Tag Archives: 3.5 Stars

Movie Review: Humans in the Loop (2024)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Humans in the Loop on Netflix

Companies specializing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) would have consumers believe that their systems are fully autonomous programs that learn independently. The reality is that AI can’t identify or differentiate things unless someone tells them how. Those someones are tens of thousands of Indian workers whose job it is to identify and label the images and videos that AI trains on.

Journalist Karishma Mehrotra’s 2022 article “Human Touch” profiles several of the women who work as data labelers in the small Indian towns that provide much of the industry’s labor pool. Filmmaker Aranya Sahay adapted Mehrotra’s article into Humans in the Loop, a fiction film that focuses on one woman who finds a new direction in life working on AI training material. It’s equal parts family drama and a critical look at the foundations of a growing technology.

Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) is starting over in her home village in Jharkhand. Her long-term, live-in relationship — an arrangement known as “Dhuku” — is over because her partner Ritesh (Vikas Gupta) wants to stay in the city and marry someone else. They have two kids together: tween daughter Dhaanu (Ridhima Singh) and baby son Guntu (Kaif Khan). The only way for Nehma to keep custody of the kids is to have a job to support them.

Nehma gets her chance working at a data labeling company in the town next door. Essentially, foreign corporations send the company collections of images and videos, the contents of those images and videos are labeled by operators, and that labeled content trains an AI program. The job is pretty mechanical — use a mouse to draw a box around all the cars in a photo of a traffic jam, for example — but it pays well enough.

The woman who runs the company, Alka (Gita Guha), explains the job to a cohort of new recruits (all of whom are women): “AI is like a child.” This resonates with Nehma. Baby Guntu is just starting to stand on his own, and she’s eager to show her city-raised daughter all the places and creatures she loved growing up in the forest. “Teaching” AI seems like a natural extension of what Nehma is doing at home.

Of course, AI isn’t a child, nor is Nehma the one to decide what to teach it. She notices that the faces she’s tagging in image sets from Western companies don’t include photos of women that look like her. She’s troubled by having to label some of the forest creatures she loves as “pests.”

[This is the nitpickiest thing I will ever write, but I’m gonna do it. Nehma believes that caterpillars are stewards who help plants thrive by eating rotten leaf parts, but some caterpillars can absolutely destroy plants. Looking at you, tomato hornworm!]

And of course, not every child is the same. After growing up in the city, Dhaanu got dropped into a new environment that has none of the comforts or technologies she grew up with. She struggles to get a signal on the cell phone her dad gave her to keep in contact. Tromping around the forest with her mom is not her idea of a good time, and she has no friends her age. Yet Nehma can’t understand why Dhaanu is unhappy.

While Humans in the Loop is most novel for its depiction of a facet of AI training few people know about, it works very well as a family drama, too. Nehma is an imperfect parent, and the tension lies in if or when she’ll figure that out. Dhaanu is at an age full of profound changes, and it’s up to her to learn how to navigate it. Guntu is there to be adorable.

Director Sahay is wise not to try to make the film bigger than it needs to be. It’s only 74 minutes long, and that feels right. She gets good performances from her cast, who all inhabit their characters nicely. The subject matter feels currently relevant but also timeless. This is filmmaking done right.

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Movie Review: Kennedy (2023)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Anurag Kashyap’s crime drama Kennedy premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and then disappeared. It finally got a digital release on Letterboxd’s new video rental platform in late 2025. At long last, a wider audience — though not one in India, where the Letterboxd store is unavailable — could watch this sought-after thriller.

While Kennedy is thematically in keeping with Kashyap’s crime-heavy filmography, the movie is important for capturing a moment in time that most directors (and audiences) seem eager to forget: the phase of COVID-19 pandemic mitigations where businesses were gradually allowed to reopen following the strictest business closures. The conditions present particular economic challenges for the characters in Kennedy and affect the plot accordingly.

Rahul Bhat plays the title character, whose given name is Uday Shetty. He’s a former cop who’s been presumed dead for six years, though he’s unofficially on the payroll of Mumbai Police Commissioner Rasheed Khan (Mohit Takalkar). Whenever Khan needs someone killed without it being traced back to him, he calls Kennedy.

