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Recent Reviews by Rahul Desai
The Hollywood Reporter India

A film critic and columnist, Rahul Desai writes for The Hollywood Reporter India and OTTPlay. In his spare time, he runs a weekly movie podcast called IIF.

Films reviewed on this Page

Mufasa: The Lion King
Jhansi Ka Rajkumar
Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous
Body
Despatch
Sikandar Ka Muqaddar
All We Imagine as Light
Freedom at Midnight
Kanguva
Vijay 69

Mufasa: The Lion King (written for OTT Play)
The Lion King Is A Disney-Sized Waste Of Director Barry Jenkins

I’m not sure what happened during the four years of making Mufasa, but I don’t see the point of putting so much work, passion, sweat, and life into something that’s already been done before.

While watching Mufasa: The Lion King, all I could think about was this: 4 precious years of Barry Jenkins’ career were spent in front of Disney green screens and sound stages to not even create something madly original? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against effects-driven or photo-realistically animated movies; visionaries like Peter Jackson and James Cameron have redefined the relationship between technology and storytelling over the years. But Disney? Another Lion King film? My viewing experience was laced with the frustration of realising that yet another Hollywood studio franchise was doing wasteful Hollywood things.

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All 4 reviews of Mufasa: The Lion King here

Jhansi Ka Rajkumar
Gulshan Devaiah's Small-Town Comedy is Dull and Dated

'Axone' filmmaker Nicholas Kharkongor’s comedy-drama about a stay-at-home dad quickly runs out of ways to reiterate its message

Even as an Ayushmann Khurrana-coded small-town comedy that’s a decade too late, Jhansi Ka Rajkumar feels dated. The film stars Gulshan Devaiah as Rajkumar, a stay-at-home dad struggling to adjust to a move from Delhi to Jhansi — or, more accurately, struggling to function in a judgmental society. His wife, Devayani (Namita Dubey), is the breadwinner with a government job. You know the drill. Gender role reversal. Ridicule. Stigma. Pressure to conform. Marital conflict. Speech. Resolution. This is basically a middle-class Ki & Ka (2016), just not as gimmicky and self-satisfied. But it’s also not as self-contained as Barun Sobti’s track in Raat Jawaan Hai, a show where the guy’s “progressive househusband” tag silently gnaws away at him.

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Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous
A Lazy and Incurious Celebrity Documentary

At some point in the Netflix documentary, Honey Singh stops being a person; he morphs into a neatly segregated storyline, an impenetrable idea that’s at once marketed and sold

Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous follows, fusses over and indulges Indian rapper Honey Singh on his comeback trail in 2023. He declares that he has returned from the dead for his fans. He looks rejuvenated. On cue, two young ragpickers at a traffic signal recognise and laud him for losing weight. The brief is simple: new body, new mind, new music videos after years of substance abuse, mental health issues and rehabilitation. Drugs are never mentioned, but the camera focuses on his physical tics and foot tapping enough to hint at it. This part is interspersed with his up-and-down journey up till this point: bits of his childhood, his early talent, his fame and fandom, and his widely chronicled collapse. The treatment is all too familiar. The lens becomes his mouthpiece. At some point, he stops being a person. He morphs into a neatly segregated storyline, an impenetrable idea that’s at once marketed and sold.

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All 4 reviews of Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous here

Body
A Hindi Indie Full of Craft, Curiosity and Naked Ambition

Abhijit Mazumdar’s troubled-actor drama is in the International Competition section of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK)

Once adulthood sets in, and once we’ve accumulated enough years, most of us have two types of recurring dreams (and nightmares). One revolves around the terror of remembering that the exam is tomorrow and we haven’t touched the school syllabus. The other is shaped by the horror of finding ourselves naked in routine situations, while being totally helpless about it. Both of these are trauma responses to our fraught relationship with society. Both feature a link between social conditioning and shame, but Abhijit Muzumdar’s Body confronts the steeper task of exploring the second dream. It’s a testing watch, but ultimately quite a rewarding one.

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Despatch
Manoj Bajpayee Powers An Ugly And Effective Newsroom Drama

Director Kanu Behl’s film dismantles the wokeness of press procedurals

Despatch starts off as a journalist story. It’s 2012. Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee) is a veteran crime reporter for a Mumbai-based newspaper. Joy is in a joyless marriage with Shweta (Shahana Goswami), and he plans a future with Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal), a colleague he’s been having an affair with; he is in search of his next big headline.

