Priyanka Roy

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.

For multiple reasons, it is difficult to write about a film like Housefull 5. The first and the most simple reason is that it is not a film. This is a string of perverse jokes, lewd gags, lame dialogues and loud decibels that play out in a loop over a mostly tortuous 166 minutes. Second, the makers are delusional enough to think this is a film, because of which they have released two versions — ‘A’ and ‘B’ — both of which have the same beginning and middle but different endings. Having endured almost three hours of Housefull A — with no intention of watching Housefull B, even if held at gunpoint — I can safely say that even if 20 more versions of Housefull 5 are released, each of them will be unwatchable.

Diverse — and divisive — worlds collide in Stolen, a film, that powered by its messy core, rips apart the fault lines in society, exposing the ever-growing chasm of class and caste and illustrates how a certain sense of redoubtability has now become the domain of the privileged. Horrific on many levels — though it doesn’t belong to the horror genre — Stolen is one of those films that you won’t be able to tear your eyes away from, immersive as it is in terms of its plot and players as well as in what seems like a narrative terrain that isn’t. That familiarity, unfortunately, stems from the fact that we hear and read about such stories every day — mob fury, kangaroo courts and a system that turns a blind eye and ear to the underprivileged. To sum it up, the lack of empathy is not unfamiliar in this country.

If there was a true-crime embodiment of the saying ‘so near yet so far’, it would be the case that shook America in the early 1980s and continues to intrigue, baffle and scare the world even today. Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, Netflix’s potent examination of how seven people in Chicago dropped dead after popping pills of Extra Strength Tylenol — a seemingly innocuous pain-relief medication — is a jaw-dropping watch, which, even if you are familiar with the case, has an ace up its sleeve. The three-episode series is the only one, among scores of other programmes on the case through the decades, that manages to get prime suspect (and, in many ways, the only suspect) James Lewis on camera. Lewis, who died in 2023 shortly after (nonchalantly) telling his side of the story, was suspected of picking bottles of Tylenol off shelves, lacing some of the pills with potassium cyanide, resealing them and putting them back in the market.