Member Reviews

A large jewellery exhibition in Mumbai becomes the site of a heist. A hysterical phone call raises alarm, gunfire is heard, the cops on duty herd the panicked gathering into a secluded area, and during the melee, a fistful of precious gems go missing.

Neeraj Pandey is credited with some incredibly sharp films that have remained iconic for years after their release. Pandey has the knack for making quintessential Bollywood thrillers engaging with his screenplay, plot line and technical finesse. Sure he has also had a few misfires but films like A Wednesday, Special 26, Baby, and MS Dhoni remain popular and relevant till now. His latest Sikandar Ka Muqaddar starts on a promising note and one almost finds Pandey’s Midas touch to the narrative but somewhere through the course of 2 hours 23-minute-long film. Starring Avinash Tiwary and Jimmy Shergill, the film is a heist drama that shows potential in the beginning to be an engaging story but becomes an exhausting watch by the end of it.

In the late 1970s, the king of Bhutan coined the term “gross national happiness". GNH parameters are used to measure progress, well-being and happiness, placing their importance over economic pursuits alone. This programme has been pivotal in shaping development policies and governance in Bhutan, a landlocked nation in eastern Himalayas that is often ranked as one of the happiest in the world. Happiness surveyor Amber Kumar Gurung of the Happiness Centre is the subject of a new documentary, Agent of Happiness (in competition at the MAMI Mumbai film festival 2024).

Even before a gun is fired or a car destroyed in director Rohit Shetty’s latest cop-and-terrorist saga, a disclaimer is read out in two languages—about mentions of a Hindu god and respect for beliefs. When you consider that Singham Again is built on the bedrock of the epic, Ramayana—with Ajay Devgn’s Bajirao Singham likened to Lord Rama—, the disclaimer seems like a safe bet.

The story of Kanguva has a lot of similarities with SS Rajamouli’s Magadheera (2009), which laid the foundation for the Telugu icon to make Baahubali: The Beginning. The Ram Charan-starrer is about a street bike race, who realises that he is a reincarnation of an ancient warrior who couldn’t join hands with his love of life. He meets her again in the new life, but the villain of yore is also born again. So, the old scores get settled in an entertaining watch. In Kanguva, the romance gets replaced by a father-son bond only that the son and the father are not related by blood but much stronger drama.

By now, plasticity has become a sort of director Karthick Naren’s style. A sense of juvenility creeps in with the premise and setups of the director, despite a fairly decent execution and technical competence. A sample of such contrived writing comes even at the beginning of the first act when one of the protagonists, Sri (Dushyanth Jayaprakash), argues with his parents to let him own a mobile phone. The deliberation to establish that the character doesn’t have a cell phone is to thwart the audience from finding any logical loopholes. The problem with such writing renders Nirangal Moondru staged and artificial, distancing the audience from the characters and their stakes.

Zebra, the film’s title, could denote the game the characters play with black and white money (they call it sugar) throughout the film. It could also mean the colour grey you get when the two stripes of the animal are mixed–which would be the moral tone of almost all the characters in the movie. Incidentally, that’s how you feel about the film as well. It is neither a smooth entertainer nor a problematic drag. In essence, Zebra is an over-the-top heist thriller that is more about entertainment and less about logic and other rational thoughts. As it gets the entertaining part right, it overshadows even its worst flaw.

“The funny thing is… on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook, “Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says with his sarcastic wit which leaves Red (Morgan Freeman) cackling in one of many incredible scenes of The Shawshank Redemption. Pathiban (RJ Balaji) says almost the same lines in Sorgavaasal but no one’s laughing here, because Sorgavaasal is a bleak world with no room for such humour. Here things are bloody and violent, and unlike the Hollywood classic, there’s no room for home in the pessimistic world of Sorgavaasal.

The first 20 minutes of Sookshmadarshini may be used as a textbook to learn the art of writing a setup. Writers Athul Ramachandran and Libin TB are preparing their viewer for a film that falls into an unusual genre but instead of rushing towards the plot, they take their time to focus on establishing their protagonist: Priyadarshini (Nazriya), a 20-something mother who admits to feeling bored of domesticity. She lives in a regular middle-class neighbourhood, filled with regulars who know everything about each other.

It’s not fair to call Lijin Jose’s Her, written by Archana Vasudev, an anthology. On the surface, these are the stories of five women taking place across five households in and around Thiruvananthapuram. The timelines are jumbled and these stories are set across different genres with at least one comedy, one satire and parts you can broadly call drama, each with its own mood and theme. Yet you feel conflicted by the thought of calling it an anthology because it never stops feeling like a unified whole, with the narrative smoothness of a well-written feature film (it’s edited by Kiran Das).