There’s something in the deal for Kennedy, too, beyond whatever perverse thrill he gets from murdering people. Kennedy is looking for a gangster named Saleem (Aamir Dalvi), and Khan has promised to help Kennedy find him. Whether Khan can be trusted is up for debate.

Living in the shadows makes Kennedy something of a ghost himself. A thick beard and mustache hide most of his face, and he hardly speaks. When he’s alone in his apartment, he’s joined by at least one chatty apparition who fills the silence for him.

Kashyap also fills the dead air with spoken word poetry written and performed by Aamir Aziz, who is accompanied by a live band. It makes the film surprisingly noisy despite its taciturn lead character. It’s a bold narrative choice, and one that I didn’t mind. For the English subtitles, the poetry had its own subtitlers — Srilata Sircar and Shigorika Singh — while Jahan Singh Bakshi handled the rest of the dialogue.

The poetry is performed on a stage in a club, and this is where the depiction of COVID mitigations is important for historical context. The club’s masked patrons listen to the performers, only removing their masks to sip their drinks. As a flip side to the depiction of the effects of COVID factory closures on migrant workers shown in Homebound, Kennedy shows how affluent city dwellers lived after businesses reopened. Clubs and restaurants operated at reduced capacity, but they were open.

This reduced capacity presents a problem for Commissioner Khan. Kennedy is one of the enforcers in Khan’s protection racket that extorts money from club owners and restaurateurs, and fewer patrons means less money for Khan. He’s desperate to pay off the loan he took out to bribe his way to the Commissioner’s post.

Besides the other crooked cops in Khan’s outfit and the ghosts in his apartment, the only person Kennedy has any connection with is a woman named Charlie (Sunny Leone). She shares an elevator with him following the first murder he commits in the film, and he winds up driving her to a club for his side gig as a rideshare driver (even assassins need to moonlight, apparently). She’s in trouble, and she pegs him as a man with the skills to help her. Whether he has the empathy it takes to do so is another question entirely.

With very little dialogue and with his face obscured by a beard or a mask, Bhat really only has his eyes and the way he moves his body to perform the role of Kennedy. The fact that the character is always mesmerizing is a testament to Bhat’s abilities. We’re always trying to figure Kennedy out, and Bhat gives just enough to keep us on the hook.

The biggest shame in the film languishing on the shelf is Leone’s performance as Charlie going unseen for so long. She’s a terrific choice for the role, and she brings a delightful, offbeat energy to it. Under other circumstances, this role could have pushed her career in a new direction toward more serious fare than she’s usually offered.

I’m glad Letterboxd finally made Kennedy available for rent (though only for a limited time). It’s an odd movie, but it’s always engaging. Its depiction of a very specific time period during an historically important period makes it special and worth preserving.

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Movie Review: Raat Akeli Hai (2020)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Raat Akeli Hai on Netflix

Honey Trehan’s terrific directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai is, on the surface, an engrossing murder mystery. Dig deeper, and the film is about the way men police women’s behavior, creating conditions that are immediately bad for women, and ultimately bad for the men as well.

Raat Akeli Hai‘s opening sequence is visually arresting and chilling. A sedan drives on a lonely highway. The lights of a truck flick on. It chases the car in the dark, knocking it off the road. Silhouetted against the the truck’s blinding lights, a man steps toward the car to make sure the sedan driver and his female passenger are dead.

The shocking start transitions to a police officer’s wedding, five years later. One of the guests —  Inspector Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) — stews as his mother Sarita (Ila Arun) shows his photo to a pretty woman, hoping to find her son a bride, too. Jatil’s subsequent argument with his mom is interrupted when he’s called to a crime scene.

An elderly rich man is murdered on the night of his own wedding. It’s a second marriage for Raghuveer Singh (Khalid Tyabji) — and to a much younger woman — so it was a quiet affair. Quiet enough that no one even heard him get shot.

There are plenty of suspects in the house, including Singh’s adult children, his in-laws, a maid, and the new bride, Radha (Radhika Apte). The only thing they have in common is that they all hated the dead man.

Radha seems to be the main suspect, and her reluctance to talk to Jatil frustrates him. But she slips him a note reminding him that they’ve met before. It was five years ago, when he stopped her from jumping off a train, saving her life — only for her to wind up here.

