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Recent Reviews by Rohan Naahar
The Indian Express

Rohan Naahar is based out of New Delhi, India, and has been reviewing films and television shows for over a decade. He has written for the Hindustan Times and currently writes for the Indian Express.

Films reviewed on this Page

Caddo Lake
Jigra
CTRL
Joker

Caddo Lake
Producer M Night Shyamalan’s new mind-bender is among the finest thrillers of the year

Produced by M Night Shyamalan and directed by Celine Held and Logan George, Caddo Lake isn’t merely one of the best thriller films of the spooky season, it’s among the best of the year.

A slow-burn thriller with a deep emotional core, an intricately plotted genre exercise, and an acting showcase for two talented young performers, Caddo Lake, on paper, sounds like the complete package. It takes a while to get going, and the first act is particularly testing, but it’s also the kind of film that gets better with every passing minute. In fact, Caddo Lake is at its best towards the end, when it ties all — or, at least two — of its narrative threads together, unleashing an emotional wallop that rivals only the sheer thrill of watching its well-executed twist.

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Jigra
Vasan Bala weaponises Alia Bhatt in one of the best Hindi films of the year; Karan Johar better have his back

One would hope that Dharma Productions doesn't push Vasan Bala into moving traffic after Jigra; starring Alia Bhatt, it's one of the best Hindi films of the year, a near-perfect marriage of Bala's irreverent sensibilities and Karan Johar's trademark drama.

Getting an audience to detest a movie villain isn’t difficult. People are cynical; all they want is someone to project their frustrations on. But getting the same viewers to genuinely empathise with the protagonist of your film isn’t as easy as it might seem. It requires them to lower their guards and shed their egos; to allow moments of vulnerability in the presence of absolute strangers. Most of all, it requires them to ignore the objectively lunatic act of developing a connection with a made-up person, as if they are real. But Vasan Bala has cracked the code in Jigra — a film that pulls off this almost impossibly difficult feat by getting you, the viewer, to participate in the grandest act of collective empathy crafted on a Bollywood screen this year.

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Read all 18 reviews of Jigra here

CTRL
Ananya Panday plays the world’s most clueless social media influencer in Vikramaditya Motwane’s wildly uneven Netflix movie

Vikramaditya Motwane and Ananya Panday's considerable talents are wasted in CTRL, a thriller that takes a fresh approach to making stale observations about the world we live in.

Normally, one of the most frustrating things that a movie can do is to abandon its characters and become too consumed by the plot. Our mainstream cinema has always struggled with this, and things have only become worse in the streaming era. It is said that show runners, in particular, can get away with anything on digital platforms as long as there is a murder in the first episode. Well, someone most certainly dies at the end of the first act in CTRL, the new film from Vikramaditya Motwane — his first feature since AK vs AK in 2020.

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Read all 13 reviews of CTRL here

Joker
Todd Phillips would rather set fire to his own franchise than let the wrong people take inspiration from it; is Vanga watching?

A perverse punchline to a joke that has been played on all of us, Todd Phillips' Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, is bolder, bigger, and altogether braver than the first film.

You’d think that the world was a less paranoid place five years ago, when the collective trauma of the pandemic hadn’t clobbered us on the head with a comically large mallet. But remember when governments were put on high alert before the release of a comic book movie about a murderous clown? Prepared for the riots that the supposedly incendiary film might incite, teams of police were stationed outside certain screenings of Todd Phillips’ Joker — a movie that was viewed by alarmists as a sort of dog whistle for basement-dwelling incels.

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Read all 4 reviews of Joker here