Rahul Desai

Most of us prefer to view great art as an act of magic: unexplainable, beyond the realms of reason, otherworldly, divine. We often speak of a landscape-altering movie or book like it’s conjured from nothing but fateful creativity and limitless vision. We perceive their creators as those who create; as those blessed with a little extra, almost as if they see worlds that we cannot. It’s not dissimilar from how we think of top athletes as supernatural beings. Terms like “gifted” and “immortal” are freely employed to describe record-breaking feats. Reframing talent as a cosmic value is the most traditional way of preserving the sanctity of ordinariness. We see them as extraordinary because it not only gives us something higher to trust in, it also absolves us from the complexities of being human. It’s easier to believe that they’re built superior so that we can reckon with our own regularity.

A brooding man returns to his hometown. Lots of emotional baggage. Plenty of memories of the wife he just lost. Estranged daughter. Roguish best friend. All he wants to do is live. But the town has other ideas. Nothing is right; there is chaos and oppression everywhere. A local goon makes it his life’s mission to bully our brooder. You know it’s a matter of time before the goon provokes the John Wick out of the griever. You know it’s coming. His violence is activated, so is a conscience; a personal mission morphs into a virtuous one. Subedaar stars Anil Kapoor as the scowler whose heroism is unplanned; Aditya Rawal plays the goon who summons the rampage. It’s a classic action-hero arc: scowl, scowl, scowl, explode. That’s how it usually goes.

Hello Bachhon (“Hello Children”) is the perfect example of how not to tell a real-life story. It’s also the perfect example of how not to tell a story. And how not to tell. And just how not to. Based on the life of Physics Wallah (PW) cofounder, YouTuber and EdTech star Alakh Pandey, the TVF-created series unfolds like a 5-episode-long corporate video that, at its best, becomes an unwitting Shark Tank parody. Why not just make a branded documentary with fictional recreations instead of a chatbot-coded dramatisation with zero curiosity and project-graded nuance? What is the point of using fiction when every line sounds like a motivational quote, every character sounds like a brown-washed hologram, every scene looks like a live-action brochure, every student storyline feels like a reality-show montage, every exchange has the depth of an Amar-Chitra-Katha-esque moral lesson, and every note looks designed to romanticise middle-Indian aspiration and the predatory education empire? I can safely say that the Hindi biographical drama has reached its nadir with Hello Bacchon, a series I could’ve watched on mute and been none the wiser. Sincerity has never felt so insincere.

It takes a considerable amount of skill to make big-budget action movies — in this case, a period pirate swashbuckler — that are neither great nor terrible. How is it possible to be so safe when the scale is lavish and the stakes are high? How is it possible to be so deliberately sterile and precisely average when the resources are limitless? But one of the magic tricks of this decade has been the way streaming platforms have legitimised the middling-and-forgettable genre. Heck, it’s almost an art form. “Produced by the Russo brothers” is usually a tell, and The Bluff is another bullseye for ambient action (I vowed to get through this review without using the word “algorithmic”). The Bluff has some texture, a pinch of personality, bone-crunching violence and gore, a spirited lead even, yet I can’t remember a single moment right now. And it’s been only 8 minutes since the end credits rolled. I suppose that’s a win for the content ecosystem.

t’s bittersweet when you learn of an independent film releasing against all odds. The more inspirational the journey is, the more complicated it gets for film critics who must approach it objectively. What if it’s not good, despite the sincerity and courage? What if the inventive process of making it is the best part of its legacy? What if the craft is consumed by underdog hype and passion? What if the behind-the-scenes story is more interesting than the film’s story? What sort of euphemisms might one have to use to be kinder to gutsy ‘outsider’ art? The anxiety is more heightened with a film like Tanmaya Shekhar’s Nukkad Naatak: a crowd-funded, self-promoted and self-distributed indie whose guerrilla marketing campaign features a recent cross-country road trip in a rented caravan. It wears its defiance on its sleeve. The premise is even designed to be curious and socially expressive — a sign that commentary might be used to offset a lack of depth.

Accused dives straight in. It has no time to mess around. We are parachuted into the life of Dr. Geetika Sen (Konkona Sen Sharma), a senior surgeon at a London hospital: smart, confident, married, on the brink of a major promotion and a move to Chester. She’s a taskmaster, but so good at her job that her social identity — a queer South Asian immigrant — is a footnote. Until it isn’t. HR receives an anonymous email by a patient accusing Geetika of predatory behavior and sexual harassment. Just like that, this life starts to unravel. Seeds of uncertainty are planted in the head of her wife, Meera (Pratibha Ranta), a doctor at a children’s hospital herself. Social media puts her on trial. Her colleagues look at her differently. An investigation begins. The film points in both directions, of course. Geetika’s personality is scrutinized in a way that invites the average viewer to interpret complexity as culpability. It says something that, even as an alleged perpetrator, she gets the victim beatdown: her past is dug up, mistakes are weaponised, judgment errors are revealed, evidence of moral ambiguity is shown, credibility is doubted. In short, she is viewed as guilty until proven innocent.

In terms of animated sports comedies featuring anthropomorphic animals, the bar is high. Surf’s Up (2007) set it nearly two decades ago; the mockumentary sports comedy about a young northern rockhopper penguin (voiced by a still-sane Shia LaBeouf) who dreams of becoming a professional surfer is unsurpassed in ingenuity, wit and underdog cinema (it’s one thing to make an animated film, it’s another to ‘shoot’ it like a live documentary). I’ll never forget the truth of the moment the protege discovers that his idol (Jeff Bridges) has been alive all along. The medium melts away, the cutesy humour pauses and out comes a classic genre trope. The heart doesn’t care if it’s not a live-action scene; emotions do not discriminate. Manufacturing them from scratch is arguably harder.

Anubhav Sinha’s latest, Assi (“80”), is a uniquely uncomfortable film to watch. There are two reasons. The first one is by design. The title lays it out: approximately 80 women are sexually assaulted in India every day. The film is built to convey the full force of this number. It revolves around one such ‘case,’ opening with what looks like a regular day in the life of Parima (Kani Kusruti), a Kerala-born schoolteacher residing in Delhi with her husband (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) and son. There’s a tangible undercurrent to her middle-class routine; something bad is around the corner. While returning from a staff party one night, it happens: five men pull her into a moving car and rape her for hours, repeatedly and brutally. She is dumped on a railway track. It’s 2025, but the ghost of 2012 hangs heavy. It’s national news. The law-enforcement, trial-by-media and justice mechanisms take over.