Rohan Naahar

Someone on social media the other day posted that each of the last 15 Best Picture winners at the Oscars could’ve been funded for the amount that Netflix spent on The Electric State, the astronomically expensive new movie from directors Joe and Anthony Russo. We’re talking about films like Oppenheimer, which itself would’ve taken up $100 million of this cash pool, leaving the remaining $220 million to be spent on landmark films such as Parasite, 12 Years a Slave, and this year’s Anora. Starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown, The Electric State is the kind of movie that seems to get longer while you’re watching it. No matter how deep into it you are — it could be the end of the first act or the second — it always feels like there’s an hour still left. On the face of it, The Electric State isn’t a particularly long movie. It taps out at around 120 minutes, which is positively merciful of the Russos, whose first gig after the global success of the three-hour-long Avengers: Endgame was Cherry, a 141-minute drama about a drug addict who robs banks to fund his habit.

In a recent interview, actor Rajiv Thakur admitted that audiences that have seen him as a fixture on Kapil Sharma’s comedy shows will have no idea that he played a menacing terrorist in the spectacular streaming series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. And those who discovered him through IC 814 wouldn’t know that he has spent years as a part of Sharma’s silly troupe. In the Venn diagram of Indian entertainment, these audiences will never intersect, even though both IC 814 and The Great Indian Kapil Show are available on Netflix. Similarly, it is possible that cinephiles familiar with Takeshi Kitano through his art-house yakuza movies, or his memorable appearance in the hyper-violent Battle Royale, will collapse in shock they are told that he was so central to the game show Takeshi’s Castle that they named it after him. Kitano gets to play with his two creative personalities — the Golden Lion-winning filmmaker and the court jester — in his latest movie, Broken Rage, which was released on Prime Video with less fanfare than what you’d find at funerals in certain cultures.

Both Mark Zuckerberg and the movie based on his early life, The Social Network, are referenced in the new Netflix mini-series Apple Cider Vinegar. Named after the snake oil that was being peddled online by seemingly every lifestyle influencer a few years ago, the show is inspired by the rather unbelievable story of Belle Gibson, a young Australian woman who scammed millions into subscribing to her personalised diet plans. Belle claimed that she’d beaten brain cancer by consuming clean food instead of conventional chemotherapy. The truth was that Belle was never diagnosed with cancer at all; it was the neglect that she experienced in childhood that compelled her to con the world. She’s played in the six-episode series by the wonderful Kaitlyn Dever, who rose to fame with the coming-of-age film Booksmart, and the even better Netflix series Unbelievable. In Apple Cider Vinegar, she puts on a convincing Australian accent, and finds a balance between Belle’s delusion and ambition. Abandoned by her troubled mother, Belle supposedly ran away from home at the age of 12. She gave birth to her first child when she was still a teenager, and subsequently embarked on a career as a huckster. Fuelled by a desire to be loved and accepted, she turned to social media to scratch this itch. Belle founded The Whole Pantry mobile app, through which she literally influenced terminally ill men and women into shunning traditional forms of treatment.

The Gorge is four movies in one. Some might describe this as a value-for-money proposition. But others might find it a bit all over the place. There is no doubt, however, that the film bites off more than it can chew. And in the age of snackable ‘content’, this could be construed as high praise. Directed by Scott Derrickson, a filmmaker who has routinely shown skill at elevating genre movies, The Gorge coasts by for the majority of its two-hour run-time on star-power alone. There are long stretches of plodding nonsense, yes, but the film’s biggest strength lies in its constant determination to be unpredictable — relatively speaking, at least. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play Levi and Drasa, two snipers who are hand-picked to keep guard at watchtowers on opposite ends of a mysterious gorge. We aren’t told where the gorge is located, or what our heroes are even supposed to be guarding. In time, however, we learn that the facility is strategically located somewhere between America and Russia, and that protecting it from being discovered was one of the biggest objectives during the Cold War. Levi and Drasa have been drafted to keep watch for exactly a year, following which they’ll be replaced by two others.

Director William Friedkin was so old and uninsurable during the making of the courtroom drama The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial that the Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro sat beside him on set every day, contractually bound to take over in case Friedkin were to — forgive the morbidity — die mid-production. The legendary filmmaker got the job done, but passed away not long afterwards. He was 87 years old. Clint Eastwood is even older; at 94, he just delivered what could be his final film, Juror No 2. Coincidentally another courtroom drama, the movie arrives over three decades after Eastwood entered the self-reflective phase of his career with the contemplative Western Unforgiven. In the last decade or so, he has devoted himself — as one would expect of a dying man — to understanding the idea of decency. Having made a name for himself in a genre famous for viewing the world in black and white, Eastwood has spent the better part of the last couple of decades dabbling in different shades of grey.

Perhaps the year’s most striking documentary, Sugarcane is billed as an ‘investigation’ into the crimes that were committed by Catholic missionaries against Indigenous peoples of Canada across a century, but it is equally successful as an examination of inherited trauma, and as a study of a community in crisis. At the beginning of the 20th Century, schools were set up specifically for Indigenous children across North America, ostensibly to help them assimilate into Western culture. The children were subjected to unspeakable crimes at these ‘residential’ institutions, operated exclusively by the Catholic church, causing many of them to take their lives as they grew older. The magnitude of the tragedy, which is revealed gradually throughout the film, is immeasurable.

Trust Wallace to get himself mixed up in a plot that puts all of humanity at peril. The eccentric inventor — he’s the protagonist of Nick Park’s four-time Oscar-winning stop-motion animation series — makes his streaming debut alongside his ‘top dog’ Gromit with the feature-length Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Released on Netflix, the film is a pure nostalgia trip for fans who grew up with their charming adventures, replete with quirky household gizmos, absurd villains, and more cheese than you’d find in a Frenchman’s larder.

A Canadian couple takes their children on a tour of the world in the new National Geographic documentary film Blink, but it isn’t just an ordinary vacation. Three of their four kids, aged between 13 and 7, have been diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable eye condition that will eventually render them blind. Overnight, the lives of the Pelletier family changed forever. The movie begins after the parents, Edith and Sebastien, made their peace with the cards they were dealt, although there is a sense that they will never fully wrap their heads around the tragedy. Still in the process of accepting their new reality, they collect their entire life’s savings and plan a trip across the globe.