Rohan Naahar

Reuniting for the first time in nearly two decades, director Spike Lee and star Denzel Washington are gazing inwards in Highest 2 Lowest. The crime-thriller premiered at Cannes earlier this year — as an official selection; not like something Anupam Kher might claim to have taken to the festival — and received a token theatrical release before dropping on Apple TV+. The wait was worth it. Over the last few decades, Washington and Lee have established themselves as perhaps the most vital voices in Black cinema. It is a position that the protagonist of Highest 2 Lowest finds himself in as well. David King doesn’t work in the movie business, but he is described as a kingmaker in the world of music. In many ways, he is a stand-in for both the filmmaker and his favourite star.

The problem with Hindi horror movies used to be that they’d sabotage their scares with music and romance. This was done mainly as a promotional tactic to lure (family) audiences to theatres, and to then give them an opportunity to use the washroom or get a popcorn refill during the interval. Neither the music nor the romance had any business being in those movies, but they were left intact anyway. They contributed nothing to the plot; in fact, they actually brought it to a standstill. The music and romance issue with Hindi horror has now been replaced with an even more irritating trend: social messaging. The latest film to fall prey to this bizarre, self-defeating strategy is Maa. It would, however, be a stretch to even describe it as a horror film, seeing how far it strays from the genre in its final act. This is when Kajol’s grieving single mother, Ambika, discovers that her teenage daughter has been kidnapped by a forest-dwelling demon, who intends on impregnating her to carry forward his ‘vansh’ or some nonsense. Ambika rushes into the lion’s den, so to speak, determined to rescue her daughter from the demon’s clutches. But before she leaves on her mission, she is told by the superstitious locals that she must perform a ritual, and seek the blessings of Goddess Kali. Kali is the only one who can vanquish the demon, she is told. And so, Ambika… does a song-and-dance number.

At what point do you start feeling bad about the idea of wanting someone dead? While watching the new Tamil-language film Maareesan, you crave nothing more than the satisfaction of seeing a middle-aged man murder child molesters. The movie aims to appease a primal desire buried deep within us, and it does so with patience and skill. But the catharsis is temporary. After a while, you’re going to have to live with yourself, a person who wouldn’t mind a few murders here and there as long as the ones being murdered are terrible people. But, the service that Maareesan is accidentally providing has a greater purpose. In its efforts to manipulate our inherent goodness — who wouldn’t want to watch bad people be punished? — it is exposing our blood lust.

There is a scam in Punjab that Rajkumar Hirani would’ve heard about while researching Dunki. Shady travel agents are charging crores from desperate (and mostly uneducated) Indians with the promise of arranging safe passage to the American state of Georgia. The scam? These poor men are being sent to the country of Georgia instead. In most cases, they’ve sold off family land, quit their jobs, and exhausted their entire life savings; some of them even have wives and children with them. All to be sent to the land of khachapuri. To put it simply, there are a bunch of people from Bathinda knocking about in the Caucasus right now. Anyway, the folks who made the new John Abraham film Tehran are no smarter. The movie opens with a voiceover in which we are told about an operation carried out by Iran in 2012, where Israeli diplomats were targeted in Thailand, India, and Georgia. They meant the country. But the map that the movie shows instead is that of the US state.

The new Netflix series Saare Jahan Se Accha begins with Pratik Gandhi’s character being posted to the R&AW’s Islamabad station, and it ends with him foiling a major nuclear operation and blowing things up real good. All of this happens in six episodes of roughly 45 minutes each. In these six episodes, we are introduced to several characters — field agents, a journalist, the chief of the ISI; even Indira Gandhi drops by. Most of these characters, including the protagonist’s wife, is introduced with enough fanfare to suggest that they are going to be important to the plot. Some of them are, most aren’t. But you can never shake the feeling that Saare Jahan Se Accha was stripped to the bone after somebody interfered with either the scripts or the first assembly. Nearly everybody in the cast suffers, not to mention the show itself. But nobody is done quite so dirty as Tillotama Shome.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that Julia Fox has a cameo in Night Always Comes, the new thriller on Netflix starring Vanessa Kirby. Modelled on the movies of the Safdie brothers, Night Always Comes stares more than just a structure with Uncut Gems, in which Fox played a memorable cameo. That ticking timebomb thriller followed a desperate New York jeweller weaponising his gambling addiction in a breakneck attempt to gather cash. It was a movie that a third-act basketball match into a life-and-death scenario. In Night Always Comes, Kirby plays a working class woman staring at sure-shot eviction if she isn’t able to come up with a $25,000 deposit in one night.

Animation hall-of-famer Genndy Tartakovsky latest film, Fixed, was originally set for a theatrical release, but was offloaded by Warner Bros. during a cost-cutting drive. While movies such as Coyote vs. Acme and Batgirl — both were dealt similar blows — remain sight unseen, it’s easy to imagine why the studio would’ve wanted to wash the scent of Fixed off of itself. A wiser move would’ve been to bury it in the backyard. Painfully unfunny, the train wreck of a movie feels interminable at even 80 minutes long; it’s crude, cringe, and filled with juvenile dialogue that makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on a group of 12-year-old boys at the playground.

Can a society that is terrified of confronting the evil at its core ever produce a single subversive piece of art? Certainly, Indian cinema is still taking baby steps when it comes to addressing our immorality; here, a movie about caste discrimination is a movie about caste discrimination, a movie about corporate greed is a movie about corporate greed, a movie about political corruption is a movie about political corruption. But it will be a while before our cinema is empowered to subvert. It will be a while before someone makes a gothic horror about crimes against women, or a creature feature about the Kashmir issue. It will be a while before we get a homegrown version of Barbarian director Zach Cregger’s brilliant new film, Weapons.