Rohan Naahar

It doesn’t take a genius to know that Dhamaal 4, directed by Indra Kumar, isn’t a good movie. At 2 hours and 20 minutes long, it’s simply a collection of gags, stitched together with weaker connective tissue than a physiotherapist could detect in the body of a 90-year-old. The film begins with a suspiciously AI-generated-looking prologue about pirates — you read that correctly. Years later, a collection of greedy buffoons sets out on a quest to locate treasure that these pirates left hidden.

Miranda Priestly probably wouldn’t tolerate Angelina Jolie’s character from Couture, a new drama set in the world of high fashion that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025. Jolie plays Maxine, an indie filmmaker who’s been hired to bring her brand of transgressive edginess to a promotional short for Paris Fashion Week. With neither the patience nor the experience for promotional work, Maxine can barely mask her contempt for her new gig — and that’s before a call from her doctor flips her world upside down. Couture couldn’t be further removed from the glossy world of this summer’s fashion world-set blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada 2. And while that movie makes excuses for the same industry that Couture wants to dress down, director Alice Winocour’s attempt to offer a ground-level perspective of an industry that has been glamorized for far too long turns out dull, directionless, and mildly delusional.

The term “deconstruction” is often thrown around in the world of haute cuisine, which director Michael Sarnoski took a long whiff of in his phenomenal debut feature, Pig. It starred Nicolas Cage as a reclusive former chef who lives in a self-imposed exile in the woods, accompanied by a pet truffle pig and his many demons. Pig remains one of the finest directorial debuts of the last decade, and is a great lead-in to Sarnoski’s latest film, The Death of Robin Hood.

A computer whiz and a tech-challenged cop team up to solve a missing person case in Hotstar’s new crime-comedy series Pritam and Pedro, co-created by the illustrious Rajkumar Hirani. The series essentially serves as a launch vehicle for his son, Vir, who plays the mysterious Pritam. We meet the young man as he’s trying to report his grandfather’s missing tape recorder at a Goa police station run by Pedro, played by Arshad Warsi. The cops throw him in jail when he refuses to leave without registering his complaint. Instantly, Pritam stands out as an honourable young man, while Pedro comes across as a no-nonsense veteran who has seen it all. On paper, they make for the perfect odd-couple — the Indian film industries don’t make nearly enough buddy comedies. However, that’s about as interesting as things get, because, at the end of the day, this is a Hirani production.

We often underestimate the power that comes with having a backup plan. This is probably what people with standbys feel when they get cheated on. Or what folks with a lucrative job offer in their pocket think to themselves when they’re presented with peanuts during appraisal season. Having a backup plan affords you the agency you normally wouldn’t have in everyday life. But as immensely privileged a responsibility as reviewing movies may be, it often leaves you without a plan B. And where there is no plan B, there is no power. For two, sometimes three hours, you’re at the mercy of whatever is projected in front of you. No running, no hiding, no sneaking into the theatre next door to sacrifice precious brain cells to Cocktail 2 again. These are the thoughts that run through your mind when you watch something like Baby Do Die Do, the new movie starring the otherwise capable Huma Qureshi.

​Make no mistake, it is a minor miracle that Enola Holmes, the Netflix film franchise which had its first outing in 2020, hasn’t been corrupted by everything that has happened in the past half-decade. The franchise has survived two Trump administrations, a pandemic and whatever the Russo Brothers (filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo, known for directing four Marvel films) have done to the streaming industry (they reportedly tried to revolutionise the space with offerings like Citadel and The Electric State, but received limited success). And yet somehow, the Enola Holmes movies — revolving around the adventures of the newly-imagined sister of English literature’s legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes — are still as earnest as ever.

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.