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The writers of 2018’s terrific buddy comedy Veere Di Wedding reunite with their ace Kareena Kapoor Khan for a new flick about a trio of women in need of cash. The high-concept heist comedy Crew soars thanks to great performances.
Kapoor Khan plays Jasmine, a flight attendant with a taste for luxury goods she can’t afford. Her coworker Geeta (Tabu) pays her family’s bills while her husband Arun (Kapil Sharma) tries to start his own food company. And Divya (Kriti Sanon) graduated from flight school with a pilot’s license but limited job opportunities, and she’s too ashamed to tell her parents that she’s paying off her student loans by working as a flight attendant.
Their employer, Kohinoor Airlines, hasn’t paid their salaries in months, and the cash per diem the crew gets on trips to the fictitious Middle Eastern country of Al Burj is shrinking as well. Rumors of bankruptcy circulate, but crusty old head attendant Rajvanshi (Ramakant Dayma) isn’t concerned. The ladies learn why when Rajvanshi dies mid-flight and they find a dozen gold bars strapped to his chest under his uniform.
Thanks to Jasmine’s quick thinking, they use Rajvanshi’s phone to contact his co-conspirator: the company’s head of Human Resources, Mr. Mittal (Rajesh Sharma). The three women take over Rajvanshi’s role in the gold smuggling operation, and their money troubles vanish.
Soon enough, the ladies find themselves under investigation from the airport customs authorities, right as their smuggling scheme is brought to an abrupt halt. The trio can either wallow in poverty or take back what they feel they’ve earned.
The screenplay for Crew — written by Nidhi Mehra and Mehul Suri — hooks viewers immediately and quickly gets into the action. This is only director Rajesh A Krishnan’s second feature film after 2020’s crime comedy Lootcase, but he shows a real flair for the genre. That said, the pace slows a bit as the story enters its overly-complicated third act, and the resolution feels unintentionally morally ambiguous.
Yet the film is ultimately a success thanks to its leading trio. Kapoor Khan is outstanding and doesn’t waste a single second of screentime. Even when Jasmine isn’t the center of attention, Kapoor Khan reacts in a way that elevates every scene. Her off-the-ball game is perfect. Tabu is a stabilizing force as the most mature of the three women. Sanon gets to do some fun physical comedy, as her character was a former collegiate athlete.
The supporting cast is solid as well, including Diljit Dosanjh in an extended cameo as a customs officer with a crush on Divya.
Crew knows what kind of movie it is and what it needs to do, and it delivers on that promise. What a delightful film.
Kiran Rao returns with her second feature, more than a decade after her directorial debut. Laapataa Ladies (“Lost Ladies“) is a sweet film about the unpredictable consequences of an innocent mistake.
In 2001, farmer Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastav) is returning to his village after his wedding to Phool (Nitanshi Goel). Many other newlyweds are aboard the crowded train, the grooms in their nicest brown suits and the brides wearing red saris with their faces covered by a veil. Deepak steps away for a minute, and seats get shuffled around to accommodate new arrivals. When they arrive at their stop in the middle of the night, Deepak grabs the hand of the bride who is sitting where Phool last was and escorts her off the train.
Only when he gets all the way to his house and his bride reveals her face does Deepak discover that he brought home the wrong woman.
The bride standing in his family’s yard says her name is Pushpa (Pratibha Ranta). She’s not sure where she was heading. The family agrees to let her stay until they can sort things out.
Then there’s poor Phool. She woke up at the last stop on the line with no money and without knowing the name of the town where Deepak lives. A kindly guy called Chhotu (Satendra Soni) introduces her to Manju Maai (Chhaya Kadam), who runs a snack stall at the station. The older woman puts Phool to work, teaching the young woman a lesson in self-sufficiency — just in case Deepak isn’t the good guy Phool thinks he is.
The thing is, Deepak really is a good guy. In fact, most of the people in Laapataa Ladies are good. Rao and writers Biplap Goswami, Sneha Desai, and Divyanidhi Sharma are perfectly aware that the world is a dangerous place for women, so there’s no need to belabor the point. Instead, the story focuses on problem solving and community building as ways to persevere through challenges.
