Tatsam Mukherjee

Unfortunately, I’m not on team Kunal Khemu. I used to be, when I thought of him as an actor who didn’t get his due. However, his directorial debut, Madgaon Express (2024), changed that. Laced with typical “boys-will-be-boys” silliness, I found myself drifting off during many points of the inanity that was unfolding on screen. It needs a special kind of wit and sorcery to keep people invested in a film where nothing truly matters but the makers’ whimsy. Then I heard his views on pay parity, on his wife Soha Ali Khan’s podcast, and he didn’t seem all that wise. It’s futile to assume the above instances wouldn’t colour my perspective of his directorial venture, Vibe, a film he has also co-produced, and is starring in. But for the sake of fairness, I have to concede that there are few things more effortless in Hindi cinema than Khemu enacting a gag he wrote.

Netflix’s Lust Stories is the only anthology to have made it to its third season, and there might be good reason. For a society as repressed as ours, sex brings out adequate intrigue on the part of the audience, assuring a base viewership. Meanwhile, by constantly shuffling filmmakers, the interpretations remain fresh, and sex becomes a capsule to be filled with commentary on inequities, female desire, and a rarely spoken language in an otherwise verbose film industry. Lust Stories 3 features a line-up of directors, which audiences will forever be curious about: Kiran Rao, Vikramaditya Motwane, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj. The results are middling to positive. But one thing I genuinely appreciated about all four films, is their intent to showcase the length and breadth of Hindi cinema, and its varying aesthetic, refusing to paint Bollywood as a monolith – which it has begun to seem like, given its over-dependence on star-led spectacles. Also, I enjoyed the music in all films, complimenting the sensibility of the respective mise en scene.

In a hyper-capitalistic city where everything/one is for sale, where desires can be preyed upon as a means to an end, how does one take on a man who wants… nothing? It’s the question at the heart of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower (2011) – following Yogesh Murthy, a resident of Vishram society, who refuses to cower in front of a gleaming offer by builder Dharmesh Shah. In director Ben Rekhi’s feature film adaptation, Murthy is changed to Mishra, presumably because of Manoj Bajpayee playing the part. Bajpayee played a similarly stoic, wilting Mumbai resident in Bhonsle (2018). Shah is played by Boman Irani, who was a builder in Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006) too. Irani is great at making his villains palpably human. There’s a wonderful moment where he coughs through his chronic bronchitis—and then takes a deep breath of the noxious fumes at a building site. “It gives me life,” he tells a doctor earlier in the film, after being informed about his deteriorating lung condition because of his very line of work.

A lot of what I like about the Mirzapur franchise can be boiled down to its title theme by John Stewart Eduri. The sound of blacksmiths at work, a minimal bass and synth line, with some light orchestration. Nothing else exemplifies the workman-like focus and the leanness of the early seasons like Eduri’s score. After three seasons of diminishing returns, the show has been rebooted into a feature film, in a parallel timeline when the events of season one concluded. Kaleen Bhaiya (a role that propelled Pankaj Tripathi to stardom in the streaming space) strategically protects his Mirzapur throne, a primary bastion to power in Purvanchal. His son Munna (Divyenndu) is too volatile to automatically be entrusted with it.

At the height of the #MeToo movement in 2018, something I read seared itself into my brain. “Men should be grateful that women are asking for equality. Not revenge.” For all the patronising tone at home, casual sexism at the workplace, catcalling on the street, groping in public transport, full-blown sexual assaults/attempts in most known/unknown corners of the city, the isolation and gaslighting that takes root after – I’ve often wondered why women still speak to men. In fact, why don’t they start their day by attacking the first man they meet? It’s an urge buried deep within Elizabeth Merriweather’s Furious – a first-rate serial killer mystery, which reveals itself as a reckoning of female rage at its most unvarnished, unbridled and intricate.

“It’s going to be a bildungsroman…” Tony (Dominic Sessa) announces at the dinner table “… a coming-of-age novel.” He’s talking about a novel he has pitched at a prestigious scholarship interview. His father (Rich Sommers) is excited, his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) is more circumspect. He’s almost certain he will be chosen for the scholarship, after which he will embark on his journey to be what he already believes is a crucial part of his identity. “I’m a writer,” our 19-year-old protagonist says while introducing himself at a bar in an earlier scene. As we all know now, the debut novel (Kitchen Confidential) would only arrive 25 years later. Before Anthony Bourdain became a renowned chef and a worldwide phenomenon – he was just a kid. An arrogant, entitled, insufferable young man, who thought the world owed him a stage to showcase his brilliance. He was also an incessant and effortless liar. In Matt Johnson’s film, we meet Bourdain when he’s – as the title suggests – Tony, and follow him over an eventful summer. His mother calls him Anthony, which the rebel can’t stand. Hence, he goes out of his way to ask people to not call him that.

Maybe, it’s not a compliment to start out comparing a film to Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s works. I can imagine how Toxic might have been pitched as something that ‘subverts’ Vanga, which is not quite the case. My most guttural response to it was, a Vanga film if it learned therapy-speak. This might be a reductive and over-simplistic response, but having mulled over it, this comes closest to my purest reaction to this (knowingly) campy, indulgent, loud, sweeping film, which has something most cash cows drop at the first slight inconvenience: a clear conscience. It has all ingredients that we’ve come to associate with pan-India blockbusters from the last decade – multi-ethnicity actors, cramped world-building, gargantuan action set-pieces, dialogues delivered like ad catchphrases, racy sex scenes featuring multiple women, and a three-act structure for key sequences – which means we’re subjected to the “hero’s entry” a dozen times.

For the most part, Jason Hehir’s Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter moves along expected lines, like any other sport-celebrity documentaries. The 39-year-old tennis icon talks about the early years, the turmoil of professional tennis as a junior, and his eventual ascent to stardom. The hostility from fans of the Federer-Nadal rivalry, who treated him as an unwelcome entity, as he dominated the 2010s. It’s still familiar territory for most tennis fans.