Priyanka Roy

If you have to cast someone as a 60-plus rock star who was once known as the “Wizard of Wiggle,” had 38 No. 1 hits in the ‘90s and used to date Cindy Crawford among many others — and now runs a (ahem!) cult — there is really only one name that comes to mind: John Malkovich. Besides being one of Hollywood’s most mystifying stars, Malkovich,71, has directed a play in Latvian, designed his own fashion lines, and even starred in a movie called Being John Malkovich that explores entering his mind. He has participated in shooting a film designed to be viewed in the year 2115, a project that highlights his unusual approach to filmmaking. His involvement in Being John Malkovich, he has claimed, was a deliberate choice, as he wanted to be involved in the “weirdest Hollywood movie ever made”. He has also famously said that “he believes he is the least eccentric person he knows.”

Remaking The Good Wife was never a good idea. Having a poorly-made second season follow up what was at best an average Season 1 has been disastrous. The Trial, that marked Kajol’s web series debut, recently dropped its sophomore season — making for six episodes of unnecessary melodrama, surface-level courtroom action and a soap opera feel to what should have been a gripping, intense legal thriller. Streaming on JioHotstar, Season 2 takes place three months after the first season ended (which was in 2023). The Sengupta couple — Noyonika (Kajol) and Rajiv (Jisshu Sengupta) are caught in an increasingly fractured relationship. Noyonika is now a much sought-after lawyer while Rajiv is trying to clean his scandal-ridden image by joining politics (but, of course!). Noyonika’s colleague Vishal (Alyy Khan) still holds a candle for her, even as their law firm acquires a new partner (Param Munjal, played by Karanvir Sharma) who has his own rules of how to keep the system going, thus disrupting the balance of power. Malini (Sheeba Chaddha), the Khanna in Khanna & Chaubey, feels increasingly threatened enough to want to start her own firm, seeking Noyonika’s allyship.

Anurag Kashyap attempts a return to form with Nishaanchi. The film — with a title that translates roughly to a ‘slingshot sniper’ — is not only a throwback to the director’s audacious, gritty, earthy style of filmmaking but is also an ode to the kind of films that Kashyap — a knee-high movie buff from small-town Gorakhpur — grew up watching. Kashyap marries the raw gangsterism of some of his most seminal films — Satya and Shool (which he wrote) to Black Friday and Gangs of Wasseypur (that he directed) — to the elements of Hindi cinema, both mainstream and parallel, that were rampant in the 1970s and ’80s. Many of them may have been stereotypes, but they also formed and subsequently defined the pop-cultural fabric of the cinema of that era.

For someone who rarely (if at all) cracks a smile, Aryan Khan does have a wicked sense of humour. Swinging wildly between spoof, satire, self-referential and self-awareness is Shah Rukh Khan’s son’s directorial debut The Ba***ds of Bollywood. Playing out over seven episodes, this Netflix series is a cheeky, and in parts courageous, look at the bad, mad, rad world of Hindi cinema that the 27-year-old Khan scion has grown up in. The workings of Bollywood, including what transpires on its fringes, has been explored and presented in various ways in the past. More recent examples include the incisive ticking time-bomb approach of Zoya Akhtar’s excellent debut film Luck By Chance, and the historically sweeping semi-biographical treatment adopted by Vikramaditya Motwane in his immensely watchable web series Jubilee. The Ba***ds of Bollywood — while borrowing a bit from both and others in the genre — takes the informed decision of veering more towards Farah Khan’s wildly entertaining Om Shanti Om, a film headlined by SRK, that both spoofed Bollywood and celebrated it.

Deliciously sinister and delectably unhinged, Fresh is a commentary on the perils of modern dating, with a refreshingly original take on the splatter genre. This 2022 film, available for streaming on JioHotstar, marks the debut of Mimi Cave (who has since gone on to direct this year’s middling Nicole Kidman thriller Holland), and manages to winningly (at least for the most part) be a dark comedy, a feminist tale and a horror fest at the same time. Fresh begins in a way that most films on modern-day urban loneliness do. Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is striking, sharp and smart, but doesn’t seem to have much luck in the dating department. With almost no family to call her own, it is her closest pal Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs) that Noa leans on emotionally. A few days after a particularly bad first date, Noa bumps into a charming stranger (Steve, played by Sebastian Stan) in a supermarket aisle. Numbers are exchanged, a few fun dates follow and before we know it, Noa is hopelessly charmed by the disarming Steve, who claims to be a doctor specialising in ‘reconstructive surgery’. More on that later.

The real and the magical collide pretty early in Jugnuma. Translating roughly to ‘firefly’ (jugnu) ’tale’ (nama), the sophomore directorial of National Award-winning filmmaker Raam Reddy is distinguished by a surreal yet warm moodiness. It commences with a single continuous shot. One that defines the rest of this film which is quite unlike anything the Indian space has seen. Dev (Manoj Bajpayee) walks out of his British-styled bungalow that breaks through the mist-capped hills somewhere in the northern part of the country. The camera feverishly follows his back as he makes his way to the outhouse in front, nodding a greeting to those who come within his eye view. Once inside the outhouse, he carefully slips on what look like a pair of giant feathered wings, walks out to the edge of a wooden board jutting out of a cliff and jumps off it. A few seconds later, we see Dev’s silhouette, the wings attached to his back, gloriously ‘flying’ around. It is a beginning that immediately arrests attention, making you want to know more, even as you are entranced by the mesmerising and mellifluous atmospherics of the film.

Think of the worst film you have ever watched. Now multiply that by the biggest number you can think of. Baaghi 4 is that film, and somehow even that math falls short of describing what a mangled (pun fully intended) mess this movie is. However bloody you thought this film was going to be, to whatever extent you assumed this film would be a brain-dead watch — Baaghi 4 surpasses all expectations. Of course, not in a good way. Blood banks in Mumbai and creativity in Bollywood have run dry, both courtesy Baaghi 4. Granted that the DNA of the Baaghi films is mind-numbing action with very little space for nuance or story. But the fourth instalment is an all-round torture fest with nothing to redeem it. Red paint flows with abandon as humans are killed like cockroaches on screen, but it is you the viewer who bleeds in your seat (my eyes! my eyes!) in a nearly empty theatre.

Picture this: A cup of steaming hot chocolate in hand, you snuggle up in your warm quilt on your favourite couch by the window and watch the rains hit the greens outside making it even more verdant. That same fuzzy feeling of familiarity and comfort is what you experience when you watch The Thursday Murder Club. Based on the best-selling 2020 whodunit by Richard Osman (who has gone on to write a few more in the series), The Thursday Murder Club takes you into the world of old-school sleuthing. One which relies on both smarts and intellect to fit together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to solve more than one murder, without having to rely on Gen-Z-coded cinema loaded with high-octane car chases and gravity-defying action sequences. If one were to quote a journalistic analogy, The Thursday Murder Club is the equivalent of good ol’ shoe leather reporting.