Manju Maai’s support for Phool does the best job at conveying that message. The older woman gently teaches the younger some hard-earned lessons that Phool’s own mother kept from her. Since Phool’s husband would eventually take care of her, why teach the girl more than basic skills like cooking, cleaning, and dancing? Manju Maai explains that sometimes life forces you to make your own way.
Similar lessons are taught back at Deepak’s house, as “Pushpa” — whose real name is Jaya — encourages the women of the house to do things that make them happy and not just prioritize the happiness of the men in the family. These lessons aren’t as organically integrated into the story and feel more like lectures. Still, the sentiment is nice and the film’s ending is made more touching as a result.
The whole cast is really strong. Casting the now-16-year-old Goel as Phool was a masterstroke, as her youth makes the abandoned bride extra vulnerable and innocent. Shrivastav and Ranta also suit their roles to a tee, and the supporting cast is great, too.
The story occasionally loses steam when it tries to incorporate too many facets of small-town life. There’s too much of the greedy police chief (played by Ravi Kishan), and a sequence involving a local politician doesn’t move the story forward at all. Still, it’s hard to knock a movie with such good intentions and so many enjoyable performances.
[Note: Laapataa Ladies debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2023. It released theatrically March 1, 2024.]
You’ve probably noticed that it’s been quiet on the streaming services as well as in theaters. We’re in the middle of cricket season, a time when producers and distributors traditionally pull back on releases while audience attention is elsewhere. The Indian Premier League is happening this month followed by the Cricket World Cup all throughout June.
So what releases are on the horizon? The only Indian Original streaming title with an announced release date is Season 3 of Panchayat, which comes to Amazon Prime on May 28:
We can predict some likely streaming debut dates for theatrical releases, which typically wind up on OTT 8 weeks after hitting theaters. All these dates are all approximate, and the streaming service may be subject to change:
What are your favorite films of 2024 so far? Leave a comment and let me know!
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Parental anxiety takes demonic form in the psychological thriller Shaitaan.
Kabir (Ajay Devgn) and Jyoti Rishi (Jyothika) are the parents of two good kids: teenager Janvi (Janki Bodiwala) and elementary schooler Dhruv (Anngad Raaj). Kabir and Jyoti raised their children with a healthy degree of independence, and their reward is a pair of responsible kids and a happy family.
While driving to their luxurious vacation home for a weekend getaway, the family stops at a roadside diner. There they meet Vanraj (R. Madhavan), a friendly guy who tells Kabir that he has a teenage daughter of his own. Vanraj offers Janvi a sweet, and as soon as she eats it, she knows something is wrong. When Vanraj tells her to finish the food on her plate, she must obey him, even though she doesn’t want to.
After the Rishis drive to their house, Jyoti notices Vanraj standing outside their gate. He tells Janvi to let him in, and she does. Kabir warns Jyoti to lock up the valuables, meaning cash and jewelry. But that’s not the valuable that the demonic Vanraj is there for.
Vanraj warns that, before this night of torment ends, Kabir and Jyoti will give Janvi over to him for all eternity. They swear they won’t, but Vanraj knows how to get what he wants. He’ll turn Janvi into someone they don’t recognize — someone who is a danger to them and to Dhruv.
The family’s predicament invites exploration of a number of themes. Janvi’s bodily autonomy is a central issue. Her transformation can be a metaphor for everything from addiction to certain mental health conditions to involvement with a controlling or abusive partner.
Bodiwala does a really nice job as Janvi. Her eyes burn with a resistance that her body can’t muster. Bodiwala played the same part in the Gujarati film Vash on which Shaitaan is based, and her experience shows.
The performances by Devgn and Jyothika evoke sympathy for the parents faced with a devastating choice. They’re powerless to help Janvi, so should they sacrifice her to protect Dhruv? Given the psychological nature of the terror in Shaitaan, it’s not a fast-paced movie. The parents spend plenty of time staring in hollow-eyed defeat, but it works within context.
