Tatsam Mukherjee

While watching Kartavya, one can spot a pattern in the films Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment (RCE) wants to champion. After Atul Sabharwal’s Class of 83 (2020), Shanker Raman’s Love Hostel (2021), Pulkit’s own debut, Bhakshak (2024) comes the upstart director’s latest release – a cop procedural set in a faux-Haryana town called Jhamli, centered around a notorious Godman, a murder and the village elders set on avenging their humiliation with corpses. Given how the space for the political film has been severely curtailed in the last few years, RCE’s films seem built around the socially vulnerable: orphaned girls, runaway lovers, kids imprisoned in service of Godmen. In a time when the studio could be making anything, props to RCE for picking these grim subjects and lending adequate gravitas to them.

Before we discuss the joys of Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives, we must dwell on the obstacles around it (and there are a few). First, that flat title – possibly suggested by a business mind. I can’t imagine many people looking at the title and being remotely excited by it. Second, this is a difficult genre. Creating an idealised version of a world (aimed at children), it’s hard to preserve the sweetness of the world without making it egregious for adults.

Ritwik Pareek’s Dug Dug is quite the tease. In a gloriously meditative opening sequence, a visibly inebriated man steps out of a liquor shop with a ‘quarter’ in one hand, and a beedi in another. He rides into a dark highway on a luna (a two-wheeler), zigzagging with abandon. SUVs, trucks and buses whiz past him from either side of the road. A car advises the man to stick to one corner of the highway, which he promptly rebuffs with profanities. The foreboding begins as the drunk man struggles to stay awake on his two-wheeler, risking his own life and others. He seems to know where he’s headed, suggesting he’s done this many times before. Watching this opening stretch, felt like seeing a nation coasting through a lonely, dark road.

The world must be changing fast and beyond recognition if even Miranda Priestly can’t afford to be nonchalant anymore. Played by Meryl Streep in the 2006 film, it was a rare instance of a star marrying the material. Streep, in her 50s then, was planning to retire from Hollywood (which she revealed in an interview recently), when a studio offered her to play the Darth Vader of bosses from hell – the kind who does more damage with a well-timed sigh than most can with 20-minute rants. Priestly, a demanding editor-in-chief for the fashion magazine Runway, also had the layer of an ambitious woman fending off sharks at work.

As someone who has been watching Bollywood biopics for the last decade, there should be little in Antoine Fuqua’s Michael that should upset me. When the protagonist is not showing off his god-given talent on screen, all that the secondary characters talk about is how special he is. It is a film that mistakes superficial tics like voice, make-up and costume as authenticity. Also, a film that confuses grit for honesty. It’s eerie how much of Fuqua’s biopic on the ‘King of Pop’ seems to internalise and then channel Rajkumar Hirani’s Sanju (2018). Hirani’s biopic on Sanjay Dutt is among the gold standards of Bollywood biopics; the hardest anyone’s worked to vindicate its powerful protagonist. Michael might be Hollywood’s answer to Sanju.

One of my favourite scenes in Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) – starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet – is when April (Winslet) greets Frank (DiCaprio) for breakfast, after a colossal fight the night before, during which things were said that neither can ever take back. As she (much to his surprise) performs her part of a ‘supportive’ wife, while he riffs on his role as the polite, clueless breadwinner of the family, the quiet breakfast – a symbol of suburban bliss – begins to feel suffocating and emotionally claustrophobic. Both Winslet and DiCaprio act the hell out of this scene, playing the wounded, flawed couple trying to deflect from the unpleasantness of their once-loving marriage, hoping things would get back to normal with time.

In a way, it’s brilliant that actor Riz Ahmed delves into one of Hollywood’s (and Britain’s) most pressing cultural voids – Who will be the next James Bond? – and inserts himself into it. In Bait, a six-episode miniseries, Ahmed plays an emerging Pakistani-British actor having an existential moment when he’s announced as a contender to be the next 007. In a series that is part wish-fulfilment, part introspection, part satire and part surreal coming-of-age tale, Ahmed meditates on his place in Hollywood, in modern British society and if his immigrant trauma will even lends itself to playing the poised, suave, and, till now, white, neo-colonial MI6 agent.

At one point, in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary, someone asks if they know when a hug ends. “You just know,” comes the response from Dr Ryland Grace, a scientist from earth, trying to devise a way to save the Sun. After the film, my first thought was if Lord and Miller’s film knew when to stop mollycoddling its audience. Why else would a competent film adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name by renowned author Andy Weir, starring an immensely watchable Ryan Gosling (playing Ryland Grace), triggering laughs and tears feel almost immediately forgettable after leaving the theatre? A film can be ‘good’ by any number of metrics, but it’s a certain degree of serendipity galvanising good films, elevating them into an authentic and a moving experience. Even the tears in Project Hail Mary feel like the result of a large assembly line, which is never a good sign.