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Movie Review: Satluj (2026)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Perhaps no film better exemplifies the dysfunction in India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) than Satluj, formerly known as Punjab 95, and before that known as Ghallughara. After years spent in release limbo and in defiance of the Board’s demands for over 100 cuts, Satluj released on the streaming service Zee5. It was pulled from the streamer in India two days later and taken down internationally days after that. Whether or not it will ever be available again or in what edited state remains to be seen.

I was able to watch Satluj before it was pulled from Zee5, and it’s a fantastic film. It’s shameful for the CBFC to withhold this from the viewing public.

Satluj tells the story of state-sponsored crimes uncovered by the human rights activist Jaswant “Jassi” Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh) in Punjab in the mid 1990s. After a decade of local insurgency, police across Punjab have carte blanche to do whatever they want in the name of fighting terrorism.

The film opens with a group of people executed in a field by the police. Two are specifically shot to pad the murder tally of one of the junior officers — the gruesome metric by which promotions are earned. Some of the bodies are thrown into the river Satluj to drift toward Rajasthan, but not all of them.

Bank loan officer Jassi learns what happened to the others by accident. The mother of his friend — who himself was murdered by the cops — goes missing. After fruitless queries at police stations and hospitals, Jassi finds the woman’s name in a book at the local crematorium. The police never informed her family that she died, but they did submit her name and hometown when they handed over her body for cremation, along with the name of the officer who killed her. The government only pays the crematorium for the wood to burn a body when there is a name and address attached, hence the paper trail.

Jassi finds himself with a goldmine of evidence in the crematorium log book: a record of six hundred people who were killed by police and whose families were never informed of their deaths. In many cases, the police refused to file missing persons reports on behalf of the family. In others, the cops demanded money for information on the whereabouts of the abducted person, only to kill them later. If all of the crematoriums across all of Punjab have similar numbers, that would mean about 25,000 people were killed by the cops in the state.

This isn’t what Jassi expected to find when he went looking for his friend’s mother. As the numbers climb and the evidence mounts, he finds it impossible to look away. His wife Pammi (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) is understandably alarmed by the danger to their family once Jassi makes his findings public and demands legal action. He acknowledges her concerns but can’t risk the justice movement dying if he steps aside.

As he’s depicted in Satluj, Jassi is the best kind of hero. He isn’t a firebrand or a politician. Dosanjh presents him as an utterly normal guy asking for answers and accountability for the harms done to his neighbors. Even in the face of danger, he makes fighting for justice look doable, no special skills required. The doing is the important part.

The scale of the crimes is horrifying, but the ease with with they are committed and condoned is particularly terrible. Director Honey Trehan includes plenty of scenes in which bureaucrats talk about mass murder as a public relations problem. The loathsome Director General of Police, Inderpal Singh Bitta (Kanwaljit Singh), tells reporters that the missing people are probably driving taxis in Canada. When officials from Rajasthan complain about their water supply being contaminated with dead bodies from Punjab, he says that people fall into canals all the time.

Though Satluj is about a particular place at a particular time, it lays out the problems with policing as an institution. When the state has a monopoly on violence, people who want to cause harm without facing consequences have an incentive to join the force. SSP Surjit Singh Sugga (Suvinder Vicky) is a great example — the rare cop so dangerous that he was actually sent to jail for violence committed while in uniform. When DGP Bitta wants to put an end to public complaints without having to change tactics, he gets Sugga out of jail and puts him in charge of Jassi’s local police station, ratcheting up instances of brutality.

The institution itself is incentivized to protect the power it has, which means protecting those who work within it. That also prevents any reform from taking place from within the institution. As Constable Satnam Singh, Saurabh Sachdeva wears an expression of utter defeat throughout the movie. He doesn’t want to participate in violence, but he lacks the authority to stop it and knows too much to be left alive were he to resign. The power of the police force can be turned inward as easily as it is projected outward.

Trehan’s direction of a screenplay he wrote with Niren Bhatt and Utsav Maitra isn’t heavy-handed or preachy. He trusts the facts of the story to stand on their own merits and the humanity of Jassi’s cause to connect with the audience emotionally. Every performance in Satluj is superb, something that doesn’t happen by accident. The film is an incredible achievement by everyone involved. It’s a fitting tribute to a true hero, and a testament that those who were lost have not been forgotten.

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Movie Review: Ikkis (2026)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Ikkis on Amazon Prime

Ikkis (“Twenty-one“) is the best demonstration of filmmaker Sriram Raghavan’s skills yet, despite it being quite different from the other movies in his oeuvre. Though it lacks the physical danger of his earlier thrillers like Johnny Gaddaar, Badlapur, and Andhadhun, Ikkis is still built around a main character’s central tension: am I going to break his heart?

