Rohan Naahar

A regular reappraisal of old masters should be made standard practice in all art. Just because someone made a good movie once doesn’t mean that they should be given immunity from bad reviews for the rest of their lives. Sure, making Piku and October and Gulabo Sitabo and Sardar Udham (in a row!) allows you one I Want to Talk, but that’s all. It is only when certain sacred cows are nudged out of (self) harm’s way that they can introspect. Had somebody somebody pointed out the obvious to Sanjay Leela Bhansali years ago, we wouldn’t have had to endure Heeramandi. Had someone criticised Nayakan for what it is — a blatant act of plagiarism — we wouldn’t have had to witness director Mani Ratnam and star Kamal Haasan doing it all over again in Thug Life. The gangster drama was released on Netflix merely four weeks after it flopped in theaters. Thug Life debuted to intense scrutiny, seeing as it marked the filmmaker and actor’s first collaboration in nearly four decades. During those years, the two rose to the pinnacle of Indian cinema, having earned not just a reputation for making hits, but also a certain respect that eludes most of their colleagues. Mani Ratnam is the thinking man’s blockbuster director; Kamal Haasan is the thinking man’s movie star. And yet, the best that they could come up with is yet another tired reimagining of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, injected with a toxic dose of Prashanth Neel.

Director Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex hums with life. It’s both dreamlike and dreadful, unfolding with a tenacity that few first-time filmmaker can conjure. The coming-of-age movie follows three teenage British girls on a summer trip to Greece; it’s their final week of freedom before they’re hurled into the ‘real world’ to look for jobs, partners, and perhaps a purpose. But the trip takes a dark turn when Tara, the liveliest of the trio, has a distressing experience. More a tone poem than a conventional, narrative-driven film, How to Have Sex shares much in common with fellow British masterpiece Aftersun. Like that movie, which was also directed by a first-timer and unveiled at Cannes, it has the hazy impact of a suddenly remembered dream. Manning Walker based the story on her own experiences, as did director Charlotte Wells with Aftersun. The Mediterranean setting is their only superficial similarity; both stories deal with trauma and revisit incidents that shape the lives of their protagonists.

We had no idea how good we had it in July 2020. Little did we know, for instance, that the pandemic just… wouldn’t end. Petrol was cheaper, the air was cleaner, and we were getting used to life at home. Plus, you could still count on Netflix to occasionally produce an impressive film or two. Extraction remains one of the slickest action movies of the last five years; in fact, it basically cannibalised The Old Guard, an equally good Netflix original that debuted only a few weeks later. Starring Charlize Theron alongside an overqualified supporting cast, the movie screamed for a sequel, which was quickly approved. But did you know that The Old Guard 2 was shot three years ago? The movie had been sitting on the shelves for quite some time before being released this week, and it shows. In case you weren’t aware that The Old Guard 2 existed, don’t blame yourself; it’s not your fault. Netflix has been suspiciously quiet about it, perhaps because the finished movie resembles a work-in-progress — a film that hasn’t yet been streamlined on the edit table. It retains the hyperreal gloss of ungraded raw footage, while giving the strong impression that what we’ve been presented with is some kind of unfinished cut. Among the film’s many flaws — we’ll get to the rest momentarily — is Barry Ackroyd’s flat cinematography.

Nearly four decades ago, the late director Tony Scott, star Tom Cruise, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer attempted to re-conjure the magic that made Top Gun such a cultural touchstone with Days of Thunder, a racing movie that followed the same basic structure, but replaced the fighter jets with fast cars. Now, Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski are essentially following the same playbook with Top Gun: Maverick and the recently released F1. The only difference, this time around, is that Cruise didn’t return for the sports drama, perhaps because he has been occupied for the last half-decade by the Mission: Impossible franchise. But this was all for the best, because nobody other than Brad Pitt could’ve played the role of the seasoned drifter Sonny Hayes. It’s an odd observation to make, because Cruise literally played the most famous drifter of them all, Jack Reacher. Twice. But he was famously miscast in those movies. Not because he didn’t fit writer Lee Child’s physical description of the towering Reacher, but because, as an actor, Cruise doesn’t exactly project the going-with-the-flow energy that is required for such a character. He is simply too intense, his persona is too curated, too meticulous to play someone that lives like hobo. There’s a reason why people joke that he’s actually an alien scientologist sent to spy on earthlings. Pitt, on the other hand, has the exact opposite screen presence. He’s a relaxed, relatable, somewhat rudderless.

A key part of movie promotions these days involves the lead cast going on the talk show circuit (as they normally would), and instructing the audience to essentially lower their expectations. In fact, it’s almost as if Priyanka Chopra remembered all those times that she and her fellow Bollywood stars sold their movies by telling viewers to leave their brains outside the theatre, and introduced this strategy to her new friends in Hollywood. She’s been going around saying that her new action film Heads of State is an undemanding Friday night watch, but, unsurprisingly, it fails to meet even those standards. Directed by Ilya Naishuller, who previously made Hardcore Henry and Nobody, Heads of State is the kind of Prime Video programming that enters your eyeballs, bypasses your brain, and leaks out of your ears. Like his previous films — Hardcore Henry was presented in first person, while Nobody transported a middle-aged man into a John Wick-style world — Heads of State works better as a concept than in execution. It stars John Cena as the President of the United States and Idris Elba as the British Prime Minister, while Chopra plays an MI6 agent who might as well have been airdropped into the movie from Citadel.

After knocking it out of the park with the excellent prison drama Black Bird a couple of years ago, writer Dennis Lehane and star Taron Egerton have reunited on the new Apple mini-series Smoke. The nine-episode thriller follows a mismatched pair of investigators tasked with tracking down a couple of arsonists. Gudsen, the character played by Egerton, is an expert of some kind. He lives and breathes fire. His new partner Calderon, played by Jurnee Smollett, is a detective with a horrific past. In a contrived piece of writing that even Mahesh Bhatt would have drawn the line at, it is revealed that Calderon’s mother tried to set their house ablaze when she was a child. It’s like Dexter, with an Apple-level budget but the soul of an MX Player original.

While promoting his new film, 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle expressed retrospective reservations about Slumdog Millionaire. By far his most successful movie, it delivered the box office performance of a Marvel blockbuster and won him the prestigious Best Director Oscar. Boyle was already famous thanks to his boundary-pushing past work, but he wasn’t Bollywood famous. And yet, while reflecting on Slumdog a decade-and-a-half later, he declared that he would never make something like it again; instead, he said, he would appoint a young Indian director at the helm. It seems like Boyle, who also spearheaded the opening ceremony for the London Olympics, has developed an acute case of ‘white guilt’. This guilt can be felt in every frame of 28 Years Later.

“There is no such thing as an antiwar film,” the French New Wave icon Francois Truffaut famously declared once upon a time. It was almost as if he’d secretly been yanked into the future and made to attend a ‘special screening’ of Uri: The Surgical Strike at PVR Juhu. It is, indeed, irresponsible for any movie to glorify war, and Truffaut was of the opinion that this isn’t a supposition, but an inevitability. He wasn’t entirely correct, of course. There have been several great antiwar films over the years, and we’ll discuss some of them here. But what about Indian movies? The recent film Ground Zero, which was released on Prime Video following a theatrical run that was unfortunately affected by the Pahalgam terror attack, appears to be aware of these concerns. But it chooses to ignore them when it matters the most.