Rahul Desai

Baramulla opens with a striking single shot: a solitary flower bud in the snow attracts the attention of a child named Shoaib. It’s the sort of shot that usually ends with the sound of a bullet and the image of blood splattered across the whiteness. It is Kashmir after all. But the camera floats above the valley as the spell breaks and he trudges into the background. Minutes later, he disappears during a local magic show. Hard-nosed DSP Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is summoned to this town to crack the case and locate Shoaib, the son of a former MLA. Ridwaan’s track is rooted in the normal — more kids disappear from the same school, and the film shows a band of militants (led by a faceless mastermind named “Bhaijaan”) behind these kidnappings.

It’s a miracle that a movie named Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat exists. It’s like watching a 141-minute music video of tight reaction shots, slow-mo emotions, designer entry shots, personality twists and lone tear-drops. It’s also like watching an injured middle finger to a digital generation that equates love with consent, respect and dignity. If the movie were a person, it’d be a Sanam Teri Kasam stan who was once a Tere Naam devotee who became a Kabir Singh fan who became a MeToo apologist who then decided to explore wokeness within the realms of toxic masculinity. I’d be worried if this were a competently crafted film. Fortunately, it has the emotional intelligence of a soggy peanut. A visual transition early on hints at a self-cannibalising Bollywood story: coins thrown at a sultry single screen (because “mass” is the genre) match-cut to coins paid to a washerman by the humble siren from the screen. As the Scorsese meme goes: Absolute Cinema.

Thamma opens in 323 BC. A cocky Alexander the Great boasts to his troops during his invasion of India. But the fabled Greek warrior does not die in Babylon — he is slaughtered in a tropical jungle by a fanged ‘betaal’ leader named Yakshasan. This bloodthirsty Hindu demon is revising history without even realising it. “You will take over Bharat?” he snarls. Yakshasan spends the next several centuries feasting on anglo blood. He picks up some broken English on the way. India’s independence movement in the 1940s is a buffet for him: pale-skinned and stiff-lipped colonisers everywhere. But Yakshasan is soon debarred and locked up by his own clan when they realise that his freedom-fighting was a front for uncontrollable primal instincts all along. He wasn’t a spiritual protector or paranormal vigilante, just a hateful being out to erase one community. A hammy Nawazuddin Siddiqui playing Yakshasan stokes the narrative fire. The metaphor writes itself, but Thamma refuses to pay any heed to its most interesting character: a power-hungry madman who is exposed for milking nationalistic fervour.

Good Fortune plays out a bit like a smart-alecky Aziz Ansari comedy sketch. A skit-like one-liner — what if a well-meaning but incompetent “budget angel” body-swaps a wealthy white guy and a miserable brown guy? — is pan-fried with a series of thematic keywords: gig economy, American dream, immigrant struggle, racial biases, capitalist greed. It’s a deadpan spoof that counts on looking like a deadpan spoof; even the sincerity is supposed to sound designed and clunky. It has the narrative scale of a gag, too. As a film, it doesn’t know where to go after the social gimmick wears off; it just fizzles into the sort of artificial resolution that, if I didn’t know any better, passes off as image-renovating and self-righteous tripe. The film is fun when Keanu Reeves turns earnestness and bad writing into an art form. But as a Barbie-styled comment on modern American society, it comes across as performative and dishonest. Look Ma, (no) Wings!

Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas starts like any Indian crime drama that wants the best of both worlds. The story is “inspired by true events,” but just about fictional and legally coy enough to stage itself as a franchise about a police officer who solves one case per film/season. It’s the Delhi Crime template. The ‘Chapter One’ in the title is a clue. As is the self-reverential opening slate: “To keep the truth alive, you must tell its story”. And a corny closing slate about courage that ends with an exclamation mark (!). In between these two quotes, however, Bhagwat defies its familiar status to stay humble, metrical and consistently watchable. Akshay Shere’s two-hour film has more in common with another well-crafted Hindi series. It shares its real-world source material with Dahaad (2023), the 8-episode thriller about a cop who gets drawn into a case of multiple missing girls and a potential serial killer. Like the show, the film does well to excavate the social fabric of a place that often serves as a portal between predator and prey.

As an Indian critic pummelled into submission by the hagiographic reverence and sanitised beats of homegrown biopics over the years, a film like The Smashing Machine is always a bit of a culture shock. What do you mean the hero is not really a hero? What do you mean he’s willing to be emotionally naked, broken, vulnerable, ugly, difficult and unreasonable on screen? What do you mean he’s a victim of his own decisions and not wronged by the world? What do you mean he’s not an inspirational story with a message? Benny Safdie’s sports biopic has a mixed-martial-arts protagonist who’s a serial winner with a drug addiction problem, a mansplaining habit, a toxic relationship that weakens him, a punctured comeback arc, and, eventually, he’s barely even the protagonist. It has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson finally playing the role he was born to play — that of a champion wrestler and near-invincible strongman — only to challenge his stardom with a painfully human(e) performance.

In the opening episode of the Search: The Naina Murder Case, its protagonist, ACP Sanyukta Das (Konkona Sen Sharma), engages in banter with the cocky man replacing her, ACP Jai Kanwal (Surya Sharma). Star detective Sanyukta is transferring herself to the cyber crime unit in a new city to save her marriage. Jai taunts her for this decision. To get the better of him, Sanyukta casually spoils the twist of a popular crime drama he’s watching. “Silent Justice” is the name of this show, a nod to Criminal Justice, one of the biggest hits of the same streaming platform and production company. The self-referencing is ironic, because Search is another page out of this OTT playbook: SEO-coded title, by-the-books remake of multi-season European/British series, less-than-ambitious staging, formulaic twists, middling craft, functional conflicts, curated colour.

You can see why Lord Curzon Ki Haveli sounds attractive on paper. Regardless of the budget, it’s an “independent-minded” Hindi film, the kind that used to be conceived, crowd-funded and exhibited in the pre-streaming age by film-makers like Sandeep Mohan, Q and Sudhish Kamath. The title is intriguing if one knows their history. It’s a chamber drama, shot largely in the living room of a British manor. It’s a lean production; the main score is Beethoven, the sound design is a co-writer, the suspense is supposed to be Hitchcockian. There are only four, sometimes five, characters in the house. It’s fully conversational, an introvert’s nightmare. There’s enough room for the lens to lurk around. The performers have worked in an indie setup before. The mood — where actors have the freedom to put on strange accents and do strange things — is a front for social commentary.