Uday Bhatia

Salman Khan can barely rouse himself to act anymore. Every director since Kabir Khan in Bajrangi Bhaijaan has had to work around the actor’s limitations, to coax brief flickers of star quality and hope the rest isn’t egregious. It can’t be easy for Khan’s fans to see him this way, complacent, over the hill, indulged and lied to. The paragraph you just read applies to Sikandar but wasn’t written with it in mind. Instead, I’ve taken a line each from my reviews of his last three solo releases: Radhe, Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan andTiger 3. You might say that’s lazy and unprofessional, but if Salman won’t make any effort, why should I? There’s only so many ways to say: it’s over, move on, stop embarrassing yourself. Sikandar begins with Sanjay Rajkot (Khan) thrashing a Mumbai politician’s son, whom he catches harassing a woman on a flight. We then learn that Sanjay and his wife, Saisri (Rashmika Mandanna), are the Rajkot royal family, philanthropic, benevolent and much loved by their people (the film is strangely nostalgic for ruler-subject relations). Sanjay—also called Sikandar, after Alexander the Great—has a trained militia on standby but never seems to need them, singlehandedly decimating goons sent on the orders of the aggrieved minister (Sathyaraj).

A movie becomes more violent the further it gets from movie violence. Movie violence insulates. It excites, titillates, comforts. It reassures audiences that what they’re seeing isn’t real and need not be taken too seriously. A realistic punch in the face registers more strongly than a hero sending half a dozen bodies flying through the air. Movie violence has no wish to distress or dismay, or to remind you of violence in the real world. The opening credits of Prithviraj Sukumaran’s L2: Empuraan, a sequel to his Lucifer (2019), show the burning of a train compartment with Hindu passengers in 2002, as had happened in Godhra, Gujarat that year. The sequence that follows shows the bloody reprisal, as Hindu mobs go on the rampage. It has the hallmarks of Indian movie violence—a truck barreling through a gate, sword-wielding goons leaping through the air, speed ramping, various things on fire—but the idea is to disturb and reckon with history. A group of Muslims offered shelter by a Hindu landowner are ambushed, sexually assaulted, burnt alive and otherwise brutally murdered. The reference to the Naroda Patiya massacre, in which 97 Muslims were killed in a day, is made clear by naming the chief perpetrator Baba Bajrangi (one of the actual accused was Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi).

Hindi cinema’s pathological obsession with Pakistan is so consistent that I just take it as a given now. Sometimes a film so virulent and stupid comes along—Gadar 2 (2023), Fighter (2024)—that it breaks the surface, but mostly it’s a lot of forgettable posturing and flag-waving. On some rare occasions, a film will introduce notes of doubt, or grace. I’ve come to expect it from Yash Raj’s action films, which treat cross-border matters with a strange mixture of cartoon villainy, human feeling and grudging respect. Sometimes it happens unexpectedly, like the recent war film Sky Force, which starts off strident but deescalates as it goes along.

Star kid releases have become a toxic cycle in Hindi film. No one seems to derive any pleasure from them, yet there’s one every month. As soon as a trailer drops, thousands of angry posts appear, with nothing to go on but two minutes of promotion and a vague idea that sons and daughters of famous actors are the enemy. Even established stars who came through film families can’t catch a break; last year, the release of Jigra, starring Alia Bhatt, was marked by unprecedented negativity. But with the younger crop, there are problems beyond an apathetic and frustrated Hindi viewing public.

In a short epilogue, The Brutalist finally shows us László Toth’s buildings. Brady Corbet’s film presents as a given that Toth is a genius architect of the Bauhaus school, but we are only shown one of his creations—a library—in full right up till the final 10 minutes. The format in which they’re presented is strange: a showreel for a biennale that looks like it’s shot on cheap video, with cheesy transitions. A film with startling pristine images spends its last moments looking like DTV. It’s a strange end to the film – and that’s without even getting into the whole Israel of it all. The Brutalist hits you several times with shots of roads and rail tracks zipping by, as seen from the front of a car or train. If the intention is to have the viewer recall the opening of Lawrence of Arabia, it worked on me. Corbet’s film has that David Lean sprawl, certainly in terms of runtime (202 minutes), but also in the ambition and density of its storytelling.

“Small cell carcinoma,” the doctor begins. Two blank faces stare at him. “Have you seen Anand?” he tries again. “What happened to Rajesh Khanna.” The simple point of Superboys of Malegaon is that, even at its bleakest, life can be made sweeter by cinema. The Anand reference softens the blow of a cancer diagnosis for two movie-crazy men who’ve travelled from the small town of Malegaon in Maharashtra. When they get back, the patient’s friends gently rib him about having a rich man’s ailment. Even the doctor’s life is made a little happier. He accepts a part in their upcoming film in return for home visits, saying he’d always wanted to be an actor but his father forbade it. Thirteen years earlier, Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) and Shafique (Shashank Arora) are on a motorbike, singing an improvised tune about not being too ambitious because they’ll end up dying in Malegaon anyway. It’s an early acceptance of the cards they’ve been dealt: Nasir to shoot wedding videos and work in his brother’s photo studio, Shafique in the mill.

It speaks to the relaxed control of Sabar Bonda how animals freely roam the frame and steal our attention. An optimistic goat breaks away from the herd and approaches two humans eating their lunch; it’s shooed away unceremoniously. A cat draws our gaze as it walks across the screen before it’s spooked by yelling and runs off. As Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) talks to his friend Balya (Suraaj Suman), he glances at a nearby buffalo that’s lifted its tail and done its business. Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Marathi film, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this month, is set in a village in Maharashtra. It’s close enough to Mumbai that Anand can take a bus there to perform his father’s last rites in his ancestral village. But it’s also a world removed, a place, in the local imagination at least, of opportunity and permissiveness, herbal shampoos and special friends.

Chhaava opens with a Maratha raid on a Mughal town. As he slashes his way through enemy ranks, Sambhaji (Vicky Kaushal) notices a crying boy caught in the skirmish. He returns the child to safety. I knew this image would return in some way and it did, about an hour later. A little girl herding goats on Maratha land wanders out of the frame. In the next shot, she’s staggering back, set on fire by advancing Mughal troops. There’s no such thing as a moral army, only propaganda and the tales we choose to tell ourselves. A French traveler to India in the early 18th century wrote about the devastation of one Maratha raid: “We camped out next to villages reduced to ashes… Women clutching their children in their arms, men contorted, as they had been overtaken by death… a sight of horror such as I had never seen before.” We see such a scene in Chhaava—but done by the Mughals. When the Marathas in Laxman Utekar’s film (based on a 1980 novel) burn down a town, there isn’t a human in sight, and the only casualty is property.