Rohan Naahar

The standard for Indian documentaries about cultural icons is so low that Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous, out now on Netflix, comes across as a refreshing change of pace. The streamer is itself guilty of lowering the bar with glorified PR exercises like Nayanthara: Beyond the Fairytale, Modern Masters: SS Rajamouli, and the worst of them all, The Romantics. They functioned more like corporate orientation films than the genuinely engaging journalistic profiles that they’re supposed to be. Not that the Honey Singh doc provides any real insight into his artistic process, barring the hilarious scene in which he is stumped by none other than Salman Khan. It does, however, do a decent enough job of giving audiences a peek inside his troubled mind. And for his fans, that will be enough. Many of them appear on camera, either commenting on his well-publicised fall from grace, or expressing their dismay at the lacklustre music that he has been releasing recently. In one scene, a woman tails him on a bike, and weeps openly as he stops to interact with her. A highly sensitive person himself, Honey recognises the emotions that she is experiencing, and begins serenading her with his biggest hit, “Blue Eyes.” Any cynical suspicion that you might have had about the woman being a plant disappears instantly. In another scene, a couple of flower sellers attempt to sell him a garland at the traffic signal. Honey quips that he needs a woman in his life to gift it to. They recognise him, and comment about his past troubles. “You’re looking smart now,” the young flower seller says to him. Honey is ecstatic.

When Dwayne Johnson succeeds, he takes hundreds of others along for the ride with him. But when he fails — and he has, in recent years — he doesn’t go down alone. After establishing himself as something of a B-movie auteur early in his career, director Jaume Collet-Serra, like so many others in his position, accepted Hollywood’s offer to level up to the big leagues. He was appointed by Johnson as his latest lackey, but found himself responsible for directing the star’s two biggest recent bombs. These were movies — Jungle Cruise, and more calamitously, Black Adam — that significantly derailed Johnson’s career. Collet-Serra became collateral damage. But as it turns out, being relegated to the relatively forgiving realm of streaming was exactly the jolt to the system that he needed. His latest film, Carry-On, is his best in years.

Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne is at his slipperiest in The Day of the Jackal, the new mini-series based on the classic beach read by Frederick Forsyth. The book was previously adapted into a lithe (and largely faithful) movie back in 1973, but has been updated for a modern audience by series creator Ronan Bennett. The bones of the story — a cat-and-mouse chase between an assassin on a mission and a secret agent tasked with stopping him — remain the same, but Bennett’s attempts to flesh the narrative out are mostly unsuccessful.

In the almost criminally enjoyable new Netflix series Black Doves, Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw play a chic housewife and her gay best friend who just happen to be covert operatives. They straddle dual identities, as does the show, which can often juggle tones with the deftness of a circus performer. Black Doves is at once a complex espionage thriller, a cheekily humorous dark comedy, and when it needs to be, a dreary domestic drama. It soars on the strength of its two central performances, and writing that is both self-aware and endearingly sincere.

Did the French auteur Jacques Audiard watch Chachi 420 and feel inspired to make his latest film, Emilia Pérez? Stranger things have happened this year. Nick Jonas has celebrated Holi in Greater Noida, and Ed Sheeran has fried a batata vada with Sanjyot Keer. Is the idea of Audiard, a Palme d’Or-winning maestro, watching a Kamal Haasan rip-off really that outlandish? The genre-fluid mess that it is, Emilia Pérez certainly has origins in mainstream Indian cinema — it can go from Ekta Kapoor-style drama to Farah Khan-inspired musical in a matter of minutes. And like so many of our country’s films, its gender politics aren’t entirely above reproach.

If nobody were to speak in the new Netflix show Senna, it would immediately warrant at least two extra stars. But each time any of its wafer-thin characters opens their mouths, you’re likely to be overcome by an intense desire to pump the breaks and make a pit stop, or perhaps rewatch Asif Kapadia’s seminal documentary on the subject. Based on the life and career of the legendary Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, the six-part biographical drama is flat, uninteresting, and most criminally, boring. It is perhaps the least effective way in which his extraordinary career, and lasting influence, could’ve been commemorated.

Sometimes, the wiser thing to do is to scale down. Not every film needs to be a sweeping epic, especially not one that demands a tight telling. Directed by the debutante Anna Kendrick, the darkly humorous thriller Woman of the Hour is based on an intriguing real-life story, but suffers from an under-confident execution. The movie would’ve worked wonderfully as a claustrophobic chamber piece, but feels compelled to jump across timelines and juggle between characters with an haphazardness that only does it harm. Kendrick is like an overeager Indian mum, checking the pressure cooker more often than she needs to, thereby releasing all the steam.

A well-intentioned drama that teeters on the edge of self-parody, Joy is a film that absolutely deserved to be made, but certainly not in this form. Some years ago, the utterly forgotten The Current War had all the messy ingenuity that a film about the creation of literal electricity demanded — the movie’s tone captured the spirit of its themes. Joy, which dramatises the events leading up to the first in vitro fertilisation (IVF) birth, would have you believe that all conception — let alone that of the artificial kind — is a cakewalk.