Rohan Naahar

While many people have tried to project meaning onto Steven Spielberg’s Jaws — some have called it a parable about the Vietnam War, others have described it as a post-Watergate examination of the American middle-class — the movie is perhaps best enjoyed as a piece of pulp, devoid of any subtext at all. It is, after all, about a people-eating shark. Some things should remain uncomplicated. Nothing, for instance, would suck the joy out of a Predator movie more than trying to extract a deeper meaning from it. The franchise’s surprise new instalment, the animated offshoot Predator: Killer of Killers, embraces the simplicity at its core. And although it’s written by two grown men, it has the giddy energy of something concocted by teenage boys.

Nobody is above being typecast, not even Shah Rukh Khan. But while the Badshah of Bollywood has broken hearts and weakened knees with his culture-defining romance movies, Rajkummar Rao has become the patron saint of losers. Far too many times in the last decade, the once-promising star has played versions of the same person: a small town layabout whose overwhelming uselessness is inexplicably presented as innocent charm. The secret behind these characters’ appeal is never revealed, nor does Rao play them as particularly irresistible. In fact, in most of these movies, not only are the protagonists indistinguishable from each other, they’re positively repulsive. Even Rao would’ve struggled to bring freshness to his performance in Bhool Chuk Maaf, the latest in this long line of films.

The central thrust of the Drishyam movies relies on one basic truth: Ajay Devgn’s character will do just about anything to protect his family. Not only does he cover up a murder, he also concocts an intricate scheme to keep the cops off his scent. The Drishyam movies don’t realise this, but the protagonist is actually a psychopath in the guise of a protective family man. In the second movie, he even allows his teenage daughter to be manhandled by the police in order to keep up the charade. The Drishyam franchise holds some sort of record for having inspired the most remakes. And although it isn’t an official adaptation, the new Apple movie Echo Valley follows the exact same beats. It would’ve been one of the rare examples of Hollywood ripping off an Indian project had Drishyam itself not been a rip-off of a Japanese novel.

The smartest thing that Himesh Reshammiya has probably done in his professional life, besides transitioning from composer to singer, is to embrace the inherent ridiculousness of his stage persona. For the longest time, he seemed entirely unaware. He’d perform bicep curls to his own love songs on Instagram, seemingly oblivious to how meme pages were responding. But something changed after Janhvi Kapoor went on Koffee with Karan and essentially pulled the curtain on what was maybe the greatest inside-joke of our times. Two years down the line, Reshammiya is starring in a movie called Badass Ravikumar and going on a ‘Cap Tour’ of sold-out live shows. It’s genius. If only Sunny Deol had the same self-awareness in Jaat.

When Nikhil Kamath interviewed Ranbir Kapoor on his podcast, he admitted that he hasn’t quite figured out the art of detachment like Marcus Aurelius. “You like Marcus’ writing?” Kapoor asked. “Yes, I like a couple of his books,” Kamath said. This bizarre exchange deserves to be unpacked in a separate article, but, for the purposes of this one, let’s focus on two things. One, the Zerodha founder reads the work of a Roman emperor in his spare time, and two, the star of Jagga Jasoos probably thinks they were talking about someone who wrote a self-help bestseller. Several conversations of this nature unfold in Mountainhead, the new film from Jesse Armstrong, creator of HBO’s Succession. Marcus Aurelius is invoked as well; in fact, so are Mark Antony and other great historical figures. Streaming in India on JioHotstar, the movie follows four men — three billionaires and one millionaire — who get together in a snowy mountain retreat for a weekend getaway, while the ‘outside world’ descends into chaos. “No deals, no meals, no women in heels,” is the motto of the get-together, which seems like something of a tradition. Steve Carell plays a veteran named Randall, who has just received a disheartening cancer diagnosis. Corey Michael Smith, who was so good in May December and Saturday Night, plays Ven, the owner of a Twitter-like social media app. He’s the richest man in the room. Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, whose company is making waves in the field of artificial intelligence, and Jason Schwartzman plays Souper, who feels insecure about being the only person whose net worth hasn’t hit a billion yet.

