Rohan Naahar

The Central Board of Film Certification’s screening process can often be arbitrary. Only recently, Indian audiences complained about the CBFC’s decision to have a 30-second kiss shortened in the film Superman. A person on social media pithily observed that the scene would’ve made the cut had Superman been slapping Lois Lane instead of making out with her. There is an element of truth to this, of course. It wasn’t too long ago that the CBFC deemed Marco — a movie in which many children die cruel deaths — fit for public viewing. At the same time, they’ve stalled the release of films such as Honey Trehan’s Panjab 95 and Sandhya Suri’s Santosh. Sometimes, however, this chaotic approach to film certification allows certain movies to slip through the cracks. Narivetta is one of them. Directed by Anuraj Manohar and starring Tovino Thomas, the mere existence of the Malayalam-language film is enough to suggest that the movie gods have a sense of humour. The CBFC can block Santosh, but while they were abusing their power, Narivetta snuck under its nose. A more populist cousin to Santosh, the film fixates on many of the same themes. Narivetta is about the systemic oppression of minorities, and mass corruption in organisations meant to serve and protect; but more than anything else, Narivetta dares to raise objections about police brutality at a time when Rohit Shetty’s cinema has basically coated the concept in Teflon.

Throttled by his government and abandoned by his peers — inanimate objects and abstract ideas get more support than Indian comedians — Vir Das seems to be in conflict with his past. His sixth stand-up special for Netflix, Fool Volume, combines his trademark self-effacing delivery with his signature ambition. Fool Volume was filmed in Mumbai, London, and New York, at venues of different shapes and sizes, in front of crowds with different thresholds of tolerance. But the elaborate production and occasional filmmaking flourish isn’t the most impressive thing about the one-hour special. It’s the comedian’s ability to spin a story, to structure a narrative that serves as yet another reminder of his skill. There isn’t a dull moment in the hour-long set, which Das says was rewritten after he lost his voice, literally, six weeks before he was supposed to perform it. He abandoned the material that Netflix had paid him for, and, either by chance or by design, found himself gravitating towards the style of comedy that he does best. In Fool Volume, Das gazes inward; he glances at the world around him, and then, he gets down to business. The show isn’t so much about a comedian finding his voice again as it is about a middle-aged Indian man finding a new voice.

By now, Quentin Tarantino’s hot take on Superman has resurfaced online enough times for it to have seeped into the cultural consciousness. Via one of his onscreen mouthpieces, Tarantino theorised that Superman truly was an alien living among us. The blue suit with the large ’S’ wasn’t a costume for him; it was the attire of his people. The real costume was the suit and tie he wore as Clark Kent. “Clark Kent is how Superman views us,” Tarantino said. “And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak… he’s unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.” The same theory, funnily enough, could be applied to James Gunn. In his new Superman movie, the filmmaker offers a similar outsider’s perspective on earthly matters. Positioned as a quasi-apology for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel — the most expensive emo music video ever filmed — Gunn’s Superman harkens back to the goofy cartoons of the 1980s. It’s bright, kid-friendly, and energetically performed. It’s also surprisingly contemporary. Not only does this Superman live in the DC Universe’s equivalent of 2025, he also finds himself at the centre of a divided world. The film’s opening titles inform us that ‘metahumans’ like him first arrived on Earth 3,000 years ago. Three years ago, Kal-El ‘came out’ as Superman, and three minutes ago, he suffered his first loss on the battlefield.

