Tatsam Mukherjee

Has James Cameron been trapped in the metaverse longer than we have? The 71-year-old director reportedly spent over a decade working on what eventually became Avatar (2009), and has been involved in making its sequels Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022), the latest Avatar: Fire and Ash released on Friday (December 19), and another film in the making – making it a cumulative 30 years spent on four films, set on the faraway planet of Pandora.

There came a scene in Prabhash Chandra’s Alaav (which as the English title Hearth & Home) when my jaw dropped on the floor. A 60-something Bhaveen is helping his 90-something mother, Savitri, relieve herself. It’s the part of a caregiving film, where most filmmakers prefer implying it by either starting the scene before or after the said deed. But in Alaav, the camera (thanks to the dependable ingenuity of cinematographer Vikas Urs) remains strategically placed, straddling a pencil-thin ethical line – where on one side they could be accused of being voyeuristic and exploitative; on the other end, it could be held for trying to lessen the blow of a hard-hitting reality. Remaining true to its static, observational style – the scene went on for longer than I was ready for, making me shift in my seat uncomfortably. It’s only then did I recognise what Chandra was trying to highlight – the selflessness of it all. We hear truisms like ‘being of service’ to something bigger than us, but nothing quite tests it like when we take care of a loved one in a hopeless situation, and when everything is only steadily regressing.

Bollywood can’t just stick to making films anymore. Successful films need to be a clarion call for a ‘higher’ purpose. Whether it’s the Kashmiri Pandit exodus in The Kashmir Files (2022), the sadistic torture of a Hindu king by a Mughal emperor in Chhaava (2025), or a visibly deranged man offering his unsolicited opinions on everything, talking at the speed of thought, in Animal (2023).

It takes a special kind of film to be aware of its surroundings. It is one thing to fetishise nature and invite comparison to the sweeping scale of a Terrence Mallick film but Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams does something interesting with the vessel of a meandering Mallick film. It cuts and splices the essential bits of a man’s journey fuelled by cosmic wonder: the meaning of it all. And it does that using a specific means: a voiceover (by Will Patton).

Despite its shortcomings, one thing that is impressive about Vibhu Puri’s Gustaakh Ishq is that it’s not tentative about what it wants to be. No pretence or excessive self-awareness – often a crutch for films afraid to go the distance, hedging against becoming a laughing stock. In an age when Hindi cinema has been pilloried as ‘Urduwood’ by right-wing trolls, it’s heartwarming to see Puri’s film reclaim and revive the Muslim social film.

In episode four of the third season of The Family Man – Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee) gets nostalgic. He asks JK (Sharib Hashmi) if he remembers Kareem – a dissident Kashmiri student who was killed in the first season because of Srikant’s misplaced suspicion. I might be reading too much into it, but it almost felt like creators Raj Nidimoru, Krishna D.K. and Suman Kumar were getting wistful about a time during the first season when there was endless possibility.

A young man sits in a cafe with a cold coffee in hand, his eyes searching for someone. Wearing a dull grey T-shirt, it will take him some time to realise that he’s been stood up by the person he was supposed to meet: a girl he exchanged messages with in an online sex chat room. Devastated at being rejected like this, Guru (Mohit Agarwal) gazes into a mirror after going back home, trying to wish away his less-than-affable appearance. Some of us might feel sorry for the protagonist, but then the director does a 180-degree flip on his audience, showing him doing something dastardly in the very next scene. At this point, Kanu Behl’s Agra – which premiered in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2023 – begins to resemble an origin story.

In Frederic Raphael’s book, Eyes Wide Open – on the making of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1998), which Raphael co-wrote with Kubrick – at one point, they discuss Schindler’s List. The much-revered, Oscar-sweeping 1995 film by Steven Spielberg is cut down to size by Kubrick for its triumphant, hopeful climax. Something that betrays the way Kubrick sees the Holocaust essentially as a tale of failure. Even though I don’t fully concur with the thesis, I do see where Kubrick was coming from. That the Holocaust was a singular example of systemic moral failure is something that is acutely understood by James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg – a film named after the infamous trial where the Allies prosecuted the surviving officers of the Nazi high command for crimes against humanity. What’s surprising about Vanderbilt’s film is its awareness isn’t instantly apparent. But how it reveals itself slowly.