Rahul Desai

Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma – The Fable opens with a long, unbroken shot. It’s the summer of 1989 in a Northeastern Himalayan town, and Dev (Manoj Bajpayee), a middle-aged and soft-spoken landlord, starts his day by walking to the toolshed in the backyard of his colonial mansion. It looks like an average routine. On the way, he greets his wife Nandini (Priyanka Bose), his playful son Juju (Awan Pookot), his two dogs Jack and Alex, and a couple of locals. The camera follows him into the dark shed, where he straps something onto his body and strolls down a path. He’s wearing what looks like mechanical wings and, before it fully registers, he casually jogs off a cliff edge, flaps those wings and flies into the valley. This is how he surveys the thousands of acres of the orchard estate inherited from his grandfather. It’s pesticide season; his route is wider. I’ve seen many striking movie beginnings, but none like this, where reality nonchalantly collides with fantasy in the same breath. In the next few minutes, we know why.

Baaghi 4 opens with a shot of a truck hurtling into a man driving his car at full speed. The next shot shows him wounded, bloody and suspended upside down in the totaled vehicle on a railway track, with a train heading straight for him. It’s fitting that these are POV (point-of-view) shots where the camera places us in the position of the hero — because watching the rest of this film feels like being hit by a truck and a train, again and again and again. The fourth installment of the Baaghi film franchise suggests that there were three before this one. They were all Hindi remakes of Tamil and Telugu action thrillers, and Baaghi 4 continues the tradition by being heavily inspired from Sasi’s Ainthu Ainthu Ainthu (2013). But it doesn’t matter. Instead, just imagine Devdas as a muscular Animal fanboy, except nobody is sure whether his Paro is real or not. Blood flows rather than booze. Chandramukhi is a Punjabi call girl (Sonam Bajwa) pretending to be a Spanish escort named Olivia. The fictional city of Chandara is composed of St. Xavier’s College Mumbai corridors and bad CGI skies, and there’s a psychotic villain (Sanjay Dutt) who’s a hybrid of Shah Rukh Khan in Darr and Bobby Deol in Animal. And of course, there’s Saurabh Sachdeva as the baddie’s eccentric brother, hamming it up in reaction shots like the action-film equivalent of Rocky’s bestie’s physical subtitling in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani.

If not for movies like Ufff Yeh Siyapaa, I’d be in denial about my age. Denial is not an option when I try to pull out my hair only to be met with a receding hairline. Thanks to the constant face-palming, I also realise that my skin has wrinkles. Thanks to the involuntary sighing and eye-rolling, I realise that yoga might be good for my stamina. Thanks to the inability to keep my eyes on the screen, I realise that my mind needs glasses too. And thanks to the resolute awfulness of a 116-minute silent comedy in 2025, I realise that my life is truly too short.

In the Netflix streaming canon, the film Inspector Zende begins where the series Black Warrant ends. It’s 1986, and deadly “Bikini Killer” Charles Sobhraj escapes Tihar jail after drugging the whole prison on his birthday. The six-episode drama hinted at how he managed to break out. The guards were too busy being the protagonists of their own stories of systemic struggle. Sobhraj, a peripheral figure in his decade there, simply took advantage of their main-character energy. Far away in Bombay, waiting in a milk queue, Inspector Madhukar Zende (Manoj Bajpayee) hears the news bulletin on a radio. By the time the others in the line look at him, he’s already gone — like a middle-class superhero looking for a phone-booth to don his cape. Only here, the booth is his modest family room in a chawl, and his cape is the Bombay police uniform. He expects a call any moment, given that he’s one of the few cops to have previously nabbed the criminal.

It’s never a good sign when I start thinking of colourful analogies and lines for the review while the film is still on. It’s a worse sign when I start reviewing the cinema hall in my head instead: the smell of popcorn is overwhelming, the seats are too leathery, the temperature is just right, the ushers are respectful, the toilets are too far, the trailers go on forever, the darkness is too dark. That’s how forgettable Param Sundari is. Everything except the screen comes into focus. The cross-cultural romantic comedy — where a generic Delhi hunk sets out to woo an occasionally Malayali girl — does the usual shtick of endless Bollywood and SRK references, recycled puns, borrowed charisma, and unoriginality disguised as hat tips. I did come up with an analogy, though. Watching the film is like walking through an upscale clothing store (“North-South collection”) in which shoppers pose in the mirror and google the latest fashion brands, Kerala Tourism ads and Chennai Express teasers play on loop on screens, and hoardings of airbrushed celebrities vow to improve our middle-class lives. In other words, it’s hard to tell a movie theatre from a mall.

Based on Warren Adler’s novel The War of the Roses, Jay Roach’s The Roses is fundamentally different from Danny DeVito’s 1989 film adaptation starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. The caustic black comedy about a wealthy American couple going through a bitter divorce is reframed as a caustic satire about a wealthy British couple struggling to stay married. The razor-sharp humour is a coping mechanism for the characters, not so much a narrative genre. When they’re mean to each other, it’s amusing because of how creatively they weaponise words, but it’s also dark for how far they’re willing to go to wound each other. When they’re not mean, it’s tense because a barb or two — like a jumpscare in ghost stories — might just be around the corner. Watching them is like being trapped in a room with a dysfunctional couple and second-hand embarrassment.

Most film-makers use craft to tell stories. But some use stories to craft unfilmable feelings. Nidhi Saxena did it in her feature-length debut, Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, which had its world premiere at Busan last year. The life of a middle-aged caregiver and her ailing mother in a crumbling ancestral home became a medium to explore the transience of memories, trauma, loneliness and everything in between. The montage of a character recording whispers and past sounds from the walls of her house with a boom mic can seem strange — pretentious, even (the house in ‘arthouse’). But it encouraged us to renegotiate their relationship with the act of watching a movie. The orthodox need to interpret fiction made way for a sensory experience of understanding life itself. Imagine the screen speaking to the viewer in a different language: where expression comes disguised as an aesthetic.

Inspired by the life of Kashmir’s first female playback singer Raj “Noor” Begum, Songs of Paradise stars Saba Azad as the young protagonist Zeba Akhter in the 1950s, and Soni Razdan as the old legend who narrates her story to a thesis-writing student named (of course) Rumi. We know he’s passionate about music because he strums a guitar absent-mindedly in public. Much of the film is concerned with Zeba’s rise from a modest wedding singer to the voice of Radio Kashmir in a conservative setting where women aren’t allowed to dream beyond marriage and housework. A few good men along the way enable her generational talent: a progressive father (Bashir Lone) who works as a woman’s tailor, a renowned Ustad (Shishir Sharma) who trains her for free, and an artful lyricist and mentor (Zain Khan Durrani, as Azaad) who goes on to marry her. The naysayers are familiar: a regressive mother (Sheeba Chaddha) who sees her daughter as someone’s future property, a community that mocks the parents for allowing the girl to do ‘Western’ things, a radio station director (Armaan Khera) whose cynicism melts away, and a society that’s yet to decode the concept of independence.