Saibal Chatterjee

Secret of a Mountain Serpent by writer-director Nidhi Saxena is a poetic exploration of female desire set against the backdrop of the Kargil conflict. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, the film weaves folklore, symbolism, and haunting performances by Trimala Adhikari and Adil Hussain into a tapestry of longing, liberation, and cinematic beauty. With its blend of myth and reality, evocative sound design, and visual mastery, it is an unforgettable contribution to Indian independent cinema. Between Dream and Reality Writer-director Nidhi Saxena’s second film, Secret of a Mountain Serpent, is an exquisite piece of cinema. It blurs the line between the dreamily meditative and the wholly tangible to explore the boundaries of female desire when it is set free from the suffocating constraints of societal stipulations. ‘

Producer Sajid Nadiadwala returns after a five-year hiatus with his nearly one-decade-old action franchise, which is perhaps like no other in the world. All the films in the series, including the one being reviewed here, are standalone ventures with Tiger Shroff in the guise of an overly belligerent rebel being the only common link between them Baaghi 4 foists upon us more of what the franchise has done before in abundance - gratuitous violence - in order to peddle a brand of toxic masculinity that the world can certainly do without. Shroff, of course, has the chops to plunge headlong, with his action hero poise intact, into spitfire sequences and give them all he has - and then some. But what can an actor do when what is on paper is only superficially visceral and does not pack the sort of punch that can inject some credibility into the protagonist’s exploits.

Coolie has no dearth of big stars. It has Aamir Khan in a special appearance as a swaggering, heavily tattooed crime lord who pops out of a chopper in the middle of a desert at the fag-end of the film. Upendra has an extended cameo that kicks of late in the second half when the chips are down for once for the titular protagonist. Nor is that all. Nagarjuna Akkineni dons the garb of the principal villain and Soubin Shahir slips into the skin of a slimy double-dealer. It’s top-heavy, to say the least. Each one of them carries his weight in Coolie-The Powerhouse (the title of the Hindi dub of the Tamil action extravaganza that’s been released without the suffix). But it is hardly surprising that the onus of doing most of the heavy lifting in squarely upon the redoubtable Rajinikanth.

Talent, teamwork and tenacity are attributes that, as a rule, occupy centrestage in a sports drama. These qualities come to the aid of a team of hoopsters that fights to beat the odds stacked against it. Add to the proceedings a dash of feel-good, high-spirited humour and periodic tugs at the heartstrings and you have Sitaare Zameen Par, somewhat inconsistent in pace but always entertaining. The underdog story, scripted by Divy Nidhi Sharma and directed by R.S. Prasanna, pivots around ten neurodiverse basketball players placed under a reluctant coach, an angry not-so-young man in dire need of a course correction. The team does not get along with the coach. A judge assigns the job to the latter as punishment for ramming his car into a police vehicle in a drunk driving case. Although they find winning ways difficult to come by to begin with, each member of the outfit makes steady progress on and off the basketball court.

Late in this sprawling and disappointingly inconsistent gangster saga, the male protagonist, badly wounded, asks a doctor about the exact nature of the injection that she is about to administer. She lets on that the fluid in the syringe is a sedative guaranteed to lull him to sleep. Mani Ratnam’s Thug Life may not be as soporific as that but large swathes of it could certainly have done with targeted shots of stimulants. Thug Life isn’t quite the kind of film that you expect to be a huge disappointment. In an era in which scepticism, even trepidation, precedes the decision to watch a movie that has blockbuster aspirations, a Mani Ratnam movie, no matter what genre it belongs to, is usually an exception. It generates both anticipation and excitement.

Cobbling together rough and random elements from a mystifying mish-mash of genres, this Maddock Films dramedy seeks to achieve what the banner did in the recent past with a blend of horror and humour in Stree and its sequel, the biggest hit of actor Rajkummar Rao’s career. As an absurd caper playing out in the realms of fantasy and in the bustling streets, ghats and marketplaces of Banaras, it isn’t madcap enough. And as a time-loop comedy, it goes completely overboard with its central premise without being able to create a logical context for the perplexing goings-on in the life of a lad trapped in a limbo. It isn’t only owing to its outlandish plot that Bhool Chuk Maaf is a tad difficult to comprehend and decipher. It goes round and round in circles. What that leads to isn’t a pretty sight despite the energy that Rajkummar Rao packs into the lead performance and the steady support that Wamiqa Gabbi extends to him.

By the time Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning trudges its way to the end of its bag of tricks, a question looms and it is as large as the aura of Tom Cruise’s Agent Ethan Hunt. Will the eighth and presumably final instalment of the popular action-adventure franchise leave the audience asking for more or have them wondering if they have had enough? The answer is likely to tilt more towards the latter. This mission, a strenuous continuation of what was left incomplete in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, suffers from an excess of expositions - a sure sign that the screenplay has holes that needed to be plugged before being sent out into the world. Almost all through the film, the characters engage in constant chit-chat with the purpose of clearing the air - and the ground - for Hunt’s hunt for the fiendish Gabriel (Esai Morales), who makes no bones about his desire to wrest control of a truth-devouring parasitic Artificial Intelligence called “Entity”, that can wipe out all of humankind by infecting cyberspace and breaching the arsenals of nations that possess nuclear weapons.

The income-tax officer who covered himself in glory in Raid gets his knickers into a twist in Raj Kumar Gupta’s follow-up to the 2018 hit. But, as is his wont, he does not stop fighting. He hits a rough patch and then schemes to find a way out of the bind. The conventional narrative arc does Raid 2 no good. Irrepressible income tax officer Amay Patnaik’s latest adventure adds up to a leaden-footed rigmarole that struggles to find its way out of the plodding grind that it quickly turns into. Raid 2, riding on the star power of Ajay Devgn, buttressed by the presence of Riteish Deshmukh as the antagonist, is a maze of facile contrivances. The outcome does not match the film’s ambition and the performances, commendably restrained as they are, fail to offset the drudgery.