This reminder prompts Jatil to do a proper investigation, rather than pin the murder on Radha like everyone else in the police department wants him to do.. Other members of the household had motive and opportunity, too, not to mention some lingering questions about Singh’s first wife’s death.

No one in Raat Akeli Hai is happy. Crucially, that includes Jatil. He’s bought into the thinking that women are something to be controlled. He’s still single because he wants a wife who is “well-behaved” and “knows her limits.” Presumably, he’ll be the one defining those limits.

The conundrum is his mother. Filial norms dictate that he respect her, and he does even when she does stuff that drives him crazy. But even though she doesn’t behave the way he wishes she would, it’s obvious how much she loves him. She means it when she says her son looks as handsome as Ajay Devgn in his uniform and sunglasses.

She’s also an example of what marital equality should look like, something that he finally appreciates during a conversation with her. As she’s telling Jatil the same story about his deceased father for the millionth time, she breaks down and says, “I miss him.” They were partners who cared deeply for each other and their son. They were happy.

Contrast with the deceased’s household, where everyone views each other with suspicion and distrust. Singh was a pervert, with a bedroom full of erotic art, pornography, and Polaroids of abused women. But he was also wealthy and closely connected to the shady politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). There was no way to escape Singh’s grasp, so everyone lived in survival mode.

Jatil finally understands that Radha’s hesitancy in opening up to him comes from hard-earned lessons. Though he’d always wanted a submissive, docile wife, her admires Radha for her courage and resilience. Maybe exerting control won’t get him the happy marriage that his parents had. Maybe he’d rather be with a woman who is strong and brave. Someone like Radha.

All of the character growth and theming in Raat Akeli Hai is done in a subtle, gradual way. There’s nothing heavy-handed or abrupt in Trehan’s interpretation of Smita Singh’s smart screenplay. The entire cast has the acting chops to pull this approach off, and Trehan trusts them to do it.

Trehan runs one of the production companies behind Raat Akeli Hai — Macguffin Pictures — with Udta Punjab director Abhishek Chaubey, who serves as Supervising Producer on the film. One of Chaubey’s duties included working on the English subtitles, which are outstanding. They include classic noir lines, like Radha’s response when Jatil asks who she thinks killed Singh: “Could be anyone. Someone braver than me… Someone more desperate. But I don’t know anyone like that.”

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Movie Review: Songs of Paradise (2025)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Songs of Paradise on Amazon Prime

Writer-director Danish Renzu’s love-letter to Kashmiri music history is vibrant and sweet. A charming cast recreates a world on the cusp of progress. Songs of Paradise is a delight.

Though not a biographical film, Renzu’s story is heavily inspired by the life of Raj Begum, Kashmir’s first female radio singer who died in 2016. Her achievements won her not just fame but also one of the Indian government’s highest civilian honors: the Padma Shree.

In Songs of Paradise, the character inspired by Raj Begum goes by the stage name Noor Begum (Soni Razdan). A framing device finds Noor in the modern day narrating her life to graduate student Rumi (Taaruk Raina), who’s writing a thesis on the history of popular music in Kashmir (and serving as an onscreen avatar for Renzu himself).

Before she started singing professionally in 1954, Noor Begum was simply Zeba Akhtar (Saba Azad). She grew up in Srinagar with her open-minded father (played by Bashir Lone) and conservative mother, Hameeda (Sheeba Chaddha).

Zeba earns money cleaning house for a music teacher, Master Ji (Shishir Sharma). Master Ji has no idea Zeba can sing, until he overhears her performing for a group of women at a family function. Recognizing her potential, Master Ji offers to train Zeba for free. He’s so impressed with her ability that he signs her up for the local radio station’s annual singing contest — something no other woman has done before.

“Freedom and progress were in the air,” the film notes. But not everyone is ready for change — not even Zeba herself. She hides her music lessons from her traditional mother under the guise of extra work hours. While Zeba enjoys her studies, she has no ambitions for them to lead to anything else. But she competes in the contest and wins decisively.

Her victory comes with a new job, performing songs live on the radio with the in-house band. Zeba’s presence causes upheaval in the male-dominated space, but soon everyone realizes the boost her heavenly voice gives the whole station. In trying to make the situation more equitable for her, Zeba champions change that makes things fairer for everyone, such as demanding grumpy station owner Mr. Kaul (Armaan Khera) read the names of every participating musician after every broadcast.

