Shubhra Gupta

Based on Arvind Adiga’s 2011 novel Last Man In Tower, Ben Rekhi’s film of the same name keeps its focus on the main thrust: shark-like developers swooping in on the crumbling parts of Mumbai, swatting aside low-stakes initial reluctance with the promise of fancy high rises. The last man in the way of builder-tycoon Dharmen Shah’s (Boman Irani) rapacious intention is retired teacher Yogesh Murthy (Manoj Bajpayee), who just wants to live out the remaining of his life in familiar surroundings, in a flat which houses the memories of his dead wife.

Haiwaan vs Insaan, monster vs human, that age-old conflict in the movies, gets a refresh in Haiwaan, with Priyadarshan re-upping his own 2016 Malayalam hit Oppam. Here Saif Ali Khan plays the sightless Shyam, up against Akshay Kumar’s murderous Parshuram, in a film which stays largely faithful to the original. In Priyan’s world protagonists and antagonists are always arrayed in black and white, with lashes of heavy-handed humour thrown in. The mix works in some of his movies, mostly his loud comedies in which the cast is tasked with delivering dialogues when not hanging off cliffs: Haiwaan is the usual mix of genres in Priyadarshan’s films, in which tonal switches abound, the first half setting up the premise of an innocent man being imprisoned for a crime he didn’t do, and the second turning into an unintentional comic police procedural.

The arena is Bundelkhand, not Chambal, but Timanshu Dhulia knows his terrain. And that familiarity makes Ghamasaan stand out from the series of films shot on locations created on sets, their artifice seeping into the story-telling: the best part of this conflict between cops-and-robbers is the authenticity of the place, and the people. Maharaj (Arshad Warsi) is Bundelkhand’s Bandit King, as opposed to Phoolan, Chambal’s Bandit Queen (in which Dhulia was casting director) , as well as Paan Singh Tomar (which Dhulia directed, turning it into one of his, and lead Irrfan’s, best collaborations) from the same area who famously gave us that line about ‘baaghis’ and ‘dakaaits’.

The moment you see a happy family in a train compartment, with a little girl and her big doll, you know something wicked this way comes. The girl vanishes, and her increasingly distraught parents, Bani (Taapsee Pannu) and Gokul (Ishwak Singh) find no help from the local police in Joypurra (fictional, of course), somewhere in Bengal. This is the kind of small town we see in streaming shows, as constructed as their plots, sequence after sequence filled with loud background music trying to stand in for tension because nothing on screen cuts it, either because we’ve been inundated with similar stuff, or we simply can’t buy any of it. Or both.

Babita aka Baby is your average Indian woman, trying to navigate politics at the work-place as well as in her domestic sphere. It could be the story played out in millions of households, but the thing that makes this film different is that Babita is a cop, elevated by circumstances into her position. The fact that hers is a ‘compassionate posting’ keeps coming up: a death in Baby’s family empties up a spot at the police station, which she steps into, with her colleagues expecting her to earn her place over and over again. The fact that it parallels her home situation, as a wife and daughter-in-law, is not hidden either: dutiful bahus are expected to fill empty spots day after day, to keep the family happy.

“So you think I’m a bad guy? No, I think you’re toxic.” This exchange comes at a point in the film by which time it’s been clearly established that Raya (Yash) is the kind of Alpha male who thinks blood spatters are the best accessories ever, especially when they spurt from freshly torn and broken limbs. So is that even a question? No, it’s entirely rhetorical. It’s exactly the thing that defines this post-Independence gangster saga, all 3 hours 15 minutes of it, for an audience primed for as much gore as the leading man can dish out, especially when he’s seen how it got lapped up in his previous mammoth hits (KGF 1 and 2).

A global cartel called 7 Dogs. A super-strong drug called Pink Lady. Good guys. Bad guys. And a billion-dollar budget. Make that billions. And there’s your Big Arabic Blockbuster, studded with international stars and locations, its India release buoyed by the presence of Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt. I must confess that I went into the movie mostly to see what the two Bollywood superstars would do in a film like this one, whose plot-line resembles countless films they’ve been part of. Clearly, the Belgian-Moroccan director duo of two of the ‘Bad Boys’ capers– as well as a couple of episodes in the enjoyable series ‘Ms Marvel’– are capable of mounting films on scale, creating kinetic set-pieces with a high degree of entertainment.

In its opening credits, Batwara 1947 brings back a significant logo. The title appears in Urdu along with Hindi and English, like it used to through so many decades, a practice which vanished quietly in the last decade. That erasure, gradual but evident, is an indicator of the state of the nation, which is busy being polarised over religion and language. It also marks a reunion between Rajkumar Santoshi and Sunny Deol, a director-star duo who gave us Ghayal, Damini, Ghatak, some of the most enduring hits of the 90s. Capturing a specific time and place, those films had a strong streak of social realism which Santoshi had a knack for, and which Deol channeled with rage and purpose.