Recent Reviews by Shilajit Mitra
The Hindu
Shilajit Mitra is a film critic and journalist with The Hindu. Based in Mumbai, he has been writing on cinema for over seven years. He started out contributing reviews to the Times Now and Zoom websites; later, for five years, he worked as a critic for The New Indian Express. Currently, he reviews Hindi films and beyond for The Hindu. He also writes features and opinion pieces for the publication, and curates a fortnightly recommendations column called Screen Share. He loves talking films, on end.
Films reviewed on this Page
The Sabarmati Report
Singham Again
Love Sitara
Jigra
Ulajh
Gyaarah Gyaarah
Wild Wild Punjab
Barzakh
The Sabarmati Report
Vikrant Massey boards the propaganda train
Based on the 2002 Godhra train burning tragedy, and its ensuing coverage in the media, this convenient and skewed film is a poor showcase for its leading man
In an interview that went viral ahead of The Sabarmati Report, actor Vikrant Massey, briefly turning political analyst, reflected on the state of the nation. “People say that Hindus are in danger, that Muslims are in danger. No one is in danger; everything is going fine. This is the best country to live in the world,” he declared in a podcast. The nervous naivety of Hindi film actors ahead of a controversial release is always enlightening to witness. It’s a balancing act no gymnast or slackliner can fathom.
All 3 reviews of The Sabarmati Report here
Singham Again
Ajay Devgn returns in deathly dull franchise
Half a dozen cameos and a Ramayana-inspired plotline cannot mask the creative shortfall of Rohit Shetty’s latest cop universe film
There was a time, not long ago, when Hindi blockbuster cinema could stand on its own — distinguishable, say, from mythological soap operas and tacky non-fiction programming on satellite TV. But the laziness and opportunism of the last few years have all but vaporized that distinction. It leaves the theatre-going audience in two minds. Adipurush (2023) was laughably inept yet insistently pious and grim. The same applies to Singham Again, ostensibly an action potboiler and an Avengers-like ‘team-up’ movie but playing like an ad for the tourism ministry’s Ramayana trail.
All 13 reviews of Singham Again here
Love Sitara
Pre-wedding blues with Sobhita Dhulipala
Sobhita Dhulipala and Rajeev Siddhartha are a couple gearing up for their wedding in this uneven relationship drama
Love, Sitara begins with a nod to Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” says Sitara (Sobhita Dhulipala). Unlike Leo Tolstoy’s great novel — whose opening line these words are — the writing in Vandana Kataria’s film isn’t as quotable, though it tries hard. You can assemble a slim volume of pithy self-help slogans from Abbas and Hussain Dalal’s dialogue: “Happiness lies in honesty.” “Dysfunction means they are making an effort.” “I’ll fix myself, before I can fix my relationships.”
All 2 reviews of Love Sitara here
Jigra
A spirited Alia Bhatt cannot redeem Vasan Bala’s shaky jailbreak film
Despite its competence and moments of poetry, Vasan Bala’s film fails to engage or excite at a visceral level
Movies can shape us in silly but significant ways. Growing up in the 1990s, for instance, I developed an irrational and premature fear of foreign travel. This had little to do with any growing awareness of geopolitical realities and everything to do with a schlocky Bollywood film starring Sridevi and Sanjay Dutt. Directed by Mahesh Bhatt, Gumrah (1993) — a jailbreak drama set between Mumbai and Hong Kong — was shivery B-movie fun, and it left me with an enduring anxiety. If I clutched my cabin luggage a little too cautiously on my first international flight, nervously looking over my shoulders, I had Bhatt and the duplicitous face of Rahul Roy to thank.
All 18 reviews of Jigra here
Ulajh
Janhvi Kapoor is caught in an inept thriller
This film about an imperiled IFS officer in London suffers from convoluted writing and misguided ambitions
What sort of a spy movie is Sudhanshu Saria’s Ulajh? It begins as a Raazi (2018) in pantsuits: patriotic female protagonist, driven by loyalty and legacy, enlists to serve her country on foreign turf. Indo-Pak diplomatic relations, as fraught and fragile as they were in 1971, inform the narrative stakes. Both films hail from Junglee Pictures, and the editor, in each case, is Nitin Baid. If that weren’t enough, the new film even has a song with ‘watan’ in its title — plastered, ineffectually, over the opening credits and thereby fast forgotten.
Gyaarah Gyaarah
Middling crime thriller bids its time
Raghav Juyal, Dhairya Karwa and Kritika Kamra try their best in this unrewarding series with a promising core
Gyaarah Gyaarah, out on ZEE5 and adapted from the Korean series Signal, is a time-warping thriller of the dour, soulless kind. Tumbling across timelines, director Umesh Bist always makes sure to hold his audience’s hand. Bland letters appear on screen to indicate the precise date, year, location. Lest we lose our bearings, the pop-culture references are even more plain: Dil for 1990, Kapoor & Sons for 2016. This is a fairly unimaginative way to summon a period, to evoke a mood. It’s unlike the scene in Back to the Future where Doc in the 1950s exclaims to Marty, who’s traveled back from the 80s, “Ronald Reagan! The actor?! Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?”
Wild Wild Punjab
Puerile buddy comedy is not wild enough
The Netflix film starring Varun Sharma, Sunny Singh and others is a blur of ham-fisted hi-jinks and inane humour
It was evident, even before Varun Sharma clambered onto the roof of a car, unfastened his fly and shot out a tall projectile of piss, that Wild Wild Punjab was not a serious film. But is it even that wild? The aforementioned scene is probably the looniest thing that happens — a nod, perhaps, to Fukrey 3, which had an entire pee-based plotline dedicated to Sharma. The rest of Simarpreet Singh’s film is oddly strained and docile, a blur of ham-fisted hi-jinks and inane one-liners. “Respect, dude,” someone tells Sharma’s character, a compliment I cannot extend to the film.
Barzakh
Fawad Khan grounds a bewitching, overblown saga
Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed star in this feverishly artful series by British-Pakistani director Asim Abbasi
“The past is not dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. Everything in Barzakh — images, ideas, sounds — responds to that famously Faulknerian sentiment. The title refers to a kind of limbo, an earthly purgatory, where the dead move amidst the living. The six-part series has been shot in the ravishing Hunza Valley, in Northern Pakistan, and is drenched in a despairing, deciduous beauty. Characters converse in pseudo-spiritualistic fragments and heartsick hokum (and also do shrooms). Mountains, as usual, hold the key to everything. Watching the series, I found myself nervously wondering if, across the border, the director Imtiaz Ali was paying attention. What if he feels a little bested, and takes it up as a challenge?