Rohan Naahar

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.

While Tom Cruise dangles off World War II biplanes and redefines movie stardom for the 21st century, Salman Khan is celebrated for simply showing up to work. This, in essence, is why our mainstream cinema can never compete. Both Cruise and Salman have attained demi-god status, but at this point, Bhai’s bracelet has a bigger screen presence than him. Watched mere days after Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Salman’s latest film, Sikandar, feels more disheartening than it may have appeared when it was released in theatres. It’s the most recent example of how mainstream Bollywood is pandering to the audience’s perceived demands, instead of challenging them to keep up. Sikandar is made up of around 500 equally nonsensical plots, which are introduced and executed in 10-minute bursts of maniacal disregard for the tenets of moviemaking. It’s like micro-dosing on Being Human deodorant; you’re going to come out the other side either with a vaguely foreign accent, or you’re going to become obsessed with finding doppelgängers of your ex-partners. Starring Salman as the king Sanjay Rajkot, Sikandar mutilates the very idea of cinema with its ineptly edited, lazily written, and lethargically acted brand of storytelling.

The Caravan reported in 2024 that Nita Ambani hired choreographer Vaibhavi Merchant during the inauguration of the NMACC, which was attended by everyone from Zendaya to Gigi Hadid. Merchant, known for choreographing iconic songs such as “Kajra Re,” was reportedly with Mrs Ambani, telling her “how to smile, now to fold hands, say namaste.” This is the sort of detail about how the other half lives that would elicit gasps of disbelief from the likes of you and I. Sirens, the new dark comedy mini-series on Netflix, offers an exaggerated glimpse inside the lives of the one percent. Julianne Moore plays Michaela, the wife of a billionaire, who is joined at the hip with her assistant Simone, played by Milly Alcock.

After he directed Aladdin — the anonymous 2019 remake that you’d forgotten made over $1 billion at the box office — Guy Ritchie became extremely prolific almost overnight. He made another movie that same year. But more importantly, Aladdin marked a major stylistic evolution for the famously flashy filmmaker: he got really into clothes. Nowadays, you find yourself admiring the tailoring in his films more than the films themselves. There is little, for instance, to like about Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. But, boy, was Cary Elwes dressed smartly. Unfortunately, the costumes in Ritchie’s recent films are inversely proportional to their quality. The worse the movie, the better the clothes. The clothes in his latest, Fountain of Youth, are excellent.

In this era of exploitative true crime television, Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story stands out as being unusually restrained. But this depends entirely on your ability to resist googling the sordid scandal that inspired it. The show will work only for those who aren’t familiar with the case; anybody who remembers reading about it in the papers will probably wonder what made the filmmakers omit crucial details. Nevertheless, Fred and Rose West is an unusually well-made piece of true crime TV; it circles the case, but doesn’t circumvent it. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the series was produced by the streamer’s UK arm, which has historically been superior to the American (and certainly, the Indian) wings. Fred and Rose West is perhaps the most disturbing documentary of its kind that the streamer has released since 2019’s Tell Me Who I Am, another British production.

Rules don’t apply to the rich in Secrets We Keep, the addictive new Nordic-noir series on Netflix. The six-episode thriller unfolds through the perspective of Cecilie, a young mother who lives along with her lawyer husband and their two children in a spectacular lakeside villa in Denmark. Her seemingly idyllic existence is upset by the disappearance of her neighbour Katarina’s au pair, a Filipino immigrant named Ruby. Only a day ago, Ruby had approached Cecelie in confidence, and had asked for her help in being extracted from Katarina’s home. Something was very wrong, Ruby said. Cecelie awkwardly avoided any trouble, and advised Ruby to raise any concerns that she might have with her employers. Little did she know that Ruby would go missing under mysterious circumstances mere hours later.