Shaitaan‘s climax tries tries to force action sequences into the story that veer into camp, especially when combined with the supernatural elements. And a needless epilogue is preachy and redundant, given how well the screenplay develops the movie’s themes.
This is a review of the version of Crakk streaming on Hulu, which has a runtime of 2 hours 12 minutes — 22 minutes shorter than the theatrical version’s 2 hours 34 minutes.
“Two hundred hungry dogs, and the contestants on rollerblades.” If this sounds like a good time — and it does to me — Crakk: Jeetegaa Toh Jiyegaa! is for you.
Vidyut Jammwal plays extreme sports enthusiast Siddhu. He films himself doing parkour stunts like jumping over an empty elevator shaft in an unfinished high-rise, hoping to catch the attention of recruiters at Maidaan — a competition that’s part Squid Game and part Fast & Furious. It’s also where Siddhu’s older brother Nihal (Ankit Mohan) died in an accident during the final round four years earlier.
Siddhu gets the call-up and soon finds himself in an abandoned castle in Poland with thirty-one other competitors from around the world. There’s a blond “American” guy with an Eastern European accent and a guy named Alphonso representing all of Africa. Fans of Maidaan watch the competition online and place bets on the winner. Half the field advances through three rounds before a champion gets the chance to face off against Maidaan’s emcee, Dev (Arjun Rampal).
The contestants either don’t realize or don’t care that when you lose in Maidaan, you die. Sure, one guy gets run over by a remote-controlled go-kart, but the other losers of Round 1 wind up dead, too. The Netflix series Squid Game highlights the economic desperation that would drive people to risk their lives. If the contestants who turn up at Maidaan are desperate for anything other than thrills, we don’t hear about it.
Even more inexplicable is the Round 2 dog/rollerblade challenge, in which each contestant is paired with someone who is not a part of the contest but is good on skates. Why would any of the rollerbladers agree to be mauled by hungry dogs?
It makes as much sense as Dev dealing plutonium as a side hustle. The bad guys in these Fast & Furious-type movies always use racing or competition as a cover for more nefarious crimes, so I guess it’s to be expected in Crakk. The plutonium puts Dev on the radar of Officer Patricia Novak (Amy Jackson) of a vague international police agency. (One would think a televised sporting event with a 97% fatality rate would be enough to warrant an investigation, but apparently not.)
Patricia teams with Siddhu to get the dirt on Dev’s dirty deals in exchange for information on what really happened to Siddhu’s brother, Nihal. Other characters of note include Maidaan’s beautiful social media coordinator Alia (Nora Fatehi) and Maidaan’s tech support person Junaida (Jamie Lever). Both of them seem okay working for an organization that kills a lot of people. Maybe Maidaan offers really good health insurance.
Crakk has many logical flaws, but none of them matter. This is a dumb action movie that aspires to be a dumb action movie and meets its goals, sans themes or social commentary. The early elevator-jumping scenes are shot really well, and the games are ridiculous but fun. Rampal seems to enjoy himself as the king of a bloody kingdom, and Jammwal’s acting is actually quite good. Siddhu regularly hallucinates conversations with Nihal, only for Siddhu and the audience to eventually see that he’s alone. Jammwal pulls off a challenging scene in which he’s essentially arguing with empty air on a dreary Polish street late one night.
The aesthetics of the world writer-director Aditya Datt created for Crakk are amusingly bonkers. Large crowds show up in the middle of the desert (yes, Poland has a desert) to watch the games, dressed in embarrassing costumes that look sourced from a Halloween store’s clearance bin. CGI fills in areas where the filmmaker didn’t want to pay for extras, complete with cheering fans and random sports cars a la Fast & Furious (but no tents or bathrooms or other facilities). All of Dev’s pasty henchmen are shirtless under their bulletproof vests.
Of course, Siddhu and Dev have a fight scene in which both of their shirts are ripped off. The movie would feel incomplete without it.
To call All India Rank a coming-of-age story about a student trying to get into a prestigious college is too simple. The story’s real protagonist is the student’s father.
