Uday Bhatia

Brahmastra: Part One—Shiva cost 400 crore rupees. Game Changer cost about the same. Adipurush is estimated between 500 and 700 crore. So much spent, so little to show for it. You can buy all the stars, all the screens, but you can’t buy taste. Money goes a lot further in Malayalam cinema. Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra has a reported budget of 30-33 crore. With this modest amount, director Dominic Arun and co-writer Santhy Balachandran build a sturdy, vivid world, full of personality and charm. The natural comparison is with Minnal Murali (2021), another deft, low-budget Malayalam superhero film. But in its fusing of Indian folklore with breezy Hollywood heroics, Lokah is really the film Brahmastra desperately wanted, and failed, to be. Lokah begins with Chandra (Kalyani Priyadarshan) escaping a burning building and the woman sent to kill her. Her crashing through a window segues into animated, era-spanning opening credits. Already this is a change from the standard Indian action film: no elaborate entry shot, flight instead of fight. The practical nature of the filmmaking carries over into the storytelling—a fantasy film whose heroes have the good sense to be wary and retreat when necessary.

Param Sundari is assemble-your-own-Kerala for dummies. Start with backwaters. Add elephants. Better still: elephants being sung the Malayalam lyrics from ‘Jiya Jale’. Toss in a Mohanlal song. Kalarippayattu. Mohiniyattam. Onam. Ayurveda. Unironic use of ‘god’s own country’. Nurses. Mundus. Red flags. Churches. Boat races. Tushar Jalota’s film hangs its Kerala fetish on the flimsiest of premises. Param (Sidharth Malhotra) is an amiable Delhi failson who keeps launching unsuccessful startups bankrolled by his wealthy father (Sanjay Kapoor). He’s intrigued by a new app called Find Your Soulmate, which matches your unique ‘frequency’ to the one person who’s meant for you. It’s the kind of faux-scientific woo-woo that would set anyone’s alarm bells ringing. Not Param, though, who’s thrilled to learn that his own soulmate is apparently in a small town in Kerala. After informing papa, he sets off to beta test.

There are four key pieces of information on the Coolie poster. Above the title: ‘Superstar Rajinikanth’. And below: ‘Written & directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj’, ‘An Anirudh musical’, ‘An Anbariv action’. In the end, the film ends up less than the sum of these imposing parts. It isn’t sterile, it has something of all their personalities, but no one brings their A-game. The film starts with its best idea: Soubin Shahir as the heavy. He plays Dayal, an enforcer at a Visakhapatnam dockyard, responsible for keeping workers afraid and details of his employer’s smuggling racket from leaking out. It’s inspired casting, transforming the mild-looking Malayalam actor into a loathsome sadist. Shahir jumps in headfirst, radiating mean little guy malevolence as he hacks, bludgeons and gurgles psychotically.

Metaphors in Hindi films come with brass bands and neon signs. War 2 opens, as Pushpa 2 (2024) did, in Japan. A yakuza family is sitting down to dinner when a raggedy wolf walks in, followed by an emissary with news of an approaching army. The army, it turns out, is ol’ green eyes, erstwhile RAW agent turned freelance assassin Kabir (Hrithik Roshan). He looks wilder than he did in War (2019), dispatching waves of armed killers with a grim smile until it’s just him and the hound left. It’s almost like he’s become… a lone wolf. After the Japan job, Kabir is hired by Kali, a shadowy crime cartel with a representative each from Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. They’re bent on some kind of world domination, though all their plans invariably centre on India. Kabir is key, the superspy patriot who now kills his own people, for a price. But writers Sridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala know that even if Kali believes Kabir has turned, the audience knows better. And so, soon after, it’s made clear that Kabir going rogue is part of a mission to destroy the cartel from within.

Saare Jahan Se Accha spends most of its time listing differences between India and Pakistan. But Netflix’s new spy series can’t help draw attention to a common heritage: language. Characters switch naturally between Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and English, as so many did in undivided Punjab. The Punjabi in particular—spoken by Pakistani and Indian characters—is mellifluous, flowing off the tongues of the actors, not the same intonations you’d hear in a modern Hindi film. It reminded me of Song of Lahore (2015), Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s musical documentary, with the Punjabi session players hitting the consonants in trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’ name: ‘Vin-ttun’.

It’s rare to see architecturally attuned Hindi films. Basu Chatterjee in the ‘70s had an eye for it. Last year, Atul Sabharwal’s Berlin used Brutalist buildings to suggest forbidding bureaucracy. I wouldn’t go as far as to say architecture informs Ankur Singla’s Ghich Pich, but the film is alive to it. Every now and then, a deliberate framing will dwarf the characters and call attention to the building in the back. It’s a welcome strategy. Why set your film in Chandigarh if you’re not going to use Le Corbusier’s creations? You can tell Singla grew up in the city. His vision of Chandigarh in 2001 feels unforced but specific, a series of quick, confident sketches rather than a laboured recreation. The central trio, fast friends and classmates in high school, are deftly drawn too. Anurag (Aryan Singh Rana) is a promising student, the one likeliest to make the jump to a metro like Delhi. Gurpreet (Kabir Nanda) is a sad sack who spends all his time thinking of ways to impress classmate Ashima. Gaurav (Shhivam Kakar) mostly gets in trouble at school, content with a future working in his doting father’s eyewear store.

Flush with pride from having joined law school, Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi), the first in his Dalit family to attend college, brings home a problem from class. He opens it up for neighbourhood discussion—a group of stranded people eat each other in a desperate bid for survival: what would the law say? The residents of Bhim Nagar are aghast. But one man examines it differently. “We’d be fine," he says. “They wouldn’t eat us.” A woman chimes in: “They definitely won’t eat adivasis.” Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, a Hindi remake of Pariyerum Perumal, takes a great deal from Mari Selvaraj’s superb 2018 Tamil film. I don’t remember this scene, though. It’s a throwaway joke, but a telling one. Unlike most Hindi films about caste, which either tiptoe around the issue or are boringly instructional, Dhadak 2 can imagine how people who’ve seen oppression their whole lives might turn it into gallows humour.

Kayoze Irani’s Sarzameen reminded me of another, very different Kajol film. I won’t say which, or why. What I will say is that if you’re hoping to land a wild plot twist, at least flesh out enough characters that the viewer can’t figure out the reveal through simple deduction. Something about eliminating the impossible… This is the second film in two months set in modern-day Kashmir and revolving around the armed forces serving there. Ground Zero, released days after the Pahalgam attack, is about a model BSF officer, devoted to his wife and young daughter. It’s the more interesting of the two films, building to the verge of critical self-assessment before retreating to the safer ground of patriotic duty. Sarzameen has a more fractious military family at its centre. Colonel Vijay Menon (Prithviraj Sukumaran) is introduced with a dramatic victory, leading the capture of separatist Qaabil (K.C. Shankar), believed to be the shadowy string-puller ‘Mohsin’. But in the very next scene—in what will become a pattern—he’s handed a defeat at home, at a party hosted by his wife, Meher (Kajol). She has a surprise: their son, Harman, wants to say a few words about his father. But the boy can’t overcome his stutter, and is embarrassed into silence by the pointed murmuring of guests and his father’s clear discomfort.