Keyur Seta

If there was one film that had an enormous amount of pressure to turn out to be impressive it was director Christopher McQuarrie’s Tom Cruise starrer Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning. It’s the last film from the globally admired and successful franchise and hence, fans from all across the world were counting on it to be good. The film is the continuation of the previous one from the series Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning. At the end of it, secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) gets hold of the special key from Gabriel (Esai Morales) from the Orient Express. The key holds the key (pun intended) to control the Entity, which has started negatively affecting the world. Meanwhile, the US President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) asks Ethan to help the government in controlling the Entity. She doesn’t want him to destroy the Entity as she believes it can destroy cyberspace.

Mumbaikars are often seen complaining about the BMC (Brihanmumbai Mahanagar Corporation) when it comes to running the city. While these criticisms might be valid, it is their poor workers who are always at the receiving end since they become the face of BMC at ground level. Debutant filmmaker Shivraj Waichal’s Ata Thambaycha Naay! is a much deserved tribute to them and their painstaking efforts to keep the city functioning. But the movie goes much beyond displaying their difficult lives. It is based on a true and heartwarming incident in the lives of a few BMC workers in 2016, although the film features fictitious characters and their sub-stories. The Assistant Municipal Commissioner Uday Shirurkar (Ashutosh Gowariker) of BMC decides to get a group of its Class IV workers complete their 10th standard. They had to drop out of school due to some reason of the other. Shirurkar not only decides to provide them education free of cost at a night school but, on top of that, promises to pay them a remuneration for the same along with a chance of salary hike.

The bug of sequels hit mainstream Hindi cinema over a decade ago and it has remained till now and there is no reason why it would disappear in the near future. The latest to join the bandwagon is filmmaker Raj Kumar Gupta’s Raid 2, a sequel to its interesting and well-made Raid (2018). Although there has been a long list of sequels, most of them have not been able to justify their existence. Raid 2, thankfully, isn’t one of them. The corrupt minister Rameshwar Singh aka Tauji (Saurabh Shukla) is sentenced to jail after being exposed of corruption by the honest Income Tax Commissioner Amay Patnaik (Ajay Devgn) at the end of the first film. Raid 2 starts seven years later in 1989. By this time, Patnaik has faced numerous transfers for troubling the powerful. He is now posted in a town in Rajasthan where he exposes the royal Raja Kunwar (Govind Namdeo).

Director Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar’s Marathi movie Devmanus is the official remake of directors Jaspal Singh Sandhu and Rajeev Barnwal’s Sanjay Mishra and Neena Gupta starrer 2022 Hindi movie Vadh (which this reviewer hasn’t seen). The movie is a fine emotional crime drama. The story takes place in Kopargaon in Maharashtra. Senior citizen couple Keshav (Mahesh Manjrekar) and his wife Laxmi (Renuka Shahane) are staying alone after their son Madhav (Ruturaj Shinde) migrates to the US and gets married over there without their consent. Keshav is a tuition teacher cum farmer, who somehow managed to gather loan to get Madhav educated in the US. Along with the bank, he also had to take money from the local contractor and an evil goon Dilip (Siddharth Bodke) while mortgaging their ancestral house.

Filmmaker Pratik Rajen Kothari’s Gujarati movie Auntypreneur has an unusual title. A person who carries out business is called entrepreneur. So, when an aunty becomes an entrepreneur, she becomes an ‘Auntypreneur’, as per the movie. What sets the protagonist of the film aside is the necessity angle of her business. Auntypreneur takes place in today’s times in Malad, Mumbai in Poonam Co-Operative Housing Society. Jaswanti Gangani aka Jasu (Supriya Pathak Kapur) stays with her young tenant Raju (Parikshit Tamaliya) and maid Manda (Margi Desai). Her son Bhavik (Ojas Rawal) has been in Dallas, US, where he is doing very well. Jasu once imagines her housing society about to be demolished by the municipality in her dream. Unfortunately, her nightmare comes true as the municipality gives an eviction notice to the CHS. It says that their builder hasn’t paid property tax worth Rs. 1.96 crores and has run away outside the country. Hence, if they don’t pay up the amount within four months, their building will be demolished.

Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Savitri Phule were a social reformer couple who worked for the causes like eradication of caste discrimination, women education, widow remarriage, etc. Filmmmaker Ananth Narayan Mahadevan’s Phule is a biopic on their lives and struggles. Jyotirao is married off to Savitri when they were kids, as per the traditions and customs of that era. They both belonged to the (so-called) lower caste. Jyotirao starts educating his wife from an early age as he strongly believed that it’s important for women to be educated. The movie starts off in 1848 when Jyotirao (Pratik Gandhi) and Savitri (Patralekhaa) are already grown-ups and working towards education of girls from their neighbourhood in Pune (then Poona). The two face strong opposition from the (so-called) upper caste people of that time.

Memory loss or issues with memory is an unusual problem. More than the person suffering from the same, it affects those around him or her. This is the base of writer and director Suman Ghosh’s Bengali film Puratawn (English title: The Ancient). The movie revolves around Ritika (Ritupatna Sengupta), a woman working in the corporate sector in a high position. Her marriage with Rajeev (Indraneil Sengupta), a passionate photographer, is going through turbulence. She, along with Rajeev, visits her ancestral home in a small town in West Bengal where her mother Mrs Sen (Sharmila Tagore) lives, to celebrate the latter’s 80th birthday in a grand manner. But there is also another reason for Ritika’s visit. She and Rajeev wish to reveal to her that their marriage is going nowhere. However, after arriving at the ancestral house, Ritika is pained to know that her mother is facing memory issues. Now, she is more hesitant to tell her about her troubled marriage as she doesn’t know how she would take it.

Just last month, filmmaker Ram Madhvani came up with his Sony LIV web series The Waking of a Nation. It was based on the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and how General Dyer was dragged to the court for the same. Although it was inspired from C Sankaran Nair’s case that shook the British Empire after the massacre, it was a fictionalized version with a fictitious protagonist. Filmmaker Karan Tyagi’s Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Truth Of Jallianwala Bagh sees C Sankaran Nair himself fighting the case against the British Empire where he accuses the latter of a planned conspiracy in the form of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that killed more than a thousand Indians gathered at the site for a peaceful protest. Although Tyagi’s film also uses a lot of fiction, it is more impactful than The Waking of a Nation.