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All 9 reviews of Despatch here

Sikandar Ka Muqaddar
Suspense Meets Nonsense In Neeraj Pandey’s Thriller

The Netflix film, starring Jimmy Shergill, Tamannaah Bhatia and Avinash Tiwary, embarks on a brisk walk to nowhere.

For Tarantino, it’s the foot shot. For Rohit Shetty, it’s the drone shot. And for Neeraj Pandey, it’s the walking-talking shot: unbroken over-the-shoulder and full-frontal shots of self-serious men striding in and out of spaces, between rooms and corridors, between people and objects. Cops walk. Robbers walk. Waiters walk. Dogs walk. Thoughts walk. The air walks. No cinematographer finishes a schedule unfit. Basically, walking equals narrative momentum. Pandey is a master at making it look like something is always happening even when nothing is — but not in a good way.

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All 9 reviews of Sikandar Ka Muqaddar here

All We Imagine as Light
Payal Kapadia’s Sublime Love-Hate Letter To Mumbai

The migrant drama starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam and others, reimagines the contours of the big-city film.

All We Imagine As Light opens like a non-fiction film about a city of grand fictions. We see a dark Mumbai — the factory of dreams — in which its survivors and victims imagine light. Invisible migrant voices play over a montage of traffic, streets, beaches, stations and hope. A pregnant housemaid jokes about being fed well by her employer. A veteran from Gujarat refuses to call it home because he’s afraid he might have to leave any moment. A dockyard worker recalls the fishy smells from his first night; he speaks like the stink has gone, but it’s his nose that adapted. A woman credits the place for making her forget a breakup. They all sound like stories from the “Spirit of Mumbai” handbook — it’s hard to tell their fate from their faith. The film seamlessly transitions from the generic to the specific by the end of this montage. The camera settles on one such story in motion: two Malayali nurses on the train back to their tiny apartment.

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All 7 reviews of All We Imagine as Light here

Freedom at Midnight
A Brave And Bulky Historical Thriller

Nikkhil Advani’s 7-episode Partition drama is ambitious, campy and politically expressive.

As children, most of us learn to see 1947 as India’s finest moment. The event is simple: India gained freedom from the greedy British Raj and that’s that. As teenagers, we start to sense that perhaps it wasn’t all smooth and happy. With independence came the pressure to move out and grow up. But it doesn’t matter much because, either way, colonialism ended. As we get older, however, a full and bittersweet picture emerges: a nation is free, only to be violently divided into two on the basis of religion. It was never as simple as the British leaving or a newly born country celebrating its revolutionaries. This fuller picture has been molded — and revised — into shapeless stories by a future reeling from its scars. History is what happened, but these days, history is what we choose to believe.

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All 11 reviews of Freedom at Midnight here

Kanguva
A Shoddy Monument To Superstardom

Siva’s Suriya-starring fantasy actioner loses more than just the plot

Sometime last month, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York took the internet by storm. The prize was a modest 50 dollars. Some participants were more convincing than others, but the reason this event went viral is because the real Chalamet made a surprise visit in the end to greet the winners. Ironically, he looked nothing like the men trying to ape him. The point of this anecdote — wait for it — is that the entire Indian fantasy-period-action-epic bubble these days is an expensive look-alike contest. During the interval of Kanguva, I was momentarily disoriented: was the second half of Devara: Part 1 or Kalki 2898 AD going to start playing? Would anyone even notice? These movies resemble each other in strange and amateur ways, but none of them resemble the original star, S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali. In fact, like Chalamet himself, Rajamouli showed up in a cameo in one of these films — and that scene alone became more popular than the mega-budget production surrounding it.

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All 10 reviews of Kanguva here

Vijay 69
A Corny Underdog Drama With No Chill

The Anupam Kher starrer is a small film with a big heart problem

There are some movies you just want to like before you watch them. Personal biases are an integral part of the cinema experience. For instance, I used to have a soft spot for stories that romanticised a version of myself: slice-of-life introvert tales or dysfunctional family dramas. My focus has now moved to aspirational old-people stories; perhaps it has something to do with my parents aging with all sorts of ailments. The prospect of watching Vijay 69, then, was an inviting one. Not only is it director Akshay Roy’s first film since the criminally underappreciated Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017), it stars Anupam Kher as Vijay Mathew, a 69-year-old widower who attempts to become India’s oldest triathlete. I went into the film expecting to revise my reality — of having a 71-year-old father allergic to physical fitness — for a few hours. A bit of sports thrown in can’t hurt matters. What could possibly go wrong? And what could possibly go wrong when you have to ask what could possibly go wrong?

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All 7 reviews of Vijay 69 here