Rahul Desai

Maalik opens with a shootout in 1990, Allahabad. A dacoit-like gangster named Deepak (Rajkummar Rao), a.k.a Maalik (“owner”), is wounded and bullet-riddled. The police have surrounded the hideout. The Bengali superintendent (Prosenjit Chatterjee) cracks a movie joke on the loudspeaker while telling him to surrender. Maalik shoots back through the window. The film then rewinds to a few years ago, starting in earnest to show how Maalik reaches this moment. It’s a narrative older than time. You’d think that if something evokes memories of Satya, Agneepath, Vaastav, Sarkar and every other popular mafia-origins movie, it must be a solid contender. But the opposite is true here: Maalik feels like a childhood film-making wish being fulfilled — an all-you-can-eat genre buffet assembled from scraps of classics — rather than an inventive or original shot in the dark.

It’s been years since I’ve laughed so much in a cinema hall. I needed it. Movies are truly the best medicine. There’s only one problem, though. Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is not a comedy. It’s not supposed to be funny. If anything, it’s the opposite of a comedy — a dead-serious romantic drama that takes an old proverb too far. In an age where most Bollywood films use self-awareness as a front for mediocrity, it’s kind of disarming to watch a bad film that doesn’t know it’s bad. I almost admire it. We often complain that nobody makes timeless Hindi love stories anymore. Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is why. It’s a high-risk genre: the line between being lyrical and being incapable of touching grass is wafer-thin. One person’s Dreamy is another’s Delusional. But naming the movie after a song from a Sanjay Leela Bhansali classic can’t be a prayer.

Aap Jaisa Koi is what happens when Badrinath Ki Dulhania (2017), Vicky Donor (2012), 2 States (2014) and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023) have an awkward college reunion at a restaurant only for everyone to leave without paying the bill. The rest of the gang — Dream Girl (2019), Meenakshi Sundareshwar (2021) and Mrs. (2025) — arrive very late, so the restaurant manager detains them instead. Aap Jaisa Koi is also what happens when playful Bollywood fare is strained through the streaming algorithm. There’s a functionality about the film that flattens the big-screen fluidity of romance, (in)compatibility, warring families and dramatic sermons. Beyond the performative premise of a small-minded man courting a free-thinking woman, the cross-cultural romcom fails to retain the wit, narrative scale and acting sparkle that mark this genre.

Superheroes have one job: they save people. This job profile is fairly uncomplicated. It does not discriminate between the people being saved, as long as they don’t deserve to die. As long as they’re innocent, in one way or the other. American superheroes have forever used this macro profile — of focusing on all of humanity, the universe, the past, the future — as a front for their micro aversions and distinctly apolitical identities. It’s easier to put the ‘petty disputes’ within a planet in perspective when all-time baddies like Thanos and co. threaten mass extinction. At best, our dark friend Batman mined the more systemic problems; politicians have been his adversaries more than once, but he has no time for politics itself. Creators and screenwriters have often shied away from contemporary cracks in favour of big pictures and bigger fish to fry.

Genetically altered freaks. Engineered entertainment. Responding to audiences. These are some of the phrases used to describe mutated dinosaurs and the programme that ‘created’ them in Jurassic World: Rebirth. But these phrases apply better to the long-running film franchise itself — so genetically altered from its original DNA, so engineered to entertain younger audiences, that they’ve become big dumb monster movies rather than the poignant sci-fi adventures that Steven Spielberg introduced to the world. The best part of Rebirth — the seventh of the long-running series and the first following the doomed Jurassic World trilogy — is the pre-film teaser of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. Wait, who am I kidding? The teaser didn’t even play before my matinee show in Mumbai. But even the anticipation of the teaser is the best part of this prehistoric movie.

Nobody expected Life in a… Metro (2007) to come from the director of Murder and Gangster. It was Anurag Basu’s first non-Vishesh Films venture after four ero-mantic (erotic+romantic) thrillers in a row. Its music composer, Pritam, was known for the chartbusters of Dhoom and Gangster. They were already commercially successful, but it never felt like they were the “makers”. More like hit-creators for hire: executors of someone else’s aesthetic. Until Metro, which became a breaking-free moment of sorts. The inspired multi-narrative drama marked the first real flex of voice for both writer-director and composer. There was a sense of exploration and discovery in the way the film unfolded — the city of Mumbai being a storyteller (with a ‘live’ band), and its many lives, the stories.

Given the censorship wrangles and politicisation of ideas these days, there’s a sense of nostalgia and wonder about watching a seven-episode investigative drama based on the murder of an ex-Prime Minister: no surrogate identities, no fake names, no “inspired by real events” disclaimers. Some of the suspense is self-inflicted; you keep looking for a hint, an agenda, a sign of loose fiction with(in) the facts. There is, after all, always a threat of offending someone, regardless of whose history is portrayed. On that count alone, it’s no small deal that The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case exists. The license to tell this particular story is no surprise in 2025, but what matters is the makers’ use of this license. Adapted from former India Today reporter Anirudhya Mitra’s first-person book, Ninety Days, Nagesh Kukunoor’s series sticks to the basics. It explores the SIT’s (Special Investigation Team) nationwide manhunt for the conspirators following the infamous suicide-attack at a Congress rally in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur in 1991. Headed by CBI officer Kaarthikeyan (the reliable Amit Sial) and operating from Malligai, the team features SP Amit Varma (Sahil Vaid), DSP Ragothaman (Bagavathi ‘Bucks’ Perumal), DIG Amod Kanth (Danish Iqbal), DIG Radhavinod Raju (Girish Sharma) and eventually, NSG Commando Ravindran (Vidyut Garg). Running parallel to their investigation is the widely-known story of the conspirators — the LTTE gang of operatives and sympathisers led by one-eyed mastermind Sivarasan (a locked-in Shafeeq Mustafa) — and their attempts to evade capture. From Madras and Madurai to Delhi and Bangalore, the chase spans safe-houses and tanker escapes, bus-station arrests and stalled raids.

Madhumita’s Kaalidhar Laapata (‘Kaalidhar is lost’) is a Hindi adaptation of the director’s Tamil drama, K.D. (2019). But in terms of mainstream Bollywood, it has more in common with that evergreen Indian-parent bible, Baghban (2003). The story of an old, unwanted patriarch finding purpose and belonging away from his greedy family in K.D. is remodelled into the tale of a middle-aged, dementia-afflicted man on the same journey. This bearded and disoriented character, Kaalidhar, is played by Abhishek Bachchan, further supplying the film’s status as a spiritual descendant of the Amitabh Bachchan starrer. Kaalidhar’s ungrateful brothers ‘accidentally’ lose him in a crowd; the identity-less man then befriends an eight-year-old orphan, Ballu (Daivik Baghela), and they embark on a fix-it adventure together. It’s a familiar template: childlike man and adult-like child forge an inevitable bond. It has a few worthy ideas. For instance, the brothers’ ploy to get rid of Kaalidhar features a packed ‘kumbh mela’ — vintage Hindi cinema’s go-to location for plots revolving around separated siblings. Given the man’s neurological condition, there’s no need for him to literally overhear their plan; the heartbreaking shot of Kaalidhar calling out to his brother only to realise he’s being ignored is enough.