Rahul Desai

Jeevan Ya Bheema Con? is what happens when Delhi Belly tries (but fails) to be a Kunal Kemmu comedy from the 2010s. It’s the sort of chaotic middle-class gag that occasionally remembers that it’s a movie. It begins with the title itself: a play on the name of the government life-insurance scheme (Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojna), where the premise features broke characters called Jeevan, Yojana and Bheema stumbling through a last-ditch insurance con. Unfortunately, there’s nobody named Pradhan, Mantri and Jyoti — why stop halfway?

After straying far and wide into the golden fields of mediocrity, the 8-year-old Mirzapur franchise returns to the comforting folds of its past like an ex-lover aching to rekindle a lost romance. Mirzapur: The Movie erases memories of the doomed third season, doing a factory reset of a cinematic universe that had reached its natural demise. It places us bang in the middle of the famous Season 1 — back when all the primary characters were alive and perverse; back when the narrative was yet to become a pale imitation of itself; back when guns, gore, profanity and sex were the law of the land; back when emasculated men were still desperate for validation from toxic fathers and brothers; back when the heartland-porn-coded vibes of the Tripathi mansion was yet to be hijacked by multiple storylines and half-hearted wokeness.

If I were younger and brasher, I’d start this review with something as direct as: Gandhari is one of the worst Hindi films of the year. I’d rant about how it creates a world record for the number of scenes in which characters speak off-screen so as to hide the clunky exposition and dialogue added in post-production; how lip-syncing is a mythical concept; how this is salvage-job filmmaking at its peak. I’d go on about how the movie treats feminism, motherhood, child trafficking, gender-based violence, trauma and breathing as a smug SoBo aesthetic; how the phrase “my culture is not your costume” was invented for screenplays like these. I’d balk at the Do Patti-coded twists, disorienting music and editing, disjointed acting and disingenuous metaphors. I’d be outraged by the film’s Haseen Dillruba-coded lens of toxic love, where the scene of a husband and wife literally clobbering each other is scored to a romantic ballad: such a ‘punchy’ love language. I’d be angry to the point of incoherence, much like the film in question.

There’s something innately sincere about The Last Salute, a documentary about the 62-year-old marriage between the MiG-21 and the Indian Air Force (IAF). It revolves around the retirement of the iconic Soviet fighter jet in 2025, leading up to its farewell ceremony while telling its story through the lens of the chosen few who were qualified to fly them. “A Love letter to MiG-21” is part of the title, so it’s more of a personal ode than a formal chronicling; its reputation as “a flying coffin” is hastily dismissed and neatly glided over. It’s just like watching one partner say goodbye to another after a long and eventful relationship, choosing to remember them fondly despite all the flaws and illnesses. Given that it’s from the creator of the recent Kargil series, Operation Safed Sagar, perhaps this apolitical and isolated wistfulness isn’t surprising.

Babita Singh Reporting is about a suspended sub-inspector who visits her hometown and gets obsessed with the murder case of a childhood friend. The town has secrets, sinister undercurrents and suspicious characters: a grieving wife with burn-marks on her hand, a resentful brother, an ex-flame with bruises on her face, a shady driver with a scar, the mystery of a red car, a nosy neighbour who knows more than he should. The miffed locals taunt the officer as the “sympathy hire”. She goes through some life-or-death experiences. A man unleashes his vicious dogs on her; another threatens sexual abuse; she is brutally attacked by a gang of junkies; she smashes a car into a pile of bricks; she climbs into the heart of a Ravana effigy minutes before a Dussehra blaze.

In response to classicist Emily Wilson’s rant about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, someone on X (formerly Twitter) quoted fabled film critic Roger Ebert about the intent of storytelling: “a movie should be evaluated for what it is and how it fully achieves the director’s vision”. How it’s basically unfair to pan movies for not being what you wish they were. Ebert’s opinion is often the crutch that many cinephiles and professional critics lean on to justify their moral stances on provocateurs like Sandeep Reddy Vanga: “judge Animal and Kabir Singh for what they are, not what you ‘wokes’ want them to be”. It’s a ready-made theory for moviegoers who have no other way to validate their kinks for stylised sexism and tortured megalomaniacs. They see it as a reflection of the world, conveniently ignoring the makers’ opportunistic fetishisations of it.

It’s easy to process the crushing familiarity of a movie like Keu Bole Biplobi Keu Bole Dakat (“Some call him a Revolutionary, some call him a Dacoit”). Mainstream Indian cinema has long run out of ways to stage populist fiction about swaggering vigilantes meting out their own versions of justice. So storytellers often choose the crutch of nonfiction. For instance, KBBKBD is a big fat superstar vehicle posing as a historical action drama. The figure it’s about — in this case, the controversial revolutionary Ananta Singh — is just a narrative vessel. The framework exists almost entirely so that Bengali superstar Jeet can flex his muscles as a Robin Hood-coded rebel and righteous superhero who fights for the oppressed in a broken system.

It’s not often you go into a film blind — and come out blinder. But Dial 1975 is that rare Hindi thriller. When you have an intriguing logline like “a gripping race to control India’s first wireless telephone takes place during the Emergency,” it takes some doing to make the furthest possible iteration of it. There were times I had to look up the premise again to make sure I wasn’t watching the wrong film. A semblance of a storyline pops up every now and then, and I can’t be sure, but it’s a pot-of-gold plot featuring an ex-soldier-turned-baddie (Kay Kay Menon), an ex-con-turned-goodie (Pravessh Rana), the goodie’s girlfriend (Kirti Kulhari), a bag full of cash (currency notes), missing tapes, a German guy with the precious invention, and a battle between government loyalists and rebel factions to procure said phone.