Rahul Desai

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.

If I had a penny for every show trying to win a Mirzapur-lookalike contest, I’d have enough money to buy a streaming platform that bans men-and-gang-war shows with fake hinterland accents. Or maybe not. I’d probably have enough money to buy myself two beers after reviewing them. Blame inflation. This genre has begun to aim for second-screen viewing, which is strange, because it’s almost like the makers don’t really want you to be too invested but be just interested enough to notice the cast and hear the bullets. It gears into fourth-screen viewing at some points, but then there will be a plot twist that makes you get annoyed for not paying enough attention. It’s a troubling pattern across most Hindi shows of this ilk; Clean Up Company is another brick in this digitally erosive wall.

I don’t get to describe a premise like this too often, so let me enjoy writing this first paragraph. A prosperous Muslim family from Meerut — led by patriarch Sikandar Mirza (Sunny Deol) — is forced to flee for Lahore on a blood-soaked Partition night. Just like that, they have nothing. After months, they are allotted a house. But they move in to discover that it will never be their ‘home’; the displacement is permanent. An old Hindu lady (Shabana Azmi), the original owner, still lives upstairs. She waits for her own family to return, refusing to leave. Mirza, his wife (Preity Zinta) and his daughter overcome their biases and start to treat her like their mother; they celebrate her festivals and cook her food. This secularism draws the ire of the community; they’re a people still learning how to discriminate by faith and divide by appearances. The local troublemakers include an extremist goon (Abhimanyu Singh) and gang — they prey on the trauma of Mirza’s son, Javed (Karan Deol), and poison him. Tensions rise, and Mirza is threatened for harbouring the ‘enemy’. As a Deol, he resists.

It’s present-day Punjab but it could be Punjab 1995; it could be India 1984. The village of Gujjarwal bristles with unsaid questions and silent answers. Big Bollywood movies (like Dangal) have been shot in the region, but the place is haunted by its own fictions. Everyone’s story is interconnected, like desperate organs of a wounded body. A young man named Keshav is absent from one household; a young father named Balwinder is missing from another. The police go around camouflaging bloody encounters as separatist violence and communal unrest. They assure Keshav’s family that his Sikh killers will be brought to justice; they visit Balwinder’s family to keep an eye on their voices.