Rahul Desai

Welcome to the Jungle is that attention-seeking kid in class who loves playing the fool so much that not even he can tell when he accidentally sounds funny and smart. Ahmed Khan’s crowded action-comedy is staged as the third film in the Welcome franchise, but it’s really just Tropic Thunder given the Farah Khan treatment. Ben Stiller’s 2008 satire about four vain actors who inadvertently invite real-world dangers during a guerilla film shoot in a jungle is ‘adapted’ into a Bollywood caper about an incompetent movie crew who get mistaken for the Indian army during a patriotic shoot in a crisis-stricken border village. The meta-ness is the main character, of course. There’s Akshay Kumar self-referencing his Khiladi and Mohra days, Suniel Shetty named ‘Anna’ Shetty, Raveena Tandon taunting Kumar for “20 years of neglection,” Arshad Warsi paraphrasing his own Jolly LLB lines, Jackie Shroff as a kohl-eyed terrorist, Farida Jalal playing a dramatic old mother India whose ‘dialogue’ nobody understands, Jacqueline Fernandez as an airheaded blonde, and so on.

With Panchayat going downhill, you’d think Gram Chikitsalay would be looking to forge its own identity after acting like a stalker in its first season. But the essence of “TVF Rural Universe” goes beyond the template of an idealistic urban character arriving to work in a ramshackle village full of idiosyncratic residents, aggressively colourful dialects, mundane conflicts and backward mindsets. The shared formula is more of an excuse to make the same series twice over. It’s a bit like watching a famous South Indian director making his Bollywood debut by remaking — or culturally adapting — his biggest hit. The remake always looks more rehearsed, functional, designed, and bereft of spontaneity.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the hit of the year, Curry Barker’s Obsession. The horror film revolves around a lonely young man named Bear whose desperate wish — that his pretty coworker Nikki falls for him — comes true with terrifying consequences. The predatory entitlement of his wish turns her into a monstrous and obsessive girlfriend who loves without autonomy. It’s a neat subversion of the date-movie template. But I kept wondering why the movie left me unaffected. Worse, I didn’t find the mutating Nikki so shocking or scary. While walking out, it struck me. I realised that mainstream Hindi cinema has normalised women (in love) written by men for decades. I see an agency-free Nikki on screen in a flashy Bollywood entertainer every other week. Except, they’re presented as sane and new-age women by Bear-coded makers without a hint of satire. In other words, Cocktail 2 ruined Obsession for me before it was even made.

Disclosure Day hits the ground running. Walking is not its style. We’re flung into a story that’s already in motion. It’s a bit like joining a film midway through: no context, no beginning or warning. Catch me if you can, it seems to say. A young cybersecurity specialist (Josh O’Connor) has something in his bag that a shadowy supervillain (Colin Firth) and his deep-state corporation wants. They’ve abducted said hero’s girlfriend (Eve Hewson) to make the trade at a wrestling arena. But this hero, Daniel, somehow escapes with both girlfriend and bag intact. (If the baddies were competent, the story would’ve ended in a minute). So Daniel was being chased, stays chased, and remains on the run. A meteorologist with psychic powers, Margaret (Emily Blunt), joins him along the way.

Two teen-aged siblings wait at a bus stop on a rainy day. The sister is on her way to sing at a radio station; her brother accompanies (and annoys) her. They are offered a lift from two strangers in a fiat. They accept, but do not return. The panicked parents inform the police. The investigation is led by rookie SI Jayprakash; the kidnapping case soon morphs into a gruesome murder case and a nationwide manhunt. This search is intercut with the ‘adventures’ of Babu and Rajjo, the two criminals, in the days leading up to the abduction. These are separate timelines a week apart, but they run parallel to each other in how the police trace the escalating journey of the killers; the present must catch up with the past before the crime enters the future. Either way, they become a definitive moment in history.

A 95-year-old Sikh patriarch (Naseeruddin Shah) quivers on his deathbed. He mutters what sounds like gibberish: random words and incoherent ramblings, delusions dancing with reality. The only thing clear is his desperate desire to visit the pre-Partition Punjab he grew up in. His adult sons put it down to his dementia; they wait for the inevitable. But the old man refuses to go, almost as if he were tricking his life into flashing before his eyes. These flashes, though, feature nothing from his 78 long years in India; they feature everything from his first 17 in ‘Pakistan’. His grandson (Diljit Dosanjh), a London-based NRI who rushes to him, is the only one he responds to. He’s the only one willing to look for a breathing tale within the debris of fractured memory. A portrait of love in the time of severance emerges: his college days as Keenu (a soulful Vedang Raina), a girl named Afsana (Sharvari), furtive glances, covert meet-cutes, his mediocre Urdu poetry, dreams interrupted, a romance rushed by history, and a love story suddenly reduced to faith and fate.

If I had an Indian Rupee for every neo-noir crime drama that features a haunted-and-disgraced cop with a drinking problem, buried trauma, a grieving subordinate and a gloomy colour palette, I’d be wealthy enough to not care about the weak conversion rate when I buy currency for a foreign trip. The eponymous protagonist of Brown is so brooding that she’d give Dracula a pale-faced complex. Rita Brown (Karisma Kapoor) rolls her own cigarettes for good measure; every puff she takes is punctuated with loud crackles of burning and inhalation so that we hear the emptiness of her soul. She misses her dead husband (Shaan) and dead unborn child.

You know how, in the middle of a film, a character suddenly does something impulsive and exaggerated and totally out of whack, and you instantly realise it’s a dream sequence? It’s not a great gimmick and you can see through it, so when the character wakes up, you can’t help but accuse the movie of cheating. The whole of Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai feels like that dream sequence. Except nobody wakes up and it’s endless; there is no movie at all. Anything happens, anyone happens, every moment unfolds like an unhinged prank. It’s also the kind of hallucinatory dream one might have after drunkenly rewatching Biwi No. 1 (1999) in 2026 and wondering what an update would look like. The title of this film is a line from a ‘playful’ song sung by a naughty husband cheating on his traditional wife with a model: “if I’m young, I will love”. If I’m a man, I will stray.