Rohan Naahar

It is easy, one would imagine, for a filmmaker to be overwhelmed by the words of the great August Wilson. Especially if they’ve never made a film before. Musical and marauding, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s language is a vessel for the ambition and anger of his people. Netflix’s The Piano Lesson — the latest adaptation of Wilson’s celebrated Pittsburgh Cycle of plays — is directed by the debutante Malcolm Washington, whose father, the legendary Denzel Washington, has publicly devoted this stage of his career to shepherding Wilson’s work onto the screen.

Like its protagonist, director Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls is a constantly evolving entity. But behind an outer veneer of control, there is burgeoning angst, a simmering chaos, and a terrible desire to be seen and heard. The psychological drama played to an uncommonly interactive packed crowd at the Dharamshala International Film Festival recently — it was a bizarre screening that exemplified how important it is to watch movies in a community environment. Often, these experiences reveal more about society than the films themselves.

There is an early scene in Singham Again where Ajay Devgn’s titular super-cop barges into his teenage son’s party along with a couple of cronies, embarrasses him in public, and hauls him back home. He does it, it seems, only to give director Rohit Shetty another opportunity to shoot him in stylised slow-motion. At home, Singham and his wife, Avni (Kareena Kapoor Khan) lecture their son about how out of touch he is with Indian values. It’s a deeply melodramatic moment; you can almost imagine them turning into Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini from Baghban in a couple of decades. But one thing is made absolutely clear by this early domestic drama: Shetty and Devgn don’t think too highly of the nation’s youth. This became a recurring theme even in their pre-release press interviews. They would both proudly declare that they barely resonate with the kids these days, and how, back in their day, they were roughing it out in the real world. This is a bizarre stance to take, for multiple reasons. For one, it’s always a good idea to understand younger generations. You might just learn something; just ask Javed Akhtar. But second, Singham Again is aimed at the very demographic that Shetty and Devgn have decided to infantilise.

A young woman grieving the death of her child treks to the cliffside spot where he died. She intends to jump herself. Played by Kelsey Asbille, the woman is approached by a mysterious stranger, played by Finn Wittrock. He recognises immediately that she’s one step away from falling to her death. The stranger doesn’t attempt to talk her down from the ledge, but he makes enough of an impression for her to reconsider. They walk back together to the parking lot, where things take a sudden turn. The man injects her with some kind of paralytic substance, revealing that he isn’t a good samaritan after all. Thus begins Don’t Move, a high-concept thriller that producer Sam Raimi probably thought was going to turn out like his knockout 2016 film Don’t Breathe. It didn’t. These movies have nothing in common beyond Raimi’s involvement, and that gentle nudge of a title. In terms of quality, they couldn’t be further apart from each other. Don’t Move appears to be so pleased with its premise — it’s a survival thriller featuring an immobile protagonist! — that it forgets it needs to sustain this early momentum. The movie succeeds in drawing your sympathies for its heroine, Iris, but struggles to put her in interesting scenarios after this pre-credits sequence.

A few years ago, there was an uproar over a scene of sustained violence in director Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, a period crime drama about a real-life incident that led to the deaths of three young men. The controversial scene unfolded across several uncomfortable minutes, and showed a group of white police officers beat down a lineup of innocent Black men. Bigelow didn’t avert her eyes from the horror, and instead, caught the audience by the scruff of the neck and made them watch. The film’s examination of ingrained racism, police brutality, and the systemic oppression of minorities drew parallels to modern-day America, but it also divided audiences. Director Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, which was screened at the recent Dharamshala International Film Festival, unpacks similar themes, but in the context of contemporary north India. Like Detroit, it pivots on a scene of unrelenting brutality that transforms it from a standard police procedural into something more haunting.

In director Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees, three generations of a Kashmiri family grapple with identity, erasure, and a desire to be heard in an ever-evolving and increasingly intolerant India. It is cruelly ironic, therefore, that the movie itself has been throttled like its characters. Originally titled Freedom, the ambitious saga has effectively been caged on a hard disk by the paranoid Netflix. But despite being denied a release by the streamer, Tees was presented in its complete form at the 13th Dharamshala International Film Festival recently, with Banerjee present to soak in the warmth that seemed to be emanating from the hundreds of pilgrims who queued up for it on a winter evening. Tees opens, rather worryingly, with a scene that wouldn’t feel out of place in Banerjee’s latest, Love Sex Aur Dhoka 2, which was more an act of self-immolation than self-expression, if we’re being honest. A computer-generated black cat walks towards us, before it is revealed to be the internet avatar of a human being looking for a connection. The year is 2042, and a young writer named Anhad Draboo (Shashank Arora) appears rattled by the rejection of his rebellious verses by an overbearing government.

Influenced by every zombie thriller ever made, but more specifically, by the video game series The Last of Us, Prime Video’s Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End is a competently crafted thriller let down by a lack of ambition. The Spanish-language film unfolds across a year in the life of a grieving man named Manel, who is caught by himself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Manel is heartbroken over the death of his wife in a car crash not too long ago — the movie opens with this tragic scene — and is hanging on by a thread when the fast-spreading virus breaks out. Having survived the pandemic, everybody assumes that they can handle this outbreak as well. But they have no idea just how terrifying things are going to get. Initially, Manel decides to stay put at home and ignore the government’s instructions to participate in a military-aided evacuation. But after a couple of months in isolation, he has no choice but to make a move. Manel’s sister left with her family for the Canary Islands just as the outbreak got out of control, and even though he lost all contact with them a while ago, he decides that the smartest thing to do would be to make his way to them. Apocalypse Z is divided into chapters; not literally, like a Quentin Tarantino movie, but more structurally.

A gleefully grotesque satire of success, director Coralie Fargeat’s English-language debut, The Substance, lives up to its title. But it has plenty of style to spare as well. Demi Moore stars as Elizabeth Sparkle, a fading actress who, in a moment of great weakness, decides to sample an underground drug that purportedly reverses the ageing process. But she quickly discovers that she has bitten off more than she can chew. The Substance is to Moore’s career what Birdman was to Michael Keaton’s, or The Wrestler was to Mickey Rourke’s, a movie that sheds its superficial obsession with superficiality and transforms into a whole new beast towards the end. It’s the kind of film that requires courage from everybody involved, including the caterers who were presumably tasked with preparing a menu that wouldn’t end up on the shooting floor everyday. It would be remarkable if nobody threw up while making this movie, because every moment of its incredible final act positively challenges you to keep your lunch in your stomach. But before Fargeat unleashes her final flourish, she sets up an increasingly absurd universe for Elizabeth to navigate.