Rohan Naahar

A sporadically clever but ultimately convoluted affair, Colony is somehow both underwritten and over-plotted. The Korean horror-thriller marks a long-awaited return to the zombie genre for director Yeon Sang-ho, who broke out internationally almost exactly a decade ago with the clutter-breaking horror hit Train to Busan. That film took a deceptively simple premise, injected it with some old-fashioned melodrama, and managed to appeal both to Western and Asian sensibilities. In the subsequent decade, Yeon has remained highly sought-after, having directed several movies and as many as three Netflix shows. With Colony, he returns to his roots, armed with a bigger budget, seemingly brighter ideas, and a significantly larger canvas to splatter with gore and other grimy fluids.

Laziness in mainstream Bollywood isn’t conditional; it’s constitutional. Cocktail 2 is a mocktail of a movie; sugary slop pretending to be the real deal. It’s populated by caricatures and not characters, set in locations that feel like postcards and not actual, lived-in places. Perhaps this is all by design; perhaps inauthenticity is the aspiration. But there has to be an element of truth even in the most far-fetched of falsehoods; there has to be something for those being duped, in this case, the audience, to latch on to. You could put Cocktail 2 under a microscope, or dip it in a chemical, and you still wouldn’t be able to decipher what truth it’s trying to get at. One thing is for sure, though, it is among the most misogynistic movies that mainstream Bollywood has made in a long time, which, for an industry that thrives on misogyny, is saying something.

You could bet your fast-falling rupees that the unit behind the film, Governor — produced by the same Vipul Amrutlal Shah who served up the deeply irresponsible The Kerala Story — had no idea that the universe would conspire to undermine whatever claims they’re trying to make here. The irony may be lost on the film’s team, of course, given a grasp of storytelling looser than the morals of mainstream Bollywood. Starring Manoj Bajpayee as an approximation of the former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor S Venkitaramanan, whose tenure overlapped with an economic crisis in the ‘90s that brought India to the brink of bankruptcy, the film is gratingly loud, ridiculously plotted and delivered with an amateurishness bordering on arrogance.

There was a time not too long ago when animated films provoked introspection. In recent years, however, the medium has pivoted to pacifying overstimulated children. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, for instance, is less a movie than a daycare to occupy kids’ time for 90 minutes. But hope has a tendency of revealing itself when you least expect it. Not many would’ve expected a new children’s movie on Netflix to offer more insight about the world than the recent films of Darren Aronofsky or Robert Zemeckis, but sometimes that’s how it goes — just look at KPop Demon Hunters. Now, the streamer’s latest offering, Swapped, takes the tropes of body-swap comedies of the past and filters them through a decidedly contemporary lens.

German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl wasn’t the only person making propaganda for the Third Reich. She is remembered simply because she was the best. By that measure, director Aditya Dhar may be painted with a similar brush, because while his fellow Bollywood opportunists choose to spoonfeed their message, Dhar deploys his through subterfuge. Overlong, gratuitously violent, and brimming with a self-indulgence that borders on arrogance, his latest film, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, ought to be canceled on artistic grounds alone before even a word is spoken about its problematic politics. The film serves as a mouthpiece for India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and not, as it claims on several occasions, a bipartisan story about the bravery of true patriots.