All India Rank takes place in 1997. 17-year-old Vivek Singh (Bodhisattva Sharma) doesn’t have any say in the direction of his life. His dad R.K. (Shashi Bhushan) wants him to get into the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), so that’s what Vivek must do. Father and son travel from Lucknow to Kota, where Vivek will spend the next year at a coaching school training to take the IIT entrance exam.
Paying for Vivek to train to take a test is more expensive than immediately enrolling him in a local college, but R.K. is convinced that the family’s future financial stability hinges on Vivek getting an elite degree. The Singhs aren’t exactly rolling in money. R.K. works at the state telecom company, and mom Manju (Geeta Agrawal Sharma) runs a small shop with a pay phone. Sending Vivek to Kota is a stretch.
Vivek hardly knows why he’s at the coaching center. He has no goals of his own, and he’s far from the best student there. But he makes friends, meets a girl he likes, and gets a bit closer to discovering what he wants from life: pretty typical coming-of-age movie stuff. Vivek’s growth arc is predictable. His father’s is not.
R.K. is so invested in his plan for his only child that he hasn’t stopped to consider the wisdom of it. Nor has he considered the effect it has on Vivek and Manju. It doesn’t occur to R.K. that he and his wife are now empty nesters until she points it out to him. When both parents have work trouble that affects their income, the financial risk of sending Vivek to the coaching academy becomes apparent, too. Shashi Bhushan and Geeta Agrawal Sharma do a lovely job playing the couple, as they try to persevere through a phase of life that’s more difficult than they anticipated.
The problems faced by the parents — which also includes a sex pest who uses Manju’s pay phone to make dirty calls — are much more interesting than anything that Vivek goes through. Yet the story spends much more time with Vivek in Kota. The narrative balance feels off, and the film overall feels less ambitious than it should have been.
All India Rank is obviously made for an audience familiar with the stakes associated with taking the IIT entrance exam and the infrastructure built to support it, but that leaves the unversed on the outside looking in. The term “All India Rank” is never explained, nor are the numbers associated with the students’ test scores. I’m sure this is clear to the intended audience, but it makes it hard for outsiders to gauge Vivek’s progress.
I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Netflix with today’s additions of the Telugu film Tillu Square and the Hindi movie Laapataa Ladies, directed by Kiran Rao. These theatrical releases come on the heels of last week’s new additions: the Bollywood flicks All India Rank and Article 370. Netflix is investing heavily in Hindi theatrical releases this year, with movies generally hitting streaming 8 weeks after they debut in theaters. Ajay Devgn’s Shaitaan could come to Netflix as early as next week, followed by Crew in late May and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan in early June (though none have official streaming debut dates yet).
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Silence 2: The Night Owl Bar Shootout leans into modern streaming video viewership habits. Every detail in this murder mystery is spelled out in such excruciating detail that you’d might as well be scrolling on your phone while you watch it. Full attention is not required.
Silence 2 is a sequel to the 2021 Zee5 Original Silence… Can You Hear It?. Familiarity with the first film isn’t required, as the sequel follows a new case, and the main characters’ personal lives are hardly mentioned.
Manoj Bajpayee plays ACP Avinash Verma, leader of Mumbai’s Special Crimes Unit (SCU) within the police force. Verma’s boss is aware of genre requirements and repeatedly threatens to disband the squad if they don’t produce results.
The SCU is assigned to investigate a mass shooting event at a dive bar. Verma’s first question is, “Did someone important die?” — as if the double-digit body count alone shouldn’t warrant his attention. Turns out a minister’s secretary is among the dead, and the minister fears it has something to do with a sensitive project he’s working on.
That’s a red herring. Verma and his crew — which includes Sanjana (Prachi Desai), Amit (Sahil Vaid), and Raj (Vaquar Shaikh) — quickly realize that the lone woman at the bar was the real target. She was an escort named Aazma (Surbhi Rohra). Soon enough, the squad is hot on the trail of human traffickers.