Zeba is interesting because she’s not trying to blaze a trail. Master Ji and her father want her to succeed because they care for her, and the station’s staff lyricist Azaad (Zain Khan Durrani) wants Kashmir to catch up with Bombay’s thriving film-music industry. But there’s a toll paid by trailblazers and those around them, and Zeba seems to know this. That’s the main reason she adopts the stage name Noor Begum. Yes, she’s afraid of what will happen if her mother finds out, but she’s also protective of her parents. Srinagar isn’t a huge town, and gossip travels fast.

Through her stern performance as Hameeda, Sheeba Chaddha makes sure we understand exactly why Zeba is scared of her mom. Hameeda levels a stare at Zeba that’s so withering that the film should come with a warning to protect delicate houseplants. Yet, when Noor Begum’s real identity is discovered, all of Zeba’s mother’s fears about social consequences come true.

Thankfully, Zeba and her family are saved by her greatest champion: Azaad, the station’s in-house lyricist. The two marry, and their romance is both tender and thrilling. They embody the style of the era and make a dashing couple. With Azaad’s support, Noor Begum capitalizes on the opportunities that arise as her soulful voice spreads beyond the borders of Kashmir.

One of Renzu’s points in making Songs of Paradise is to remind us how fragile history is. In an era before digital backups, physical copies of recordings were all that existed. Lose them, and you lose the performance, the song, the film. The credits of Songs of Paradise note that many of the songs used in the movie are recreations, likely due to there being no surviving physical recordings. The music in the film is a lovely augment to a charming story of progress and promise.

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Movie Review: Stolen (2025)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Stolen on Amazon Prime

Two brothers are drawn into a kidnapping case in the gripping drama Stolen. This is the most intense Hindi rural thriller since Anushka Sharma’s brilliant NH10.

Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer) sleeps on a bench at a train station with her 5-month-old baby Champa when another woman quietly grabs the infant and makes off with her. Jhumpa wakes moments later to find the baby missing, and no one on the platform saw anything. The only potential suspect is a man holding Champa’s hat.

The man with the hat is Raman (Shubham Vardhan), who just stepped off the train and is late to his mother’s wedding in the city. The delay means Raman’s wealthy brother Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) is already in a bad mood when he arrives at the station to pick him up. Finding Raman being grilled by the police as to where he found the hat only makes Gautam grouchier.

At first, the cops don’t seem eager to investigate a lead beaten out of a nearby tea vendor, so Jhumpa asks the brothers for help finding her baby. Gautam offers her money. The money isn’t for anything in particular, like hiring a detective or paying for a ride to a friend’s house. It’s just supposed to make Jhumpa go away. She doesn’t take the money.

That brief exchange summarizes the point of the film. People of means think that every problem can be solved with money. They aren’t concerned with what happens after they hand over their cash, so long as they get what they want. In this case, Gautam wants to take Raman to their mother’s house. He doesn’t really care if Jhumpa finds her baby or not.

Raman is disgusted by his brother’s lack of sympathy, but the cops take the decision out of the men’s hands. Inspector Shakti Singh (Sahidur Rahaman) and constable Pandit Ji (Harish Khanna) order the guys and Jhumpa to follow them in Gautam’s car to investigate the tea seller’s lead in a remote area that’s further away than the “15 minutes” they promised.

Along the way, the car is stopped by other law enforcement officers who’ve gotten a tip via social media that two men and a woman in a black SUV fled a train station with a stolen baby. They’ve even got Gautam’s license plate number. Singh and Pandit Ji set these officers straight, but that won’t stop the firestorm the rumor set off in the region. Turns out Champa isn’t the first baby to be taken, and folks are eager to make someone pay. Jhumpa and the brothers are only safe as long as they stay with the police — a fact they don’t appreciate until it’s too late.

From the brothers’ perspective, Stolen is about being in the wrong place at the wrong time and how your response to trouble illuminates your character. But from a wider view, the story is about powerlessness. It’s about how easy it is to victimize the poor and working class, and how institutions like the police that purportedly exist to help everyone don’t really (last year’s thriller Sector 36 was another great example of this).

