Rahul Desai

Termite, a 30-minute short, is documentary maker Shaunak Sen’s first fiction film. But it’s hard to tell the difference. He treats life as the introverted ally of storytelling; his nonfiction often designs the truth of an invisibilised India. It finds a controlled language to present what already exists. While Cities of Sleep traced the gloomy lyricism of Delhi’s insurgent sleeper communities, the Oscar-nominated All That Breathes shadowed two Muslim brothers who run a bird clinic in old Delhi. The camera — steady, studied, often static — reframes the people as characters, spaces as settings, and ecological relationships as cultural metaphors. Termite looks like it’s ‘following’ two men in the capital, too. A Tamil migrant, Ajith (Valavane Koumarane), shares a rooftop room with his Muslim friend, Saud (Faisal Malik); they spend tired evenings drinking tea and passively watching television.

If there were a world in which simply “Why?” could pass off as a professional film review, I’d happily live in it. But here I am instead, wondering how to do my job, after 164 minutes of precisely the kind of movie that makes Bollywood everyone’s favourite punching bag. Priyadarshan’s Haiwaan, a remake of Priyadarshan’s Oppam, is inane in so many ways that one is spoiled for choice. I had vowed to be kinder and calmer to bad thrillers; it’s easy to be entertaining when the only motive is to surprise the audience. But this kindness and calmness disappeared two scenes in, when the blind protagonist sings a happy-go-lucky song and dances optimistically on a ferry to Mumbai like a 1980s hero striving in the wrong decade; this is moments after he is introduced as a part-time wrestler, guitarist and all-round truster who has just fixed his sister’s marriage. It’s hard not to be defeated by the delusionally dated tone before the premise even begins.

Based on Aravind Adiga’s novel of the same name, Ben Rekhi’s Last Man In Tower is defined by its curious relationship with storytelling. It starts out like a vintage Bombay movie with ‘characters’ and designs of a scrappy fairytale about the old guard holding down the brick fort in the face of rampant gentrification. There’s a sense of community and colour. It’s 2010, the setting is a crumbling colony called Vishram (“Rest”) in Mumbai’s suburb of Vakola, and the residents are diverse: the touchy Punjabi lady with a neurodivergent son, the generous old Catholic couple, the fiery single mom accused of ‘communism,’ the mild-mannered building secretary, the lone Muslim family, the street-smart hustler, and the single working girl who becomes the subject of gossip for having a sex life. Retired teacher Yogesh Mishra (Manoj Bajpayee) is the fair and level-headed patriarch of this unofficial family; he tutors the kids and schools the adults.

You can tell when a film-maker returns to their comfort zone. There’s something dry and unfussy about the storytelling, as if to say: No big deal, I know what I’m doing. There’s a conventional template and familiar tropes, but the padding is full of little observations, themes, subplots and set-pieces that don’t call for attention. The treatment is casual, confident. It’s almost like watching a tennis player competing on their favourite court after a while: all muscle memory and twitches. That’s director Tigmanshu Dhulia’s relationship with the hinterland crime drama. More than a decade after Paan Singh Tomar, his latest, Ghamasaan, tells a cop-and-dacoit tale in Bundelkhand of the mid-2000s. It’s soothing to see how relaxed the movie is. The prolific Arshad Warsi plays Maharaj (based on Dadua, the actual ‘Veerappan of Bundelkhand’), a god-fearing jungle king who terrorises villages and slaughters traitors; Warsi has been enjoying quite a second wind lately, and regardless of the tone he occupies — whether sullen cop, comedic gangster or serious don — he always brings something new to the table. The reliable Pratik Gandhi plays IPS Aditya Singh, the all-business outsider tasked with capturing Maharaj and his trigger-happy gang.

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.