The crew exists in order to make every clue explicitly obvious. A coded message instructs someone to “Meet at Sam’s.” They narrow the search to a handful of buildings with names like Kaveri, Samruddhi, and Riddhi. Sanjana proudly connects the dots, “Samruddhi! SAM’S!”
Desai and the other actors playing squad members actually do a decent job delivering lines that require zero nuance. Same for Bajpayee, who gives a matter-of-fact performance. Parul Gulati — who plays a rich woman named Aarti — is the film’s unsung hero for managing to give a believable performance, when the material she’s given could’ve easily been interpreted in an over-the-top way.
That’s the mistake Dinker Sharma makes as cartoonishly theatrical business tycoon Arjun Chauhan. “Theatrical,” as in he wears a cape and holds a fake skull while reciting Hamlet’s “Poor Yorick” speech. Every moment he’s on screen is annoying.
Given that a few of the other supporting performances are hammy and irritating, too, Sharma might be doing exactly what writer-director Aban Bharucha Deohans wants. Regardless, this isn’t a film that any of the actors involved will want to emphasize on their highlight reels.
Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (“Got So Entangled in Your Words“) has the makings of a decent movie. What begins as a high-concept romantic comedy about a man in love with a robot takes an insane turn at the end. Not once does it address the logical ethical questions that must be asked of such a relationship.
Shahid Kapoor stars in Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (TBMAUJ, henceforth) as Aryan, a robotics engineer. His family is pressuring him to find a wife, but he’s more interested in his job. He takes after his single aunt Urmila (Dimple Kapadia), who runs a big engineering firm in the United States.
Urmila invites Aryan for a visit but is called away on an urgent business trip. She leaves him in the hands of her assistant Sifra (Kriti Sanon). Sifra is gorgeous, helpful, and clearly interested in Aryan. He thinks she’s perfect.
After day of flirtatious fun in the sun, the two sleep together. Urmila returns the next morning and drops the bomb on Aryan: Sifra is an incredibly lifelike robot. Urmila invited Aryan to test if Sifra could pass as human, and she did. Aryan was none the wiser, not even while having sex with her.
Angry as Aryan is at Urmila’s deception, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s developed feelings for Sifra. But who exactly is Sifra? She is programmed to read human emotions and respond appropriately, but she has no emotions of her own. Aryan loves her because she’s hot and will do exactly what he wants her to do whenever he wants.
Under the guise of conducting further research, Aryan convinces Urmila to ship Sifra to Delhi to meet his family and see if she can fool them, too. He doesn’t tell his aunt that he’s intending on marrying Sifra if she passes the test.
None of the stuff with his family is very funny. Situations that should spark extended comic sequences — such as when Sifra downloads a virus that erases her memory — are resolved in a matter of minutes. The robotic woman angle should be fertile ground for physical comedy, but that aspect is especially weak.
There are a bunch of ethical questions that needn’t be investigated thoroughly in a comedy but should at least be acknowledged. Sifra is programmed to do what anyone tells her, so where should the line be drawn as to what constitutes an acceptable command and who can issue it? Does she have bodily autonomy? Is it permissible to hit her? (This is plot relevant, sadly.)
Before the end of the story, Aryan will have to chose whether or not to commit to marrying a robot. The way in which he’s forced to do so is chaotic and ridiculous, and the dark turn doesn’t fit with the tenor of the film to that point. Then Janhvi Kapoor appears in an epilogue cameo that is somehow even crazier than the bizarre climax.
It’s a surprise that TBMAUJ winds up being as bad as it is given that it’s co-written and co-directed by Amit Joshi and Aradhana Shah, writers of the charming 2022 comedy Babli Bouncer. That film was thoughtful about the unconventional woman at the heart of its story, as opposed to treating Sifra’s womanhood (or approximation thereof) as immaterial. Babli Bouncer was also much funnier.
Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon share good romantic chemistry and look hot together in the song “Akhiyaan Gulaab” (although the closing credits dance number is kind of a mess). Neither of them perform particularly well during the comedy bits, but that’s probably more of a writing issue since no one else in the film is funny, either. The story setup is so solid and accessible that it makes the sloppy execution extra disappointing.
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