That kind of environment creates a vacuum where poor people’s only recourses for justice are the ones they create for themselves. Hence the appeal of an anonymous social media rumor that pins the blame squarely on three people. Targeting Jhumpa, Raman, and Gautam is an action the villagers can take in the absence of better options. Rich guys like Gautam don’t have enough cash to defuse that explosive anger borne from helplessness.

The performances in Stolen are pitch-perfect. Banerjee plays Gautam as loathsome at the start, but his mind and heart open as their situation worsens. Vardhan has some of the saddest eyes in the business, making it easy to care for Raman, who’s always trying to do the right thing. Maelzer’s Jhumpa keeps secrets, but her desperation is genuine and urgent.

Director Karan Tejpal — who co-wrote Stolen with Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar — is equally adept at showing the breadth of a societal problem as he is at showing the emotional turmoil of the three main characters. He also displays a real flair for action. The stunt driving in Stolen is a marvel. This film is something special.

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Movie Review: A Nice Indian Boy (2024)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Rent or Buy A Nice Indian Boy at Amazon

A Nice Indian Boy is an adorable romantic comedy about how the way we communicate with our family influences how we interact with everyone else, for good or ill. This adaptation of Madhuri Shekar’s play of the same name is a ton of fun.

Karan Soni stars as Naveen Gavaskar, son of mom Megha (Zarna Garg) and dad Archit (Harish Patel). In the six years since Naveen’s sister Arundhati’s (Sunita Mani) wedding, everyone within the orbit of this Indian-American family reminds Naveen that he’s expected to get married soon, too.

The thing is, Naveen is gay. His mom is supportive, if a little unsure of how to relate. She religiously watches dating shows on a queer cable channel, looking for ways to connect with her son. Dad doesn’t want to talk about his son’s sexuality, so Naveen avoids the subject, which often means avoiding his parents altogether.

While praying to Ganesh at the temple, Naveen notices a handsome white guy come in and do the same. When they run into each other again, it seems like divine intervention. The guy is Jay Kurundkar (Jonathan Groff), a former foster child who was adopted by an Indian couple, who are now deceased. Jay asks Naveen on a date to see a screening of his late dad’s favorite movie: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.

Jay is as emotionally open and sincere as Naveen is closed off, but their attraction is real. They fall in love, and eventually Naveen has to do the thing he’s dreaded: introduce Jay to his parents. Bringing home a white boyfriend requires understanding and finesse. Naveen bungles this spectacularly.

Lesser movies manufacture conflict from misunderstandings that could’ve been prevented with a simple conversation. Here, the the inability of the Gavaskars to talk with one another about their feelings is the point of the film. The dysfunction extends beyond Jay and his parents and includes Arundhati as well, who’s wilting under the pressure of being the perfect Desi daughter. The fact that none of them feel like they can freely discuss what they want with one another makes all of them miserable and adds a layer of artifice to their relationships.

The centrality of the relationships between the Gavaskars is more than just a source of character development. It’s world building. Naveen’s learned defensiveness informs the life he’s built for himself and the relationships he has with everyone in it. If Naveen can’t be honest with his parents, he can’t be honest with Jay, either.

All of this dysfunction is depicted in a really relatable way. Naveen’s emotional distance is frustrating but understandable, because we know where he comes from. Soni does an excellent job making sure the audience always roots for Naveen to become his best self. Groff’s Jay is sweet but secure enough that he’d walk away if he finds the romance more trouble than it’s worth.

The Gavaskar family is delightful. Garg is an hilarious nosy mom who plays well off of Patel’s taciturn dad. Mani deftly navigates Arundhati through a low moment, made easier to stomach because we understand the family she comes from.

Shekar’s story is truly charming, and director Roshan Sethi and screenwriter Eric Randall do a lovely job adapting it for the big screen. Like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, A Nice Indian Boy reminds us why we love stories about love.

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Movie Review: Mrs. (2023)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Mrs. on ZEE5

A bride’s newlywed bliss is slowly crushed under household demands and unattainable standards set by her new husband and his father in the relentless drama Mrs.. The film isn’t presented as a thriller, but it elicits some of the same oppressive feelings as movies in that genre.

