Priyanka Roy

Putting ‘blockbuster’ in ‘summer blockbuster’ in the way few films can is F1 — The Movie. This high-octane, classic underdog story, stylishly acted and seamlessly picturised, is just the adrenaline shot that the big screen needed. Dominating cinema space this weekend, big movie comfort food rarely felt as enticing as F1 which may run on familiar fuel but delivers huge dollops of entertainment. Powering this rise-against-all-odds story is Brad Pitt. At 61, Pitt fires on all cylinders, showing us yet again why he and Tom Cruise, a year older than him, are indisputably the last great movie stars. That F1 is directed by Joseph Kosinki, the man who helmed Cruise’s 2022 summer blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick — the film that brought theatres back into business globally after the pandemic — is only one of the many commonalties that their careers have shared. In the late 2010s, Kosinski was developing a racing film with both Pitt and Cruise set to star — and do their own driving. Earlier this week, Cruise landed up at the London premiere of F1 to support his Interview with the Vampire co-star. Needless to say, in its thrills and chills and its need-for-speed DNA, the shadow of Cruise looms large over F1.

In an opening flashback, Carmen aka Carmy — played by the irrepressible Jeremy Allen White — is seen telling his late brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) about his vision for a restaurant. He says: “We could make it calm, we could make it delicious, we could play good music, people would want to come in there and celebrate… we could make people happy.” Carmy’s recipe for a winner of a restaurant pretty much sums up what The Bear has meant to us over the last three seasons — a series, that true to its audacious and intense DNA, throws its players into the frying pan of adversity, but the fact that they come up trumps at the end, is inspiring. In short, it is an uplifting experience. The Bear has always “made people happy”. Season 4 of the much-loved and highly feted series is now streaming on JioHotstar, and it hits the ground running, taking off from where the third season had ended. The reason could possibly be that they were shot back-to-back. It is a more confident and calmer season than its immediate predecessor, though the 20-episode arc across the two seasons — with a ‘to be continued’ thrown in — means that they are essentially two sides of the same coin.

There is comfort in familiarity, but there is also fatigue. Season 4 of Panchayat is a stark example of the same. Operating within the confines of Phulera — the tiny hamlet somewhere in North India whose nooks and corners now feel like home — Panchayat 4 reintroduces us to its quirky bunch of characters who have increasingly become like family. But while there is a certain delight in getting back to the people and places that have become part of our lives over the last four seasons, the lack of momentum this time around does compel us to feel that Panchayat has run its course. In an OTT age dominated by blood and gore and twisted relationship dramas, the advent of Panchayat five years ago felt like a breath of fresh air. That it arrived during the pandemic — a time of uncertainty where we were clutching on to anything that felt even remotely comforting — made this series an instant clutter-breaker and, by extension, a bona fide hit strong enough to spawn a few seasons. But what started as a delightful fish-out-of-water story of a young man (Abhishek Tripathi, played by Jitendra Kumar aka Jeetu) who takes up the low-paying job of a panchayat secretary as a stop-gap arrangement before he gets back to the big city to pursue his dreams, but gradually learns to warm to its eclectic residents, has now completely shifted focus to the petty (and both funny and unfunny) politics in Phulera.

Sitaare Zameen Par is also refreshing in terms of how a Bollywood superstar — an almost deified being for most of our audiences — isn’t afraid to poke fun at himself. Aamir’s height (or rather, the lack of it) is mined for laughs, and there is also a reference to his age. The man has always led the way, and with Sitaare Zameen Par, he gives us the vintage Aamir that we have always loved watching. Honest, emotional, fun and meaningful. There isn’t anything in Sitaare Zameen Par, however, that we hadn’t seen in its trailer. Aamir plays Gulshan Arora, the assistant coach of the Delhi basketball team, who after a physical altercation with his boss and a run-in with cops, is sent to do community service for three months. That means heading to the city’s Sarvodaya Centre to train a bunch of neurodivergent players for an upcoming tournament. While most of us tend to group those with physical or mental disabilities under a generic umbrella, this film presents them as people with individual quirks and personalities who operate within their ‘own normal’.

Since its release, Materialists has stirred a fair amount of conversation, inviting diverse interpretations of its theme, tone and treatment. A recent article in Indiewire goes as far as to state that the film not only subverts the conventional romance genre but is also director Celine Song’s takedown of the transactional nature of Hollywood itself, a ‘business’ where commerce weighs heavy on art; one in which cinema has largely been reduced to an assembly-line product that needs to ‘check boxes’. Where films are no longer films, but generically referred to as content. It is an interesting way to read the film, like many of the other exegesis of Materialists that have sprung up over the last week. At its core, Materialists poses the age-old question of what makes two people come together in a marriage — love or security. Song uses an unexpected and clever sequence set in prehistoric times to frame her film’s central theme, that of romantic relationships being either transactional or emotional, or often both.

The Survivors, the new six-episode Australian miniseries on Netflix, will remind you of Big Little Lies. People gone missing, secrets held close both in the past and present, deaths hanging over a closed-knit group of residents, and a fresh murder that not only triggers old memories but also reopens an old case. But unlike Big Little Lies, when it comes to crafting a compelling mystery with engaging characters, The Survivors just about passes muster. Based on the eponymously named book by Jane Harper, the action in The Survivors takes place in the fictional Tasmanian town of Evelyn Bay, the hometown of Kieran (Charlie Vickers), that he visits — girlfriend Mia (Yerin Ha) and their infant girl in tow — to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the night of a terrible storm. It was an unfortunate event in which Kieran himself nearly drowned, while his brother and a friend died trying to save him. Memories of that dreadful night — and its aftermath — loom large over Evelyn Bay, with most residents believing that Kieran was to blame. In fact, the young man’s mother Verity (Robyn Malcolm), having lost a son, also holds Kieran responsible for the deaths.

Rana Naidu is a series about family ties (and often, the lack of it). With the first season being semi-criticised for its overt violence and depiction of gratuitous sex, Season 2 of the Netflix show sees its makers go slightly easy on the former and mostly do away with the latter. The result is eight episodes that perhaps reach out to a wider demographic, but a series that has lost much of its bite. And we don’t mean just in terms of the (rather welcome) clampdown on cuss words. What Rana Naidu does carry forward from one season to the next is the absence of nuance. This is an example of writing, directing and acting which is pretty much on the nose. Subtlety has been a bad word in the world of Rana Naidu, and it continues to be so. Rana Naidu is an adaptation of the American TV show Ray Donovan. A strongly written and stylishly executed series that kept viewers more or less hooked, despite its shortcomings, Ray Donovan benefited greatly from superlative acts by Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight, playing a father and son who cruise through the world of crime with a prickly, unresolved dynamic hanging like the sword of Damocles over their heads.

Set in the same twisty world of the M. Night Shyamalan classic Sixth Sense and Gothika, starring Halle Berry, but far inferior in terms of storytelling and character-building, Tyler Perry’s Straw, nevertheless, makes for a semi-engaging watch. Powered by a central act from Taraji P. Henson, whose character of an underprivileged single mother struggling to stay afloat in a world that is insensitive — and, more pathetically, blind — to her pain and plight, the 105-minute film touches upon some pertinent issues, even as it shows Janiyah’s (Henson) world unravelling in the course of a single day. Those familiar with Perry’s style of filmmaking would know that everything that the actor-director says is always on the nose. Racial discrimination, the trials of the working class, the problems that those who are failed by the system face on a daily basis… Straw touches upon all of them, but with the kind of heavy-handed treatment and dense literal rather than metaphorical depiction that we have seen in Perry’s previous overwrought dramas.