A regular reappraisal of old masters should be made standard practice in all art. Just because someone made a good movie once doesn’t mean that they should be given immunity from bad reviews for the rest of their lives. Sure, making Piku and October and Gulabo Sitabo and Sardar Udham (in a row!) allows you one I Want to Talk, but that’s all. It is only when certain sacred cows are nudged out of (self) harm’s way that they can introspect. Had somebody somebody pointed out the obvious to Sanjay Leela Bhansali years ago, we wouldn’t have had to endure Heeramandi. Had someone criticised Nayakan for what it is — a blatant act of plagiarism — we wouldn’t have had to witness director Mani Ratnam and star Kamal Haasan doing it all over again in Thug Life. The gangster drama was released on Netflix merely four weeks after it flopped in theaters. Thug Life debuted to intense scrutiny, seeing as it marked the filmmaker and actor’s first collaboration in nearly four decades. During those years, the two rose to the pinnacle of Indian cinema, having earned not just a reputation for making hits, but also a certain respect that eludes most of their colleagues. Mani Ratnam is the thinking man’s blockbuster director; Kamal Haasan is the thinking man’s movie star. And yet, the best that they could come up with is yet another tired reimagining of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, injected with a toxic dose of Prashanth Neel.

Director Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex hums with life. It’s both dreamlike and dreadful, unfolding with a tenacity that few first-time filmmaker can conjure. The coming-of-age movie follows three teenage British girls on a summer trip to Greece; it’s their final week of freedom before they’re hurled into the ‘real world’ to look for jobs, partners, and perhaps a purpose. But the trip takes a dark turn when Tara, the liveliest of the trio, has a distressing experience. More a tone poem than a conventional, narrative-driven film, How to Have Sex shares much in common with fellow British masterpiece Aftersun. Like that movie, which was also directed by a first-timer and unveiled at Cannes, it has the hazy impact of a suddenly remembered dream. Manning Walker based the story on her own experiences, as did director Charlotte Wells with Aftersun. The Mediterranean setting is their only superficial similarity; both stories deal with trauma and revisit incidents that shape the lives of their protagonists.

We had no idea how good we had it in July 2020. Little did we know, for instance, that the pandemic just… wouldn’t end. Petrol was cheaper, the air was cleaner, and we were getting used to life at home. Plus, you could still count on Netflix to occasionally produce an impressive film or two. Extraction remains one of the slickest action movies of the last five years; in fact, it basically cannibalised The Old Guard, an equally good Netflix original that debuted only a few weeks later. Starring Charlize Theron alongside an overqualified supporting cast, the movie screamed for a sequel, which was quickly approved. But did you know that The Old Guard 2 was shot three years ago? The movie had been sitting on the shelves for quite some time before being released this week, and it shows. In case you weren’t aware that The Old Guard 2 existed, don’t blame yourself; it’s not your fault. Netflix has been suspiciously quiet about it, perhaps because the finished movie resembles a work-in-progress — a film that hasn’t yet been streamlined on the edit table. It retains the hyperreal gloss of ungraded raw footage, while giving the strong impression that what we’ve been presented with is some kind of unfinished cut. Among the film’s many flaws — we’ll get to the rest momentarily — is Barry Ackroyd’s flat cinematography.

Nearly four decades ago, the late director Tony Scott, star Tom Cruise, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer attempted to re-conjure the magic that made Top Gun such a cultural touchstone with Days of Thunder, a racing movie that followed the same basic structure, but replaced the fighter jets with fast cars. Now, Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski are essentially following the same playbook with Top Gun: Maverick and the recently released F1. The only difference, this time around, is that Cruise didn’t return for the sports drama, perhaps because he has been occupied for the last half-decade by the Mission: Impossible franchise. But this was all for the best, because nobody other than Brad Pitt could’ve played the role of the seasoned drifter Sonny Hayes. It’s an odd observation to make, because Cruise literally played the most famous drifter of them all, Jack Reacher. Twice. But he was famously miscast in those movies. Not because he didn’t fit writer Lee Child’s physical description of the towering Reacher, but because, as an actor, Cruise doesn’t exactly project the going-with-the-flow energy that is required for such a character. He is simply too intense, his persona is too curated, too meticulous to play someone that lives like hobo. There’s a reason why people joke that he’s actually an alien scientologist sent to spy on earthlings. Pitt, on the other hand, has the exact opposite screen presence. He’s a relaxed, relatable, somewhat rudderless.

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.