Mrs. is Cargo-director Arati Kadav’s adaptation of Jeo Baby’s 2021 Malayalam movie The Great Indian Kitchen (which I haven’t seen). The Hindi version stars Sanya Malhotra as Richa Sharma, the leader of a dance troupe. Through an arranged marriage, she weds Diwakar Kumar (Nishant Dahiya). He’s a handsome doctor who is kind and attentive in the run-up to their wedding.

Upon moving into Diwakar’s family home with her in-laws, Richa notices that her mother-in-law Meena (Aparna Ghoshal) spends her day in near-constant labor, waking before everyone and going to sleep last. Father-in-law Ashwin (Kanwaljit Singh) is particular about his meals, so Meena has to do a lot of work by hand that could be done by a machine more quickly.

Diwakar’s sister lives far away and is expecting her first baby. Richa offers to take over the household chores so that Meena can go help with her new grandchild. Meena happily takes Richa up on the offer, but she knows that her daughter-in-law is in for a hard time.

A learning curve is to be expected, but Richa’s lack of familiarity with the house is not the problem. Even when she does as she’s asked, her father-in-law finds flaws. When she executes a recipe perfectly, he invents problems. She just can’t seem to do anything to his satisfaction.

That’s exactly the point. Giving Richa approval would give her leverage, and that’s the last thing the Kumar men would ever do.

The relationships between men and women in Mrs. are defined by power imbalances. The methods used for maintaining that balance are less obviously villainous than, say, locking Richa in a closet, but are just as abusive nonetheless. It’s the cumulative weight of indignities, insults, and lack of agency — designed to make Richa too exhausted to resist — that reveal them as the control tactics they are.

That’s even before mentioning the fact that Diwakar subjects Richa to daily, painful sexual intercourse. He’s never noticed that he’s hurting her or cared that she’s not having a good time. It’s more important for him to get her pregnant, giving her yet more to do and making it that much harder for her to leave.

Kadav is careful not to be too heavy-handed with the tone of her film. She lets the audience draw their own conclusions from the actions of the characters, without relying on things like melodramatic music. It’s clear what’s happening.

Kadav also knows how to use her greatest asset: Sanya Malhotra. An opening dance number show’s Malhotra for the star she is, and she’s just as skilled through the rest of the film. She portrays Richa as a woman who is sincerely doing her best while she being pulled farther and farther away from the woman she was before marriage. She’s not a quitter, so it takes her a long time to accept that her best will never be enough.

Dahiya and Singh deserve a lot of credit as well for playing their characters with restraint. The point of the film would be lost if Diwakar and his dad were cartoon villains. Everyone knows them to be upstanding citizens and devoted family men, and that’s how they see themselves. They act in a manner that will get them what they want while still maintaining that image.

I really enjoyed Kadav’s film Cargo, which is delightful to watch. Mrs. is anything but delightful, but it’s an impressive achievement all the same.

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Movie Review: Superboys of Malegaon (2024)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Superboys of Malegaon on Amazon Prime

Superboys of Malegaon is a film for anyone who loves movies. Director Reema Kagti’s latest is a touching story of friendship and all the things that can go right and wrong in the creative process.

Varun Grover’s screenplay is based on director Faiza Ahmad Khan’s documentary Supermen of Malegaon. The documentary itself is wonderful, and Grover brilliantly adapts its fictional version.

The story begins in 1997 in the industrial town of Malegaon, about 300 kilometers from Mumbai. Movies are a popular pastime for the men in the city, but film reels are hard to come by. The small theater Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) runs with his older brother gets by screening Charlie Chaplin movies, but business is lousy.

Their fortunes improve when Nasir learns how to edit together VHS tapes using two VCRs. His mashups of Chaplin and Bruce Lee are a hit, until the cops bust him for piracy. That’s when Nasir realizes that he needs to make his own films.

He’s got everything he needs within his circle of friends. Nasir can direct and edit. Akram (Anuj Singh Duhan) is the town’s wedding videographer. Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh) writes for the newspaper. Irfan (Saqib Ayub) can act. And Shafique (Shashank Arora) can do whatever else is needed.

Nasir rejects Farogh’s suggestion for a more serious story, reasoning that things in Malegaon are tough enough as is. They settle on a parody of Sholay called simply “Malegaon’s Sholay.” With the help of plenty of other people in town and a dancer named Trupti (Manjiri Pupala), their original film becomes a massive local hit.

