Rohan Naahar

In the almost criminally enjoyable new Netflix series Black Doves, Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw play a chic housewife and her gay best friend who just happen to be covert operatives. They straddle dual identities, as does the show, which can often juggle tones with the deftness of a circus performer. Black Doves is at once a complex espionage thriller, a cheekily humorous dark comedy, and when it needs to be, a dreary domestic drama. It soars on the strength of its two central performances, and writing that is both self-aware and endearingly sincere.

Did the French auteur Jacques Audiard watch Chachi 420 and feel inspired to make his latest film, Emilia Pérez? Stranger things have happened this year. Nick Jonas has celebrated Holi in Greater Noida, and Ed Sheeran has fried a batata vada with Sanjyot Keer. Is the idea of Audiard, a Palme d’Or-winning maestro, watching a Kamal Haasan rip-off really that outlandish? The genre-fluid mess that it is, Emilia Pérez certainly has origins in mainstream Indian cinema — it can go from Ekta Kapoor-style drama to Farah Khan-inspired musical in a matter of minutes. And like so many of our country’s films, its gender politics aren’t entirely above reproach.

If nobody were to speak in the new Netflix show Senna, it would immediately warrant at least two extra stars. But each time any of its wafer-thin characters opens their mouths, you’re likely to be overcome by an intense desire to pump the breaks and make a pit stop, or perhaps rewatch Asif Kapadia’s seminal documentary on the subject. Based on the life and career of the legendary Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, the six-part biographical drama is flat, uninteresting, and most criminally, boring. It is perhaps the least effective way in which his extraordinary career, and lasting influence, could’ve been commemorated.

Sometimes, the wiser thing to do is to scale down. Not every film needs to be a sweeping epic, especially not one that demands a tight telling. Directed by the debutante Anna Kendrick, the darkly humorous thriller Woman of the Hour is based on an intriguing real-life story, but suffers from an under-confident execution. The movie would’ve worked wonderfully as a claustrophobic chamber piece, but feels compelled to jump across timelines and juggle between characters with an haphazardness that only does it harm. Kendrick is like an overeager Indian mum, checking the pressure cooker more often than she needs to, thereby releasing all the steam.

A well-intentioned drama that teeters on the edge of self-parody, Joy is a film that absolutely deserved to be made, but certainly not in this form. Some years ago, the utterly forgotten The Current War had all the messy ingenuity that a film about the creation of literal electricity demanded — the movie’s tone captured the spirit of its themes. Joy, which dramatises the events leading up to the first in vitro fertilisation (IVF) birth, would have you believe that all conception — let alone that of the artificial kind — is a cakewalk.

It is easy, one would imagine, for a filmmaker to be overwhelmed by the words of the great August Wilson. Especially if they’ve never made a film before. Musical and marauding, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s language is a vessel for the ambition and anger of his people. Netflix’s The Piano Lesson — the latest adaptation of Wilson’s celebrated Pittsburgh Cycle of plays — is directed by the debutante Malcolm Washington, whose father, the legendary Denzel Washington, has publicly devoted this stage of his career to shepherding Wilson’s work onto the screen.

Like its protagonist, director Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls is a constantly evolving entity. But behind an outer veneer of control, there is burgeoning angst, a simmering chaos, and a terrible desire to be seen and heard. The psychological drama played to an uncommonly interactive packed crowd at the Dharamshala International Film Festival recently — it was a bizarre screening that exemplified how important it is to watch movies in a community environment. Often, these experiences reveal more about society than the films themselves.

There is an early scene in Singham Again where Ajay Devgn’s titular super-cop barges into his teenage son’s party along with a couple of cronies, embarrasses him in public, and hauls him back home. He does it, it seems, only to give director Rohit Shetty another opportunity to shoot him in stylised slow-motion. At home, Singham and his wife, Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) lecture their son about how out of touch he is with Indian values. It’s a deeply melodramatic moment; you can almost imagine them turning into Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini from Baghban in a couple of decades. But one thing is made absolutely clear by this early domestic drama: Shetty and Devgn don’t think too highly of the nation’s youth. This became a recurring theme even in their pre-release press interviews. They would both proudly declare that they barely resonate with the kids these days, and how, back in their day, they were roughing it out in the real world. This is a bizarre stance to take, for multiple reasons. For one, it’s always a good idea to understand younger generations. You might just learn something; just ask Javed Akhtar. But second, Singham Again is aimed at the very demographic that Shetty and Devgn have decided to infantilise.