Wholly unoriginal yet embarrassingly addictive, MobLand can best be described as a soap opera for boys. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the gangster drama (briefly) unseated Taylor Sheridan’s blockbusters off the viewership charts — Sheridan has built a literal empire on the back of expensive sagas aimed at men, like Yellowstone. MobLand combines his signature brand of family drama with gruff machismo of a Bollywood potboiler; it’s an experience so Ajay Devgn-coded that Tom Hardy’s protagonist could have just as easily been introduced with a packet of Vimal in his hands, and we’d have been none the wiser. He may as well be chewing ‘elaichi’ in his scenes, going by his line delivery. Hardy can be magnificently theatrical when he wants — “let’s not stand on ceremony here!” — but he’s made a name for himself as one of the great mumblers of his generation. That’s exactly what he does as Harry Da Souza in MobLand. Harry is a fixer of sorts, torn between his two families — the real one, with wife Jan and teenage daughter Gina; and the one that he has been adopted into, the Harrigans. Like Tom Hagen from The Godfather, Harry is the brain and brawn behind the Harrigans’ criminal empire, led by the psychotic patriarch Conrad, played by Pierce Brosnan.

Comedian-writer-lyricist Varun Grover’s directorial debut, Kiss, contains multitudes. The ideas that it is preoccupied by can be upsetting, even terrifying. But, made by someone who has clearly benefited from therapy, the movie is able to comprehend, contest, and communicate these preoccupations with a necessary calm. Kiss was finally released for public viewing on MUBI recently, a full three years after its festival run first began. It isn’t at all like Grover’s feature-length debut All India Rank, although both projects are marked by a decency that seems altogether absent from our culture these days. Fascinated by the idea of cinema as a therapeutic medium, the 15-minute short stars Adarsh Gourav as Sam, a young filmmaker who finds himself in a rather awkward ideological stand-off with a couple of men after the dreaded ‘censor board’ screening of his latest movie. The two men are played by Swanand Kirkire and Ashwath Bhatt; they’re meant to represent this unnamed censor board, but they may as well be the moral police that sends filmmakers to prison in Iran, the settlers who drive people out of their homes in Palestine, or the Romeo squads that torment young lovers in India. Kiss could be set in the distant future, for all we know. There is a certain dystopian quality to the movie.

In an industry dominated by vanity projects, nepo nonsense, and state-sponsored propaganda, nothing is more annoying than a film that aims to impart a ‘message’ to the audience. As with everything else in Hindi cinema, this message is typically delivered at such a volume that Sonu Nigam might take offence. Laxman Utekar’s Mimi concludes not with climactic catharsis, but with a chunk of statistics about adoption. How cinematic. The horror film Chhori, on the other hand, ends with data points about female infanticide. Neither film had enough faith in the audience to know, without being told, that killing babies (or abandoning them) is wrong. It was quite refreshing to discover that the new Amazon Prime Video film Stolen, despite being a ‘message’ movie itself, chooses to let the plot and characters do the talking instead of literal text. Directed by Karan Tejpal, Stolen’s true agenda — and there is an agenda, make no mistake — reveals itself only at the end. This revelation is smartly timed to coincide with the redemption of a truly terrible character, played by Abhishek Banerjee. His name is Gautam, and we first meet him as he’s waiting outside a small-ish railway station for his younger brother, Raman. It’s nighttime, and there’s a wedding in the family the next day. They’re already late because Raman missed his flight and had to take a train instead. At the station, he witnesses a tribal woman’s infant being kidnapped, and moments later, finds himself ensnared in the mess. Gautam’s instinct is to mind his own business and get on with his life, but something — it could be guilt, it could be trauma, or it could just be basic decency — compels Raman to get involved.