Watching the guys make the film with the technology available in a small Indian city in 1997 is a treat. They improvise a dolly by strapping Akram’s video camera to bicycle. Trupti’s vanity van is an auto-rickshaw with a shawl draped over one side. It’s not fancy, but it works.

Yet even this crew of friends is susceptible to the stressors that can foil any collaborative creative project. Disputes over input, respect, and financial compensation strain the group, and Nasir — who enjoys being celebrated as the brains behind the operation — is too prideful to stop things from unraveling.

The story is ultimately about learning the real meaning and value of friendship, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Since the movie is based on real people who have lives outside of their amateur filmmaking endeavors, Superboys of Malegaon takes place over the course of thirteen years. That just emphasizes how difficult it can be to put egos aside and apologize for bad behavior.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect cast for this underdog story. Adarsh Gourav skillfully portrays Nasir as the kind of guy with enough charisma to pull together this kind of project, but with the flaws that often accompany that kind of charisma. Vineet Kumar Singh’s quiet seething as the writer whose ideas get trampled by his director represents the many contemporary Indian screenwriters who feel devalued by the industry.

With his skinny arms and incongruous pompadour, it’s impossible not to love Shashank Arora’s Shafique. Though everyone in the film feels their lives limited by lack of opportunity, that’s most true for Shafique. He’s the forgotten member even within his friend group. But from the minute he’s introduced, it’s obvious that he’s the heart of the film.

Reema Kagti’s movie is made with real affection for everyone who inspired it. It’s in details like all the retro movie technology and Bhawna Sharma’s charming costume design. It’s in casting just the right performers to bring these scrappy guys to the big screen. Superboys of Malegaon is a lovable movie.

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Movie Review: Dhoom Dhaam (2025)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Dhoom Dhaam on Netflix

Dhoom Dhaam knows exactly what it wants to be: a light romantic comedy with a touch of adventure that will make you laugh and not feel like you’ve wasted two hours. It delivers exactly that.

Yami Gautam Dhar and Pratik Gandhi star as Koyal and Veer. Their parents arranged their marriage, and they find one another attractive and accomplished enough to agree to the match. Koyal’s clingy family ensures that the couple never has a moment alone in the weeks before their wedding, but everyone seems happy with the arrangement.

Their first awkward moments alone in a hotel room on their wedding night are interrupted by a knock on the door. A pair of gun-toting tough guys barge in demanding to know where Charlie is. Neither Koyal nor Veer know anyone named Charlie, but the thugs assume they are lying.

A daring escape from their balcony reveals that Koyal is much more courageous than timid Veer. That’s further confirmed when they race away from the men in Veer’s car, and he’s more worried about getting a speeding ticket than the fact that their pursuers are shooting at them. Thankfully, Koyal is an experienced street racer.

That’s not to say that Veer is totally gutless. He’s a veterinarian, so blood doesn’t bother him. When their search for Charlie takes them to a male strip club, he does what he has to do and entertains the ravenous patrons with a cartwheel in his boxer shorts. Seeing a bunch of other women lusting after her new husband makes Koyal think that he might be a catch after all.

The action as the newlyweds race all over town is energetic, but not gruesome or too intense. This is definitely not an R-rated movie. Likewise, there isn’t a lot of heat between the couple, but their growing fondness for one another is quite sweet.

The couple’s physical awkwardness relates to the film’s theme: you can’t really know a person until you spend time with them, especially when there is such pressure to be perfect. Social media accounts and dating profiles are heavily curated. When Koyal and Veer meet for the first time, it’s in front of their whole families, with everyone on their best behavior. It’s easy to hide your true self and all your flaws under those circumstances, but it’s hard to do it forever.

What Dhoom Dhaam lacks in sparks, it makes up for in laughs. Gautam Dhar and Gandhi are both very funny and make good use of a solid script by Aditya Dhar, Aarsh Vora, and Rishab Seth, who also directed the movie. The writing team has a terrific handle on context and continuity, mining them for comedy while throwing in some delightfully absurd moments. Quality subtitles ensure that none of the humor is lost in translation.

Sequences are tightly edited, and without traditional choreographed numbers, the story moves at a fast clip. This is a movie intent on not overstaying its welcome, and Seth certainly achieves that. Dhoom Dhaam is really enjoyable.

