Shubhra Gupta

Small town upright cop up against the all-powerful mobster. That could also be read as monster. Because the bad guy in Kartavya is yet another variant of the dhongi baba from Ashram, and several others that I’m finding hard to remember now because there have been so many of varied stripes but who broadly adhere to the ground rule: the more beatific you look, the more depraved you are. It says something about the utterly generic Kartavya, a crime thriller set in Haryana, that the good guy, played by Saif Ali Khan is surrounded by a bunch of bad guys — a senior cop (Manish Chaduhuri) who keeps blocking Pawan’s (Saif Ali Khan) path, and a junior cop (Sanjay Mishra) who is a constant companion, basically playing the BFF trope, and not one of them has been given a characteristic that we haven’t seen before.

Black-and-white frames can be rendered either warm or cool, depending on what you’re going for. Pawel Pawlikowski manages to combine stateliness and intimacy in his signature look, where both those colours are given several shades of grey. As soon as ‘Fatherland’ (Cannes competition) begins, in which unfolds a fraught chapter of the famous author Thomas Mann’s life and times, we know we are back in Pawel territory. It is 1949. Mann (Hanss Zischer), who had fled Nazi Germany for the US, is back, readying for the Goethe prize to be conferred upon him. The film loses no time in setting the context: here is a man who has essentially given up on his country — not motherland; Hitler had turned it into fatherland, a paternalistic, authoritarian, murderous dictatorship — and is to be welcome back at a time when the recently-concluded war has drawn a line separating the East and West.

There’s been a recent upsurge of the interest in Japan, as both location and metaphor, in Indian cinema. The romantic leads in both Toh Ti Ani Fuji ( Marathi) and Ek Din (Hindi), wander around Japanese hills and vales, looking for themselves. The four central characters in Koji Fukada’s latest Nagi Notes (his first in Cannes Competition) are also searching, and their quest turns into a ruminative marvel, which sneaks into your heart without fanfare. Two women, co-sisters-in-law in spirit even when the man in question has vanished from their lives, reunite for a week in Nagi, the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone else, public service announcements on radio talking about mundane civic affairs (as well as the war in faraway Ukraine) become the chief source of information, and where the rhythms of nature reflect the inner turmoil of the characters.

What is a woman’s life? It’s been one of those questions that filmmakers down the ages have grappled with, and will continue to do so, as we engage with the eternal dance of identity, gender politics, roles and responsibilities. Some of the answers that Charline Bourgeoise-Tacquet comes up with in her second feature, prosaically titled, A Woman’s Life (Cannes Competition section), are a surprise. Gabrielle (Lea Drucker), 55, is clearly on top of her profession, a surgeon of repute, who heads her section in a city hospital. When we come upon her, she is juggling multiple things: a long day at work, a husband (Charles Berling), a mother (Marie Christine-Barrault) with advancing dementia, and a room full of interns who seem to think work is a picnic.

Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 is exactly the kind of rom-com that Bollywood is constrained to doing these days, in an era swinging wildly between minority drubbing and bhajan clubbing: empty of fresh ideas, trying to please the conservatives and the so-called moderns, going exactly nowhere High-school dropout Shivansh aka Sunny (Avinash Tiwary) is a kushti-loving fellow who is careful to wear a langot which looks more like a pair of shorts. His big ambition is to wrestle at the national level, but a wrong video going viral puts paid to that plan, leaving him unhappy and unfulfilled in his Rishikesh house, which he shares with his father (Sudhir Pandey), and older brother and bhabhi, and a tenant who doubles up as the ‘hero ka BFF’.

By rights, the re-uniting of Priyadarshan and Akshay Kumar, the haunted palace, and fresh shenanigans of past and present bhooths should have been a rollicking affair, with the 2026 Bhooth Bangla boasting many of the same elements which made the 2007 Bhool Bhulaiyaa film such a hoot. Remember that fast-paced plot which combined old myths and new superstitions, Akshay’s adventure-seeking ghostbuster coasting on his comedic persona, and Vidya Balan’s terrifying Monjulika? Not everything landed — Priyadarshan’s capers are typically a harum-scarum tumble of characters and situations which seem to have been conjured up on the spot — but there was something about the way all those crazy energies came together that has made the film so much of a nostalgia bomb.

Matka King review: ‘Matka King’ is loosely based on the infamous exploits of real-life cotton trader Ravi Khatri, who created a highly addictive gambling game out of the humble earthen pot in the Bombay of the 60s. Vijay Varma plays Brij Bhatti, whose sharp brains and an endless capacity to keep his eye on the end result, refuses to labour under his canny seth (Gulshan Grover) when push comes to shove: slowly but steadily, his efforts take him out of his chawl, where he lives with his younger brother Lakshman (Bhupendra Jadawat), wife (Sai Tamhankar) and little boy, to spiffy mansions and fancy boudoirs of the rich and famous.

This Telugu-Hindi thriller, meant to be a fast-paced romance between two good-looking people from opposite sides of the tracks, proves a few things: plots trying to be new shouldn’t feel familiar, it’s never a good idea to waste Prakash Raj, and that Anurag Kashyap needs to act a lot more, as he literally saves this film from sinking. It’s good to have Adivi Sesh back in action, building on his kinetic Kshanam-Goodachari persona. But his conflicted convict Hari, out for revenge against the love of his life (Mrunal Thakur), whom he holds responsible for his ruin, is overwrought. More underwhelming is Thakur as Saraswati, the upper-class, upper-caste woman whose idea of showing her lover a good time is to teach him how to drive on a straight road.