The title refers to the age at which Indian Army 2nd Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal (Agastya Nanda) died in the waning days of the 1971 India-Pakistan War. Thirty years later, Arun’s framed photo hangs on the wall of a house in Lahore, Pakistan belonging to Brigadier Jaan Mohammad Nisar (Jaideep Ahlawat). The photo’s curious existence is made even more intriguing when Nisar hides it before his houseguest arrives.

That guest is Brigadier Madan Lal Khetarpal (Dharmendra), Arun’s father. The elder Khetarpal grew up and studied in Pakistan before Partition drove his family to move to India. He returns for a class reunion and a visit to his hometown, staying with Nisar, his wife Maryam (Ekavali Khanna), and their adult daughter Saba (Avani Rai).

The rapport between the family and their guest is immediate, and Khetarpal is glad to have their company at the reunion. He also speaks freely about his own family, including Arun. Through Khetarpal’s reminiscences, we get to know about his first-born son, and we see Arun’s life in flashbacks.

Though Ikkis is based on a true story, this isn’t a hagiography. During his officer training days, Arun is a capable leader, but he is just as bad at anticipating consequences as most 21-year-olds are. He struggles to balance his military duties with his new romantic relationship with medical student Kiran (Simar Bhatia). He follows rules to a fault.

That’s why Arun’s death in combat has always been a mystery to his father. The official report states that Arun — who was assigned to be a tank commander when sent to the front in 1971 — turned off his radio and disobeyed orders in his final moments. That doesn’t sound like the Arun his father knew.

Questions linger over Ikkis: Why does Nisar have a photo of Arun? Why is he hiding it from Khetarpal? What really happened to Arun on the battlefield? The answers are decades old and pose no immediate danger, but they create a tension that propels the story forward, building as Nisar’s fondness for the elderly Khetarpal grows.

That affection is what makes the film so special. This is Dharmendra’s last movie, and his tremendous talent shines through as a father searching for something to finally help him make sense of his son’s death. Ahlawat deftly portrays the internal conflict between Nisar’s respect for Khetarwal and his guilt at keeping secrets from him. The warmth between the two actors is a joy to watch.

After a forgettable debut in The Archies, Nanda shows much more promise playing Arun. He’s a competent guide through history, showing us a war that looks much like any other war. Young men raised on heroic stories are eager to make a name for themselves, even though many of them won’t survive to tell their own tales. One of Arun’s senior officers Risaldar Sagat Singh (Sikander Kher) warns Arun not to “go looking for death,” but Singh later repairs a tank tread with a fresh bullet wound to the shoulder. He makes heroism look easy, so of course it would appeal to Arun and his classmates.

That’s the trick with anti-war movies: they always end up showing the cool parts of war. Tanks are cool. Getting shot and acting like it’s no big deal is cool. Raghavan does his best not to glamorize war, but it’s ultimately up to the older characters like Khetarpal and Nisar to explain that war is bad for everyone.

Hindi films about cross-border relationships used to be far more common, which makes Ikkis not just unique but important. There’s truth in the film’s central idea that India and Pakistan are more alike than they are different. The first thing Arun and his tank crew remake upon when they roll across the border is that it looks the same as the land on the other side. Frequent reminders about our shared humanity are vital.

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Movie Review: Sister Midnight (2024)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Sister Midnight on Hulu
Rent or buy Sister Midnight at Amazon

Debutant feature director Karan Kandhari brings delightfully weird sensibilities to the dark comedy Sister Midnight. He finds the perfect collaborator in Radhika Apte, who gives a wonderfully unhinged performance as an unhappy newlywed bride.

The movie opens with Uma (Apte) and her husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) traveling by train from their arranged wedding to his tiny Mumbai apartment. Once there, he bolts out of the room when she tries to change clothes in front of him. She wakes up alone the next morning with no money or food, and he comes home drunk that night. Neither of them says a word until eight-and-a-half minutes into the film, when he tries to explain himself and she scolds him for neglecting her.

This is Uma’s life now, and she’s not suited to it at all. She doesn’t know how to cook, so she has nothing to do all day. She doesn’t know anyone in the city, so she wanders the neighborhood after dark in her nightgown.

One day, she takes a train to the end of the line intending to mope while looking at the sea. Embarrassed to be counted among the other mopey folks at the beach, she instead gets herself a job as a night janitor in an office building. It’s not glamorous and it’s a four-hour walk from home, but it’s something to do.

Things get a little better for Uma when she befriends her surly neighbor Sheetal (Chhaya Kadam), the night watchman at the office building, and a friendly group of hijra who hang out outside the building. But just as Uma makes connections, her health takes a turn. She’s pale and can’t keep food down. One fateful night, she figures out what’s ailing her.