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Movie Review: Jigra (2024)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Jigra on Netflix

Filmmaker Vasan Bala’s Jigra (“Courage“) shows the lengths to which a protective older sister will go to save her younger brother. Alia Bhatt once again commands the screen, turning in a complex, emotional performance in this tense prison-break drama.

Bhatt plays Satya, big sister to promising software engineer Ankur (Vedang Raina). When they were still in elementary school, the kids witnessed their father’s suicide. Satya has shielded Ankur from harm ever since. They were raised by a wealthy, distant relative, Mr. Mehtani (Akashdeep Sabir), whose son Kabir (Aditya Nanda) is best friends with Ankur.

While Ankur believes they are one big family, Satya knows the truth. She manages the Mehtani’s household staff, only changing out of her uniform for public events where the appearance of familial unity matters. The Mehtani’s expect reimbursement for her care, and soon they’ll expect the same from Ankur.

Ankur and Kabir ask Mr. Mehtani to help them find an investor for software Ankur built. This project is an ideal opportunity for Kabir to straighten his life out following multiple drug arrests. Mehtani sends the guys to meet a colleague in the fictional island nation of Hanshi Dao, off the coast of Malaysia.

The guys secure the funding and celebrate. Kabir gets caught with drugs, and both are arrested. Drug possession is a capital offense in Hanshi Dao — a fact the Mehtani family lawyer Jaswant (Harssh A. Singh) knows but the guys don’t. Jaswant tricks Ankur into taking the fall for Kabir. When Ankur is sentenced to death, Satya burns bridges with the Mehtanis and heads to Hanshi Dao to free her brother.

Without the expectation of repayment and the double-edged sword of family ties, Satya is finally able to find allies who share a mutual interest. Ex-gangster Bhatia (Manoj Pahwa) wants to get his son Tony (Yuvraj Vijjan) off of death row. Muthu (Rahul Ravindran) quit the Hanshi Dao police force after he accidentally sent an innocent man — Chandan (Dheer Hira) — to prison. With no legal recourse left, the three unlikely allies use their skills and connections to formulate an audacious escape plan.

Though Satya is the main character, the story gives us a glimpse into Ankur’s life in jail, too. His betrayal by the Mehtanis and his painful adjustment to life under sadistic warden Hansraj Landa (Vivek Gomber) shake him out of his prolonged adolescence. He finally becomes a man, one with only a few months to live.

With a big star like Bhatt on board, Bala — who co-wrote Jigra with Debashish Irengbam — takes a slightly more conventional filmmaking approach than with his previous features Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota and Monica, O My Darling. This mostly comes in the form of flashbacks to Satya and Ankur as little kids, meant to reinforce the depth of the siblings’ bond (akin to how many mainstream Hindi films about romantic couples insist on flashing back to how the couple first fell in love). The flashbacks aren’t necessary and slow down the pace of the film. Satya’s love for Ankur is active — we can already feel it in everything she does.

One of Bala’s superpowers is staging his heroines in fight scenes. Too often, “strong” female characters in films have some sort of elite training or physical prowess — qualities that allow them to fight like men, essentially. Bala’s leading ladies — Satya in Jigra, Supri in Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, and Monica in Monica, O My Darling — aren’t like that. They are scrappy, ordinary women who prevail over their male adversaries through sheer determination (though Supri’s black belt helps). Satya’s unpolished fight scenes are all the more riveting because of what they say about her personality. She won’t let anything get in her way.

Through her depth of talent, Bhatt conveys so many of the emotions roiling within Satya even when her expression is stone-faced. It’s a remarkable performance in a career full of remarkable performances.

Pahwa and Ravindran play perfectly off of Bhatt. Because of their performances and the stakes for their characters, Satya’s relationships with Bhatia and Muthu are probably the most emotionally impactful in the film. Few actors portray heartbreak as well as Manoj Pahwa.

In only his second feature role, Raina acquits himself very well as Ankur. He undergoes more of a character transformation than Satya does, while still needing her as much as he ever did. Raina also does a nice job singing the film’s title track.

Vasan Bala’s filmography is among the best among working directors, and Alia Bhatt is Hindi cinema’s top actress for a reason. Put them together, and you get something very special.

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