Shubhra Gupta

Me: Oh brain, braaaain. It’s that time again.

Dead Silence

Two brothers stuck in an impossible situation spiralling out of control without a lid in sight, in a Living-In-Two-Indias set-up: the premise of Stolen is sharp and current, and it starts out by pushing its unprepared protagonists, and us, into a state of high alert. Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) is in a swanky SUV outside a train station in the dead of night, waiting for his ‘chota bhai’ Raman (Shubham Vardhan) to alight from a horribly delayed train. At around the same time, a baby is snatched from next to a sleeping woman.

There is comfort in watching characters we know go through a new story arc, a mix that allows for both familiarity and freshness. The fourth season of Criminal Justice re-unites us with the core team of Madhav Mishra, played by the affable Pankaj Tripathi, his perky wife Ratna (Khushboo Atre), her eager-beaver brother Deep (Aatm Prakash Mishra), and the immaculately-turned out Shivani Mathur (Barkha Singh), which is plunged into a roiling family affair featuring murder and mayhem. Only three episodes of the eight are streaming currently, in which we are introduced to the prime suspects of a murder most foul in a fancy Mumbai high-rise. A domestic help arrives in a flat in the morning and sees a woman, all bloodied, being cradled by a man, who appears to be distraught. Another woman is present, who has already called the cops.

Sister Midnight, which premiered at Cannes in 2024, and is out in limited release this week in India, is a bizarro-serio-comedy like no other. Radhika Apte plays Uma, a newly-wed on a train heading into Mumbai. The vastness of the city is reduced to a ramshackle kholi that is as alien to her as the man she is married to: Gopal (Ashok Pathak). He is as uncomfortable as she is, when it comes to holding out any kind of comfort or consummation. UK-based British-Indian director Karan Kandhari uses his varied music video experience to layer his debut feature with sounds drawn from around the world. It takes a bit getting used to, and feels all over the place at first, but then you realise how the discordance matches the movie, which is all about jangled people trying to find their rhythm.

Adapted from Israeli show ‘Magpie’, a chirpy synonym for police informers, Kankhajura brings the tale home, to Goa. Ashu (Roshan Mathew), out from prison after 14 years, goes looking for his beloved older brother Max (Mohit Raina), and finds him very well-off, and looking to expand his construction business, along with his old pals Pedro (Ninad Kamat) and Shardul (Mahesh Shetty). This cosy little triangle has no place for Ashu, and once again, he finds himself on the periphery, desperate to get an in. As he tries wriggling into his brother’s personal and professional spaces — getting close to Max’s svelte wife (Sarah Jane Dias) and daughter, and hovering around Max and his bros — he finds himself constantly rebuffed. His only solace is another old friend Amy (Trinetra Haldar), who used to be Amay, and who now runs a tiny bakery in one of those picturesque Goan villages.

Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is masterly in the way it creates characters with their rhythms and impulses, building on them with one surprise after another, till you have no idea where things are headed — there is only a tiny instance in which the director telegraphs a punch, but that is so fleeting that you barely have time to notice it, and it’s gone. The Competition section began with Mascha Schilinski’s The Sound Of Falling, a beguiling intergenerational saga of female despair and desire. It has ended with The Mastermind, a bumbling caper cum character-study which has the director’s distinctive interplay between drollery and sharp observational skills. It has climbed to the top of a slate crowded with solid films, including Joachim Trier’s moving family drama Sentimental Value, all contenders for the Palme d’Or.

It’s late in the night, and a family of three, a husband, wife, and their young daughter, is heading back home. Suddenly, there’s a sickening thump, and the car comes to a halt. The man gets out, looks at something on the ground, his face lit by the headlights. We do not see the exact shape or size of the roadkill, but the little girl mentions the death of a dog, the woman justifies it as an act of god, and this little interlude sets the tone for the rest of the film.

If whimsy had an address, it would be Wes Anderson, whose confections can either delight or dismay. His Cannes competition entry The Phoenician Scheme has nestled firmly into the latter for me: his latest flight of fancy, quite literally, with his lead character traversing the skies in a private jet, being ejected at regular intervals, turns the film into a survival manual. The film is set in the 50s. Benicio Del Toro plays Zsa Zsa Korda, a wealthy businessman who has a half-brother (Benedict Cumberbatch, almost unrecognisable under a thatched beard), a daughter who is a nun, and nine sons. If Korda wasn’t properly eccentric, he wouldn’t be a Wes character: accordingly, he decides to bequeath his empire to Liesl (Mia Threapleton), whether she likes it or not.