Rahul Desai

When Chandrayaan-3 nailed the first-ever soft landing on the South Pole of the moon in 2023, all I could think of was the mad scramble of studios to secure the rights to ISRO’s remarkable feat. I could almost sense it happening in real time. It didn’t take long for the child-coded euphoria to make way for an adult-coded wariness — who’s going to pitch first? Who’s going to overcook the perfectly good story? Who’s going to make the unglamorous heroes speak to each other like human ChatGPT apps? It felt inevitable, given the tailor-made ingredients: science, space, patriotism, spaced-out patriotism, a budget less than Nolan’s Interstellar, New India, first-world villains, a moon that doesn’t resemble Swiss cheese. TVF wasn’t on my Creator bingo card, but their slate has often used popular appeal to conceal themes of social conservatism and compliance over the years. Ironically, the current ‘2016 viral trend’ would flash back to TVF as the first movers and harbingers of Indian web storytelling. But space is not their jam; the future is not their cup of (mainstream) tea.

The “Supreme” in Marty Supreme has dual connotations. The obvious one is that here’s an underdog hero who will stop at nothing to achieve sporting supremacy. Marty Mauser will be an anti-hero, a hustler, a fraud, a narcissist and whoever it takes to summon his destiny of being world champion. Usually, such protagonists have to overcome the system with talent and grit. Here, the talent and grit are almost incidental. It is assumed he has those, so he’d rather game the system in the language of those who run it. As a Jewish shoe salesman in 1950s New York in a post-Holocaust world, he is accustomed to selling his identity more than proving it. America and table tennis are merely his mediums to be seen; he is neither patriotic nor a purist. If he’s an allegory for the entitlement of US capitalism and the illusion of the American Dream — where he upends multiple lives and puts everyone at risk to get what he wants — so be it.

I have two core memories from the time of J.P. Dutta’s Border (1997), the era-altering Bollywood blockbuster that made national pride an innocent household emotion two years before the Kargil War. One: a talented classmate named Rohan won the singing competition the next three years in a row by nailing the anthem-coded hit “Sandese Aate Hai”. We often ended up crooning along like rogue choir vocalists. But his pre-teen voice never faltered, towering over the auditorium without needing to understand the lyrics. They were just musical words to us. The second memory is more haunting. The final montage of the film — where newly widowed women, penniless old parents and glum relatives wait in vain — left a lasting impression on me. Most of us had enjoyed the action sequences, bloodshed, martyr-like deaths and slow-mo courage up until that moment. To be hit with the sobering price of war felt like an out-of-syllabus chapter; the sadness had no sides. I did not expect a patriotic and violent war epic to close on a slightly reflective note.

Nia Dacosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple directly takes off from where Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025) left off. The setting is quarantined Britain, 28 full years after the Rage Virus — a mutated strain that transformed its victims into hyperaggressive zombie-like creatures — tore through the continent in 28 Days Later (2002). Few humans have survived. Young Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves the sheltered isle after the death of his cancer-riddled mother (Jodie Comer) to “come of age” on his own terms in the zombie-infested mainland. This film opens with him getting roped into the weird ‘gang’ that rescued him at the end of the last film — except they turn out to be a toxic Satanic cult run by a psychopath named Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell). Spike is too scared to escape the Jimmys, a group that spends their days skinning and killing survivors as a sacrifice to the devil. Parallely, a lonely Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who urged Spike to find his own way, forges an unlikely bond with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the Alpha leader who terrorised them not too long ago. It’s apparent that, at some point, the paths of the iodine-smothered orange-skinned doctor and a Jimmy’d Spike will cross. What’s not apparent is how a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller can be unexpectedly funny and profound at once: not spoofy-Shaun of the Dead funny, more like Tarantino-Spike-Lee-revisionism funny.

A Neeraj Pandey-created film or series comes with a specific aesthetic: neither television plus nor streaming pulp. Or perhaps both at once. To be fair, this treatment has remained consistent over the years. You know what to expect from the filmmaking: physical momentum is used to manufacture the illusion of narrative intellect. There are those long tracking shots of characters walking importantly from one space to another and one mood to another. The camera and background score move faster than the plot; they work overtime to defeat inertia and convey a sense of coolth and cleverness. Even if people are merely looking at one another, the lens rotates around their bodies in circles and sometimes follows their gaze as if there’s a reveal of Big Foot at the end of every shot. There’s the fake-flashback formula; an incomplete scene or conversation plays out at first only for the story to later show the full scene/conversation that conveniently omitted the twist. And there’s the ‘cultural’ colour-grading: the Middle East is yellow-sepia, Europe is blue, India is yellow-blue, Africa is green, the sky changes tones like an errant disco ball rather than AQI markers.

Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos is like that restless kid in school whose sense of humour is so niche and Hollywood-coded that he decides to employ Indian-ness as a punchline to impress his elite classmates. He hits them with wave after wave of wonky NRI accents, Bollywood tomfoolery, spoofy imitations, endless pranks, so-unfunny-it’s-funny cultural gags — until the classmates start to enjoy his enthusiasm. His madness becomes infectious, even if he’s just too much of an acquired taste at times, because he arrives every morning with a sole purpose: to play the fool. Who doesn’t fancy a comedian that commits to their image, swings for the fences, and turns their own pandering into a joke? Maybe the kid’s comfort watch is Delhi Belly.

Rahu Ketu is the sort of inane and aggressively stunted Bollywood comedy in which the interval is so long that it feels like the movie doesn’t want to continue. But it does continue. For 70 more minutes. In all directions and no directions, unfolding like it’s made for a human demographic that doesn’t exist. I know there are takers for this brand of leave-your-brains-and-veins-at-home gibberish, but I am not one of those takers. I’d like to believe I’m a giver, because nothing else explains the fact that my body stayed seated in the cinema hall throughout, even though my spirit escaped (and probably had an accident on the way back). If it sounds like I’m exaggerating for effect, it’s true. There’s no other way to open the review of a movie where Piyush Mishra is still playing a Himachali storyteller who pretends he’s not in Tamasha, Manu Rishi Chadha is playing a writer who pretends he’s not in RK/RKay, Chunky Panday is playing a retired Mossad spy turned drug kingpin whose punchline is “Karma is a switch, join me and I’ll make you rich,” and Varun Sharma and Pulkit Samrat play dim-witted buddies who pretend like they’re not in Fukrey. Everyone seems to be pretending — except me.

Growing up in the 1990s, I spent many summer evenings fiddling with a Panasonic remote and searching for a very specific brand of TV entertainment. My father had his old movies and news channels, my mother had her Hollywood soaps, but my obsession with sports led me to expect that elusive beast on the small screen: an Indian cricket-themed serial. There were plenty of army stories, family sitcoms, horror shows, mythological dramas, campus romcoms. But not enough cricket stories were being told in a decade where Sachin Tendulkar had elevated the game to mythical heights; it’s almost like filmmakers were afraid to mess with India’s newest religion. So I settled for Bodyline reruns instead. LBW: Love Beyond Wicket is probably the kind of serial my 11-year-old self was craving for — a slice-of-life, tacky, tropey, clumsy, but oddly sweet college-cricket television serial (not web series, mind you) with bite-sized episodes, Disney-coded stakes and a soap-opera aesthetic.