Saibal Chatterjee

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.

A pitch-perfect Pratik Gandhi performance underwires the intrinsic authenticity of Ananth Narayan Mahadevan’s Phule. But more than anything else, it is the abiding pertinence of the film’s theme that sets it apart from anything that Bollywood has delivered, or is likely to produce, this year. Phule has its share of dramatic flourishes, but it lets nothing deflect it from its resolve to bring to the big screen an essential story that is still as relevant as ever, notwithstanding a card at the end of the film (obviously at the behest of those with the power to decide what we can and cannot watch), proclaiming that the caste system is a thing of the past.

A red diamond brings the worst out of two men—a criminal kingpin and a globetrotting con artist—in Jewel Thief - The Heist Begins. The trouble is, it does not spare the film either. Jewel Thief - The Heist Begins, all style and no substance, is an abomination of monumental proportions. Beyond trite, it rests on a premise that should have been snuffed out on paper itself. The precious object that two combatants are ready to die for is of African provenance. It triggers a rigmarole that traverses the world—Budapest, Istanbul, Mumbai—for inspiration. It finds none. The heist thriller piles inanity upon inanity and never pauses to ponder why. Produced by Siddharth Anand’s Marflix Pictures, the Netflix film is directed by Kookie Gulati and Robbie Grewal. It has come from the stable that delivered War, Pathaan, and Fighter. Don’t let that fool you.

Epic in length - it has a runtime of nearly four and a half hours - but squarely focused on the minutiae of the life of three boys and their excessively stern father, Naangal (This Is Us) is an exceptional piece of cinema. Calling it a piece of anything would be somewhat incongruous - it is far larger than that. Naangal - the Tamil film is part of the Asian Cinema Competition at the ongoing 15th Bengaluru International Film Festival - is a striking and sweeping collage of innumerable shards of memory, mostly unsettling, collated and rendered in the form stunning images underwired by a fantastic background score and strung together with impressive skill and imagination. Written, directed, shot and edited by Avinash Prakash, Naangal has the look of a work helmed by a seasoned director. But it is a debut film. A deeply personal essay, its length is bound to be commented on. What is important is that the time that Naangal takes to tell a story that spans about a decade seems completely justified. Growing up is never easy particularly when home isn’t what it is meant to be - sweet home.