Saibal Chatterjee

A well-trained Pakistani spy sent on a mission to destabilise India post-Operation Sindoor suffers a grievous head injury. He loses his memory. His bosses in Rawalpindi go into a tizzy, his accomplices in India are caught in a bind and the film about an amnesiac secret agent’s erratic exploits flies off on a merry but uneven tangent. What’s not to like in this harmless cockeyed concoction, one might ask. A lot because the arrow that Udta Teer refers has a rather blunt head that knows not where it is headed? There is a great deal in Udta Teer that keeps spiralling out of control as the film makes its way through an exercise that harks back in spirit, but certainly not in substance, to the Hollywood spy parodies that Mel Brooks and Mike Myers powered many decades ago with considerable commercial success.

Desperate as hell to look and sound like a film that is serving up a fresh-off-the-oven concoction, Nayyi Navelli, scripted by Divy Nidhi Sharma from a story by Himanshu Sharma, goes overboard with a palette of garish colours and a cast of actors of proven quality bent upon out-hamming each other. The result is a film that neither looks pretty nor sounds right. Talk overshadows action and logic gets drowned out in the confusing din of clashing decibel levels.

The tagline suffixed to the title - it reads “The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam” - reveals would have us believe that Prahaar, produced by Dinesh Vijan of Maddock Films, written by Sumit Roy and helmed by director-cinematographer Avinash Arun, is out to narrate a tale that simply had to be told. That supposition might be open to debate but consider this: while dramatised depictions of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and its immediate aftermath have often found their way to the screen, the legal process that led to the conviction and execution of the sole surviving terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, has not.

A crackling whistleblower drama that excoriates the algorithm-driven world of Facebook/Meta/Instagram for the way it imperils nations, societies, communities and individuals struggling with disaffection and disinformation, The Social Reckoning sees writer Aaron Sorkin return (this time with directorial responsibility added on) to the turf that he trod in The Social Network (2010). He hits his target hard enough when the darts land right. When they don’t, this standalone follow-up, which rests to a great extent on the shoulders of Jeremy Strong stepping in for Jesse Eisenberg in the role of Mark Zuckerberg, is projected as a sort of cold-hearted corporate scalawag chasing revenues no matter what the price of the pursuit is.

Continuing in the same vein as the first two films of the self-contained Drishyam universe, the past never goes out of focus in the concluding part of the Hindi-language franchise adapted from Jeethu Joseph’s superhit Malayalam original. It constantly impinges on the present as the barely educated protagonist, Vijay Salgaonkar (Ajay Devgn), stops at nothing to obfuscate the truth. The inveterate movie buff who takes his cues from the films that he has devoured over the years and believes that the one who controls the narrative holds all the aces. There are two types of stories, he asserts: one hides the truth, the other becomes the truth. Who is telling the story is of utmost importance, he feels as a bunch of people around him ferret vigorously for leads that could nail him and his family for good.

The eponymous forest - it has been in existence since the 7th century, the audience is told in a rushed introduction - has a human voice. It emanates from a goddess carved in stone. The rock deity has eyes that glow in the dark like traffic lights. Only those who dare to venture into the forbidden, mystical woods at night witness the phenomenon but only a few survive to tell the tale. It is deep-rooted fear of the unknown that keeps people away from the forest after sunset. In the climax, a crowd divided by what they know or what they don’t congregates there. A protracted fracas erupts. The skirmish is of the sort that leaves one completely cold.

Excessive violence and predictable storytelling suck the air out of The Paradise and reduce it to a limp, messy heap despite all the technical wizardry and visual vim and vigour that director Srikanth Odela packs into it end to end. A Telugu mass movie that pulls out the stops, The Paradise homes in on a man who takes up cudgels on behalf of his mother and his marginalised tribe to avenge the brutal oppression that a feudal lord has subjected them to for many years. Lead actor Nani, reuniting with Odela three years after the super-successful Dasara, plays Jadal, a seething rebel with a cause who returns to his people after serving a long prison sentence. He sets out to settle scores with the viciously exploitative Malik (Mohan Babu).

Slacker comedy meets espionage thriller in an awkward but passably entertaining union in Vibe, produced, written and directed by lead actor Kunal Kemmu. The fun elements in the film vary wildly but they do not veer too far off the path the screenplay marks out for them. And that, for what it is worth, is no mean achievement. High-spirited frivolity of the kind that Vibe peddles demands extreme caution. The danger of it falling through the cracks and sinking into brainless buffoonery is real and ever-present. To its credit, even as it navigates differing strains of mirth that occasionally appear to work at cross-purposes, the film retains its grip on a wacky sense of verbal humour. For the most part anyway.