Rohan Naahar

Every so often, Netflix releases a true crime documentary so algorithmically rigorous, so obnoxiously constructed, and so casually exploitative that its success is almost a foregone conclusion. It would, in fact, be a miracle if the film didn’t break through the clutter. Unknown Number: The High School Catfish follows in the undignified tradition of films such as The Tinder Swindler and The Social Dilemma, narrating a story so bizarre that they could’ve made 15 different versions of it and still had material left over. The version presented to us, although undeniably engaging, is perhaps the least responsible way that the filmmakers could’ve approached this scandalous tale. The crime that it revisits wasn’t entirely victimless. And while Unknown Number understands the tragedy at its core — the final 15 minutes contain enough evidence to support this theory — the way it chooses to present its findings is rather odd. The film revolves around… nobody. While it could’ve chosen to approach it from the perspective of at least three different people, it decides to make the story itself the protagonist. Actively ignoring all the different human interest angles on the table is unusual for any documentarian — one could argue that it is their job to uncover human arcs by sifting through hours and hours of raw footage — but that is what director Skye Borgman does here.

Directed by and featuring Eddie Huang, Vice is Broke plays out like the most venomous exit interview of all time. Huang served as a key contributor to the punk magazine Vice during its heyday in the 2010s. He’d made a name for himself as a chef, and appeared to have just the sort of personality that Vice would seek out back then. This was when the magazine was expanding its online footprint with immersive video reportage and outstanding documentaries. They were filing dispatches from war-torn Afghanistan and the hermit kingdom of North Korea. Vice reporters were doing drugs in the Amazon and interviewing high-ranking Taliban officials. On a weekly basis, they were hurling Molotov cocktails of rage, righteousness, and rebellion in the face of legacy media. All of it, according to one person, was done with the aim of making ‘the rich feel cool and the cool feel rich’.

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.