Priyanka Roy

With Digger, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, a multiple Oscar winner (it was five at last count), once again ventures into the territory he is known for — his visceral, psychological filmmaking style exploring gritty realism and raw emotional vulnerability, painful existentialism, all-out redemption, interlinked fates and sweeping stakes. In Digger, he has Tom Cruise for company, with the two taking a wild swing that veers dangerously between ambitious and outlandish. The time is right, more than ever, for a satire on climate change, but Digger is too overstuffed and oddball (not in a good way) to make an impression with lasting impact.

My five minutes of joy — and, more importantly, of peace — are when I lay my head on my furry baby’s stomach and talk her through my day. The highs, the lows, the mundane and the momentous… I talk to her about everything. She responds with a few grunts (if I am lucky), but I am mostly greeted with an unstifled yawn. But her eyes tell me she understands. That she shares and cares. That alone is enough to help me power through yet another day.

Netflix has made a killing out of Harlan Coben. At last count, the American writer had as many as 13 titles running on the streaming platform, with each generating massive watch hours. Case in point: The adaptation of Coben’s I Will Find You, released this year, accumulated 619 million hours watched (equating to over 112.9 million views) during its historic run on Netflix. Coben’s writing is formulaic and functional, with many describing it as “airport fiction”, the kind that employs relentless plot twists at the cost of literary depth. But in a world ruled by decreasing attention span, low patience for world-building and the preference for page-turning, high-velocity reading, Coben thrives.

At what point does justice spill over into becoming revenge? When does “due process of law” degenerate into meaning legal loopholes to be taken advantage of by the perpetrator? How do law enforcers take the law into their own hands, aided by the footnote that the “law has to do its duty”? How does one decide what is within the “daayra” of the system and what isn’t? These are just a few of the multiple questions — many uncomfortable, most for which no one can really have an emphatic answer — that Meghna Gulzar throws at the viewer in her latest film. Daayra, which translates to “limit”, explores what the law really means in a country where most don’t have the patience for the deliverance of justice, living as we are within a system that delays — and often denies — justice. Which side of the divide are we on? More importantly, can we — and should we — pick a side?

Kiran Rao is a talented filmmaker. She is also an incredibly clever storyteller. The latter is evident, and palpably so, in her segment of Lust Stories 3. The second film in Netflix’s latest instalment of its four-in-one anthology — that has looked at relationships, sex and (mostly female) desire through an often cheeky, mostly empathetic and sometimes outlandish lens, over three outings — is the one that gets the memo most accurately. Rao’s film doesn’t have a name. None of the four in Lust Stories 3 does, except being interconnected by certain timelines, which may or may not intersect. They also may or may not make sense.

The concept of CCTV cameras doesn’t exist in the world of Haiwaan. Neither does logic, rationale, common sense or coherence. One could still overlook the absence of all these elements if this was a Priyadarshan comedy. But Haiwaan is supposedly a cat-and-mouse game, a play of good vs evil, a thriller which is meant to keep its players on its toes and the minds of its audience ticking. But this is a film that mistakes dumbness for dread and incomprehensible for acuity. In terms of this genre alone, Priyadarshan has done more, and done it much better. Haiwaan is, after all, a remake of the man’s own 2016 Malayalam thriller Oppam. And even though it is an almost faithful adaptation of its core material, Haiwaan feels empty and tiring, which Oppam certainly didn’t. The presence of big stars and better production values doesn’t cover up for the tedious slog this movie is.

Before the release of Mirzapur: The Movie, a number of questions popped up in my mind. The most important among them being: how does one view a popular, pulsating world and its indelible, iconic characters through a new lens, having journeyed with them over three blockbuster seasons? Mirzapur: The Movie — based, of course, on the streaming winner which broke out as soon as it dropped its Season 1 in November 2018 and has since become a pop-culture phenomenon — ushers you in with a feel which is familiar yet fresh, taking us into the origins of this gritty, violent world and the beginnings of its memorable players. This is a film that has been created purely in the service of its fans. For a large part, it fulfils that promise, but one also feels that the bite and bhaukaal has gone missing in this tempered-down big-screen outing.

A fundamental problem of Kanika Dhillon’s writing — and that is particularly evident in the case of the films in which there is a raging female protagonist — is that the ideas burst with immense possibilities, but the execution (and that stems from the root of its weak writing itself) is far from effective. Dhillon focuses on flawed, unapologetic women thrust into circumstances which often place them in a do-or-die decision-making pivot, but the result is more of an unhinged chaotic mess than a carefully-built complex quagmire. This is especially true of Kangana Ranaut’s Judgementall Hai Kya, in which Dhillon explored gaslighting, but the film’s convoluted look at mental health came in for much criticism. Or for that matter, Do Patti, with Kriti Sanon featuring in a double role, that felt like a superficial, glossy take on domestic abuse.