The key to Sister Midnight’s success is in its delivery. Kandhari tells his story with an odd, snappy cadence, not just in how characters perform their lines but in how shots are connected. Something happens, the camera quickly pans to Apte making a face, then it quickly pans back to the thing that happened. The pace keeps the audience off balance and provides ample opportunities for funny surprises.

Apte’s sterling credentials have been established for years, but this is the best she’s ever been. She is an expert at physical comedy, whether it’s something dynamic like leaping into a bush to catch a bird or just making a strange face or adopting an awkward posture. Because Uma has no backstory, Apte has great latitude in defining the character via her performance, and she creates a hilarious antihero.

Some parts of Sister Midnight aren’t executed to technical perfection, but that actually works in the film’s favor. Computer generated animals move in wonky ways that almost evoke claymation, which makes them more charming somehow.

Even when the story slows down, Kandhari finds ways to surprise. Uma sits at a roadside diner, morose and out of ideas, when a black & white samurai movie comes on the TV and snaps her out of her despair. The film is not a classic samurai movie, but one that Kandhari filmed (in Scotland, of all places) specifically for this scene.

Propelling everything forward is a killer soundtrack, with songs from artists as diverse as Howlin’ Wolf, Iggy Pop, Buddy Holly, and Motörhead. Best of all are three songs by Cambodian singer Sinn Sisamouth, who was active from the 1950s-70s. If you’re unfamiliar with him, I’ll embed one of his songs below.

The wide-ranging soundtrack fits with a movie from a filmmaker who wants to delight and surprise his audience. Sister Midnight is an astounding feature debut.

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Movie Review: Homebound (2025)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

This is a review of the uncensored version of Homebound. Here is my article on Which Scenes Were Censored in Homebound.

Watch the censored version of Homebound on Netflix

Two best friends find their future opportunities limited by discrimination, poverty, and systemic shortcomings in the touching drama Homebound. India’s selection committee picked a worthy submission to the 98th Oscars.

The film opens in North India around 2017-18. Best friends Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) want to become police officers, a feat that first requires battling their way through a crowded train platform before they can even reach the admissions testing site. The crowd they navigate consists of hundreds of other young men and women vying for the same posts — a fraction of the 2.5 million applicants from across the country for just 3,500 job openings.

Shoaib is Muslim, and Chandan is from one of the Scheduled Castes. They’re sick of being looked down on by higher caste Hindus and figure that being cops armed with batons will put an end to the disrespect they’re accustomed to.

A year goes by with no word on the exam results, leaving the guys in limbo. They’ve invested so much in this dream that taking any other job seems like giving up. But there’s a hole in the roof of Chandan’s family home, and Shoaib’s dad needs knee surgery so he can get back to work in the fields. The guys can’t wait on their dream forever.

Writer-director Neeraj Ghaywan is so effective at communicating how immediate the needs of the poor are. With no financial cushion, problems quickly become emergencies. Even when the government creates opportunities intended to level the playing field — such as reserving university spots for those from castes historically denied admission — taking advantage of them requires planning and sacrifice from family members who don’t have much left to give.

One of those family members is Chandan’s older sister Vaishali (Harshika Parmar). Chandan opts to go to college to be with a woman he met at the police exam, Sudha (Janhvi Kapoor). When Chandan later drops out, Vaishali points out that he’s squandering opportunities their traditional parents would never let her have. He’s flitting between uncertain futures while she’s stuck working as a bathroom attendant at an elementary school. He needs to settle on a way to contribute to the family and stick with it.

The story takes a major turn when the guys get jobs in a garment factory over 1,000 kilometers away from home. They earn steady money that gives their families stability. Then COVID-19 hits. The government institutes same-day lockdowns that last for weeks, shuttering businesses. As money runs out, migrant workers like Shoaib and Chandan are forced to make their way home, sometimes on foot.

It was journalist Basharat Peer’s reporting on such cases for the New York Times that inspired Ghaywan to write Homebound. In fleshing out backstories for his main characters, Ghaywan draws together the various threads that create the net that traps people like Shoaib and Chandan in poverty. Sudha represents someone able to take advantage of the government’s efforts to remediate caste discrimination, but the mistreatment experienced by the guys show just how easy it is for bigots to undercut those efforts.

The cast of Homebound is wonderful. Khatter’s spent the last few years proving why he’s probably the best actor of his generation, but Jethwa makes a compelling case for why he should be included in the discussion. The friendship between Shoaib and Chandan feels so real, through all of its ups and downs.

Kapoor uses her supporting role to show just how impactful she can be when not playing a lead. Parmar likewise stands out even though she’s only in a few scenes. Vaishali is pragmatic, but her advice is also clearly motivated by her own emotional baggage. Both sets of the boys’ parents are played beautifully played as well.

Ghaywan’s sophomore effort after 2015’s terrific film Masaan was a decade in the making but worth the wait. Homebound is insightful and thought-provoking, painting a vivid picture of the challenges faced by those living in poverty in contemporary India.

