Rohan Naahar

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.

Depending on where you live in the world, the first episode of HBO’s new true crime series, The Mortician, will either be scandalous or sloppy. In the 1980s, a man named David Sconce took over his family’s respectable funeral home business, and took it in an altogether macabre direction, all in the name of aggressive expansion. But the sort of shenanigans that he got up to would hardly draw a second glance in India. A lot of what he was convicted of doing would be brushed off as ‘jugaad’ here. In the United States, however — especially the wealthy Pasadena neighbourhood where Sconce conducted his activities — a scandal erupted. It was discovered that Sconce was mass-cremating bodies and essentially scooping out ashes from large barrels, and presenting them to the families of the deceased. They had no idea that the urn being given to them contained the remains of several dead people mixed together, and not just their loved one. Sconce said that this was a common practice in funeral homes, and that most businesses would be lying if they pretend that it wasn’t. You could imagine white people getting all hot and bothered about something like this, but in India, where the cost of human life is negligible, it would be more surprising if there was no skullduggery going on.

In recent years, several Bollywood big-shots with varying degrees of wealth and intelligence have said that South Indian movies are performing better than their Hindi counterparts because they’re more ‘rooted’. The word has become a part of the lexicon, alongside terms such as ‘elevation scene’ and ‘BGM’. Anurag Kashyap has said it; Javed Akhtar has said it; if they’d asked the women, they’d have said it as well. But what does the word ‘rooted’ even mean? The one movie that perfectly captures all the ingredients that are missing from Hindi cinema these days, the one movie that Bollywood would do well to emulate, is the Malayalam-language sports comedy Alappuzha Gymkhana, which debuted recently on SonyLIV after an excellent theatrical run. It’s as rooted as they come. But the definition of this kind of cinema could vary. While Kashyap thinks that ‘rooted’ cinema refers to stories of the heartland, Akhtar has complained that Hindi filmmakers are losing touch with the language. He forgets that his own children write in English and have their scripts translated. For most Bollywood producers, ‘rooted’ is merely a code word for a very specific kind of big-budget movie; the chauvinistic and bombastic sort of cinema popularised by the Telugu industry and bastardised by the north.

A few years ago, Karan Johar debuted his Dharmatic Entertainment banner with a Netflix film called Guilty. It remains memorable for two reasons; first, Kiara Advani is terrific in it, and second, it’s perhaps the only time that Bollywood has addressed the #MeToo movement head-on. Guilty, which made solid use of the Rashomon effect, ended with a rather on-the-nose title card about Bollywood having turned a blind eye to the accusations made against some of its most prominent figures. Years later, their alleged crimes are essentially forgotten. Many of the accused continue to work freely, while several of those that raised their voices were quietly outcast. Entirely by accident, Johar’s recent co-production, Kesari Chapter 2, turns out to be an accurate indictment of why, as a system, the industry failed its most vulnerable members.

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.