoned, and although the man (called Eghbal, played by Ebrahim Azizi) sounds and smells like him, and even has a limp, there is uncertainty.

TEHRAN is the latest John Abraham film, where the actor is out to avenge. For a while, it was the country (Parmanu, Satyameva Jayate); then it became more pointed (in both Vedaa and The Diplomat, he saves a girl). A less obvious, but more definite, shift has been his heroism, which has shapeshifted from a combative force to inner resilience. It has become less showy and more nuanced, more cerebral and less extraneous, much like the nationalism in his filmography. In that sense, Tehran is an able extension of this humanity that props up the ideas of protection without losing sight of the cost. In Delhi, 2012, an Israeli diplomat’s car was bombed. Similar blasts occurred in Georgia and Thailand. But the one which we see in the capital (designed in a sleek shot; Evgeniy Gubrenko and Andre Menezes are the cinematographers) results in an unwitting casualty. A young girl on the street, not much older than the daughter of ACP Rajeev Kumar (Abraham), suffers injury. This pulls him into the case even when he was hesitant initially.

Ayan Mukerji’s War 2 is the sixth film in the Yash Raj Spy Universe. It is a precarious position to be in, not least because its prequel, Siddharth Anand’s War (2019) remains objectively fun. A more pressing concern is that through the years — from Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger (2012) to now — the politics of the setting has altered. India in 2025 is not what it was a decade ago, and the shift has transformed other things. What would be identified as sweeping patriotism in the past runs the risk of being jingoistic now; what would qualify as defending the country now translates to not questioning it.

There is such a thing as a Festival Discovery. When you walk into a theatre blind and watch in awe a film taking shape and culminating into everything you wanted to see but did not know. There is such a thing as a film seeing you in a crowd, acknowledging you for what you are and smoothening the jagged edges of what has become of you. Like offering a handshake in the dark. Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was that film for me. The description on the festival website was vague: “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on… for everyone around her, at least.” It said something and nothing. Something bad happened to Agnes (Victor), the tall, awkward protagonist of the film who lives in a quaint house and is overjoyed every time her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie) visits her from New York. They sit on a couch and collapse into a lived-in comfort of years. You look around and see no one else around. When they meet their other friends from college, Agnes is asked, “Do you still live there?” Her gaze falls and Lydie holds her hand beneath the table. But even she has her own apprehensions. “Don’t kill yourself,” she urges. “I won’t,” Agnes reassures with a certitude that implies that she had considered it.