Rohit Khilnani

Priyadarshan has remade his own Malayalam film Oppam, which released in 2016, as the Hindi film Haiwaan. The original, starring Mohanlal, had a simple but effective premise: a visually impaired building manager gets involved in protecting the young daughter of a resident who is murdered as part of a revenge plot. Somehow, that story worked beautifully in 2016. In Haiwaan, the same premise struggles to hold together. The biggest problem is that the world created by Priyadarshan simply doesn’t feel believable.

Once you watch Mirzapur The Movie on the big screen, you realise this was always meant to be a theatrical experience. We have enjoyed Mirzapur on OTT, but watching these characters and this world unfold on a big screen gives the story a completely different impact. It transports you right back into their world. It also makes you realise that writing is where the real magic lies. Puneet Krishna’s writing and Gurmeet Singh’s direction are once again a winning combination. They take the same characters, put them in familiar situations and yet manage to make this feel like another chapter in their lives. The film fits somewhere in the timeline of what we have already seen in the series and works almost like another, very big episode of Mirzapur.

Taapsee Pannu plays Bani, a mother whose daughter is abducted. After losing her eyesight in the aftermath, she refuses to give up and sets out to find her child, taking on a dangerous world of crime and trafficking. Taapsee Pannu acts well and does exactly what the role demands, but unfortunately, that doesn’t save the day. Ishwak Singh too puts in a good performance, while the supporting cast does its part. The problem lies largely with Kanika Dhillon’s writing and Devashish Makhija’s direction. Gandhari is supposed to be an action thriller, but it is an action thriller without any real thrills. There are no genuine edge-of-the-seat moments, and the film rarely creates the kind of tension or urgency you expect from this genre. You keep waiting for the story to grip you, but it never quite gets there.

There are many bad films. I’ve seen bad films week after week. But there are bad films, and then there are really bad films. And then there is something like Geetu Mohandas’ Yash-starrer Toxic. The biggest problem with Toxic is not the lack of resources. In fact, it’s the opposite. The makers had everything you could possibly need to make a big, ambitious film: a superstar, a producer with money, a fantastic technical team, some of the biggest actresses, good music, huge sets, international locations and all the money required to create a spectacle. What they didn’t have was a good story.

Jason Statham is back with Mutiny, another action film that gives him exactly the kind of role his fans expect from him. Statham plays Cole Reed, a former Special Forces operative who is now working in private security. His billionaire boss is murdered and Cole is quickly made the prime suspect. He knows he has been framed and sets out to find the people responsible. His search eventually takes him to a massive ship, where he discovers that the murder is connected to a much bigger conspiracy. The story is familiar, and the film doesn’t really try to reinvent the action genre. There is a lot of chasing, fighting and shooting, with Statham moving from one dangerous situation to another.

There is something about watching Emraan Hashmi on the big screen. Whether he has short hair or long hair, the camera seems to love him, and he has that rare intensity that makes you want to keep watching. Awarapan 2 works largely because of him. The film begins with Shivam (Emraan Hashmi) finding an abandoned little girl in a graveyard. This leads him to fight a child trafficking racket in Bangkok. It’s a fairly straightforward action drama, and strangely, it feels like a film from the era when Awarapan originally released in 2007. But somehow, it works.

War dramas can be tricky. They can either become overly jingoistic or simply tell the story with honesty. Operation Safed Sagar belongs firmly in the second category. The six-part Netflix series takes us back to the late 1990s, when India and Pakistan had just held peace talks, but tensions between the two nuclear neighbours were simmering beneath the surface. The makers cleverly use archival footage to establish the political atmosphere of the time and remind us how quickly hope turned into conflict. The series is slick and stylish, yet never loses its rawness or authenticity. It stays focused on one story, the crucial role played by the Indian Air Force’s Golden Arrows Squadron during the Kargil War. Thankfully, it doesn’t get distracted by unnecessary subplots or melodrama.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the fourth Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland picks up after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home. The world no longer remembers Peter Parker, who is now living a lonely life, dedicating himself entirely to being Spider-Man. But as he faces a mysterious new threat, he also undergoes a strange transformation that puts both his identity and the city at risk. The film also stars Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Sadie Sink, Michael Mando, Tramell Tillman, and Mark Ruffalo.