Saibal Chatterjee

An action-comedy that never finds its way out of the woods, Welcome to the Jungle jangles along mindlessly down a messy path. It delivers chaos, cacophony and confusion in bushels. Like it or lump it. The film gives an unwieldy cast the kind of freedom that only a muddled, overstuffed screenplay can. The actors stop at nothing, hamming it up like there is no tomorrow. While they have a ball, and then some, the Firoz Nadiadwala-produced film, directed by Ahmed Khan (who has toted up quite a few sequels and takes over the reins of this one from Anees Bazmee), lurches merrily from one massive wobble to another.

A Gen Z rom-com with a millennial soul and the heart of an overgrown child, Cocktail 2 is a hit-or-miss mix of tips about life, love and uncharted adventures in Sicily that do not fully dissolve into the breezy, pulpy potion that the film seeks to serve up. The pearls of wisdom that it bandies about stick out rather awkwardly as another menage e trois led by a young man in an open relationship navigates the ebbs and tides of the heart and the desires of two women who are polar opposites. Coming 14 years after Cocktail, which was about two equally dissimilar ladies making impulsive choices, right or wrong, and holding up a mirror to the wayward ways of an entitled, commitment-phobic philanderer, the follow-up scampers in a different direction and winds up (along with its three principal characters) in a place where confusion runs riot.

This movie would have us believe that its eponymous protagonist pulled India out of a major financial crisis and set the nation on the path to economic liberalisation in the early 1990s by making impossible calculations and moves. It gets both its math and its motive all wrong. Disappointing? That would be an understatement. Governor, propelled by an acting masterclass from Manoj Bajpayee that is sadly wasted on a vehicle whose wheels are terribly misaligned, is a disaster. The film spins a gossamer-thin yarn, and the kite that it seeks to send soaring in the air struggles to stay afloat.

She has had a choppy ride at the box-office of late. Her last four Hindi releases (Thalaivi, Dhaakad, Tejas and Emergency) underperformed big time. Could Bharat Bhhagya Viddhaata, a female-centric film set in a hospital under a terror attack, be the throw of the dice that could turn things around for Kangana Ranaut? The actor spares no effort, leading the charge with admirable restraint in a survival thriller that does well to never get ahead of itself. It stays well within and thrives on the limits that it sets for itself. On her part, Ranaut, whose banner Manikarnika Films is the lead producer, ensures that she does not become bigger than the film, which often tends to be the bane of Bollywood movies that are bankrolled by stars.

No matter how contrived and conventional they might get at times, madcap comedies like Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai have a way of trundling along no matter how frequent and imposing the roadblocks in its path are. There are plenty of them here and they do get in the way of the film becoming the pure, old-fashioned laugh riot that it aspires to be. The title is drawn from a song in David Dhawan’s Biwi No 1 (1999), but Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai, which the veteran director has announced will be the final film of his long and eventful career, does not roll off the tongue as smoothly as a Hindi film number usually does.

The protagonist of Bandar, a scrappy and uneven prison drama directed by Anurag Kashyap and written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, learns the hard way that the law is an a** and its victims are monkeys in their own circus. Played by an intense Bobby Deol, the man falls prey to an unrelentingly brutal system that blurs the line between innocence and culpability and makes the process as harrowing as the punishment. Bandar is a grim, frequently confounding portrait of a lawless prison for undertrials that turns the toughest of men into amoral wrecks caught in a distressing struggle for self-preservation and dominance.

Shape of Momo (Nepali title: Chhora Jastai), directed by Tribeny Rai, emerges as one of the most compelling independent films of the year. Set in the picturesque landscapes of Sikkim, this intimate coming-of-age drama explores themes of womanhood, identity, migration, family expectations, and personal freedom. In this review, critic Saibal Chatterjee examines how Rai crafts a powerful narrative about a young woman’s struggle to reconcile her evolving sense of self with the expectations of the community she once called home. First-time director Tribeny Rai’s Nepali-language Shape of Momo starts with a poem that the protagonist, a young woman who has quit her job in Delhi and retreated to her family home in Sikkim, recites, intoning each word with intent and clarity.

The chapter of Maratha history that Raja Shivaji, a Marathi-Hindi bilingual written and directed by lead actor and co-producer Riteish Deshmukh, brings to the big screen is far more momentous than what Tanhaji - The Unsung Warrior and Chhaava have done. Both films drew elements gleaned from our school textbooks and served them up heated and heightened for an easy-to-sway mass audience to lap up. Not that Raja Shivaji does not intend to be a crowd-pleaser - it definitely does - but its many narrative flourishes, elaborate battle scenes and bloody duels are not as in-your-face as the ones that were mounted in Tanhaji and Chhaava.