Rahul Desai

For most of its 8 episodes, Musafir Cafe has the aesthetic of streaming television from the 2015-16 days (also known as the Little Things age). This natural-artifice aesthetic thrived when YouTube was still the platform for millennial motifs wrapped in modest productions: relatable DIY ‘content,’ relationship-core characters, designer dialogue (“travelers don’t just change places, they travel within themselves”), a gooey soundtrack and title montages, pastel-coloured narratives and branded locations. As watchable as these shows were, they were almost indistinguishable from each other. Given the current onset of true-crime fatigue, this romantic drama might feel either dated or nostalgic — or both at once.

It’s tempting to like a movie like Max, Min & Meowzaki for its many progressive ingredients. The title refers to a young couple and their cat. Or more specifically: a young interfaith couple (‘Max’ is a Tamil-Brahmin named Mahesh and Min is a Muslim named Minara) going through a breakup; they debate the custody of their cat named after iconic Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. The film opens with their ending. Production designer Min (Medha Shankar) is already in a relationship with an older Bengali director she works for. Ad-jingles composer Max (Siddharth Menon) goes on a date with an influencer-coded girl who parrots the language of WhatsApp-university forwards (“there is no such thing as Hindu extremists, okay?”) and right-wing algorithms.

Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya revolves around a ramshackle public school and its many colourful faces. It may not directly belong to the ‘Rural Cinematic Universe,’ but you can tell that it comes from the house of former TVF collaborators (you can take the makers out of a streaming brand, but you can’t take the streaming brand out of the makers). It’s the same shtick of Panchayat (ramshackle village office), Gram Chikitsalay (ramshackle government clinic) and Maamla Legal Hai (ramshackled district court): slice-of-life dramedies where everyone is a ‘sample’ character, every crisis is lighthearted, every episode has a centrist moral stance, and every monologue belongs to the Rajkumar Hirani school of happy problem-solving. The genre fatigue is real. The language is faded, like a gravy-stained page of a book that’s worn out from overuse.

The homework required to process The Odyssey is a key part of the experience. Familiarising yourself with the fabled source material (Homer’s ancient Greek epic) goes hand in hand with re-acquainting yourself with the fabled director’s filmography. If you’ve been watching Christopher Nolan’s movies over the years, you’ve essentially seen the making of The Odyssey in real time. It’s not just the recurring themes of adrift men looking for a way home — to children, to comrades, to companions, to family, to themselves. It’s also in the physical images of Nolan-telling scattered across this narrative. There are flashes everywhere. A confused man wrestling with memory on the sea-shore (Inception); the piecing together of a disorienting past (Memento); an injured hero returning to rescue a city under siege (The Dark Knight trilogy); a blind worker, twins, and the obsession to win as a plot device (The Prestige); wars fought on hostile water and lands (Dunkirk); Trojan-Horse-coded deception by a Matt Damon character and a father chasing a belated promise (Interstellar); a thinker haunted by the consequences of his genius (Oppenheimer); a sleepless and guilt-riddled veteran (Insomnia); the blurred lines of time and tide (all of them). The film-maker has been adapting Homer for more than two decades. Like the protagonist, he finally returns home with The Odyssey, but not before defying the genre gods and braving the blockbuster elements.

“Being careful is the new brave,” says R&AW chief Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor) while driving through Kashmir. He’s reminding his butt-kicking daughter, Durga (Sharvari), to stay alert and expect an attack from rogue forces. We soon hear another of his Kaulisms: “Sometimes you have to go backward to move forward”. He’s dispensing sound military advice, of course. But the film he’s in (Alpha), and the commercial franchise he’s in (YRF Spy Universe), follows this advice to a T. It takes every one of his words to heart, only to damage its own heart in the process.

As an assassin story, Baby Do Die Do is not out of the ordinary. The only novelty is that the brooding hero is a deaf-and-mute hitwoman, not a hitman. The tropes are Freudian and familiar. A childhood tragedy turns this woman named Baby (Huma Qureshi) into a cold-blooded contract killer. She works for a father figure called Papa (Chunky Panday). She’s slick and experienced at her job; a sharp-shooting umbrella is her weapon. She finds a good man (Rachit Singh), and suddenly, the secret is too heavy. She wants out of the profession. She wants to be human. Except it’s not that simple. She’s in too deep. A bloody mess is imminent.

A young man, Pritam (Vir Hirani), is jailed for threatening a lazy constable. It’s Goa, of course. Pritam watches as the inspector of the police station, Pedro (Arshad Warsi), hears of a high-profile ATM robbery. The middle-aged cops have no idea where to start. So Pritam offers to help in return for freedom; he is immediately allowed to use their computer, and in ten minutes, he tracks the culprits down. He does it with the grating innocence of a child educating his grandparents about electronics.

Welcome to the Jungle is that attention-seeking kid in class who loves playing the fool so much that not even he can tell when he accidentally sounds funny and smart. Ahmed Khan’s crowded action-comedy is staged as the third film in the Welcome franchise, but it’s really just Tropic Thunder given the Farah Khan treatment. Ben Stiller’s 2008 satire about four vain actors who inadvertently invite real-world dangers during a guerilla film shoot in a jungle is ‘adapted’ into a Bollywood caper about an incompetent movie crew who get mistaken for the Indian army during a patriotic shoot in a crisis-stricken border village. The meta-ness is the main character, of course. There’s Akshay Kumar self-referencing his Khiladi and Mohra days, Suniel Shetty named ‘Anna’ Shetty, Raveena Tandon taunting Kumar for “20 years of neglection,” Arshad Warsi paraphrasing his own Jolly LLB lines, Jackie Shroff as a kohl-eyed terrorist, Farida Jalal playing a dramatic old mother India whose ‘dialogue’ nobody understands, Jacqueline Fernandez as an airheaded blonde, and so on.