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Movie Review: Amar Singh Chamkila (2024)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Amar Singh Chamkila on Netflix

Filmmaker Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila is an all-time great music biopic and one of the director’s finest works. His use of varied storytelling techniques makes for a riveting exploration of the life of a controversial celebrity.

In the 1980s, Amar Singh Chamkila (Diljit Dosanjh) and his duet partner and wife Amarjot Kaur (Parineeti Chopra) ruled the music scene in Punjab with their cheeky, catchy tunes. The movie opens with the couple’s assassination on March 8, 1988, along with two members of their band.

As their bodies are ferried away, a song begins, and performers akin to a Greek chorus sing about Chamkila’s life as seen from different perspectives. Some of the singers are characters who will be important to the film going forward, while others stand in for the masses who adored Chamkila.

The montage cuts between groups of singers, all of whom emote directly to the camera with abandon. Rival musicians are hostile, while the older guys who sing about Chamkila being a “horny” guy give some great lascivious looks. Same for the saucy ladies who confess to listening to Chamkila’s music secretly. It’s so effective and so fun. (Ali brings the ladies back later for an excellent, raunchy number performed with maximum sass.)

The film’s present-day action takes place on the evening of the murders, as those who worked closely with Chamkila narrate flashbacks to his beginnings. His drunken former friend Tikki tells everyone in a restaurant how he found Chamkila working in a sock factory. Entourage member Kikar Dalewala fills the cops in all the folks who wanted Chamkila dead, from conservative religious groups who considered him a corrupting influence to rival singers whose livelihoods were damaged by his success.

What made Chamkila so popular was his willingness to write about the stuff of neighborhood gossip, things like a brother-in-law spying on his sister-in-law while she bathes, or randy old men. He wrote them as duets: a back-and-forth between a man and a woman. The first singer he works with, Sonia, is reluctant to sing dirty lyrics until she sees the crowd go wild for them.

Dosanjh is a wildly popular singer in his own right, and he infuses Chamkila’s lyrics with his own energy and charisma. The casting of the women singers in Amar Singh Chamkila is brilliant. While Sonia and others are good, they don’t sound right with Chamkila — until Amarjot comes along a few years into Chamkila’s career. Then everything falls into place. Chopra had never sung on a film soundtrack before, and she absolutely nails the part of Amarjot. Being tutored by the legend A. R. Rahman — who wrote original music for the film with lyricist Irshad Kamil — undoubtedly helped.

Throughout the movie, Ali intersperses images of publicity photos and album covers featuring the real Chamkila and Amarjot, often alongside recreations by Dosanjh and Chopra. It’s a reminder of how careful Ali and his co-writer Sajid Ali were when telling the couple’s story.

A note at the start of Amar Singh Chamkila clarifies that some liberties were taken for the sake of the movie. Nor is it meant to be comprehensive. While Chamkila sang about violence and drugs, most of the songs in the movie are about sex, including hits like, “Brother-In-Law, Check Out My Booty.” Still, the movie does a good job placing Chamkila’s career and his social importance within the context of Punjab during a time of rising violence and economic hardship.

The film’s greatest success is showing just what made Chamkila a superstar. His music is really catchy. The give-and-take between him and Amarjot is fun. Their songs and performances lifted people’s moods when there was plenty of reason to be down.

Chamkila has been referred to as the “Elvis of Punjab,” and the comparison is fitting. Both grew up in rural poverty. Both became bigger sensations than they could have dreamed, inspiring an insatiable voracity in their fans. That adoration was offset by critics who viewed them as obscene. There was no way either singer could stop being who he was, and they both died young as a result. It’s no surprise that both artists inspired truly great biographical films: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2022 and now Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila. Both deserve it.

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Movie Review: Three of Us (2023)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

A woman diagnosed with early-onset dementia returns to an important place from her youth in the quiet, thoughtful drama Three of Us. It’s a gorgeous film that gives its characters all the time they need.

Shefali Shah plays the woman in question, Shailaja. She’s married to Dipankar (Swanand Kirkire), and their son is away at college. Shailaja’s increasing forgetfulness necessitates an early retirement from her government job processing paperwork for divorcing couples.

She asks Dipankar to take her to visit Vengurla, a small town on the Konkan coast where she attended school from fifth through eighth grade. It’s not a place she’s ever mentioned before, so he’s surprised by the request but obliges with a week-long trip.

Old classmates and teachers recognize Shailaja immediately, even though she’s been gone almost thirty years. Most importantly, her childhood sweetheart Pradeep (Jaideep Ahlawat) is still in town. He’s happy to see her and takes off work to guide the couple around the area.

Elements like Shailaja’s past reluctance to talk about Vengurla or the boy she left behind could easily be the setup for a thriller or romantic drama, but Three of Us isn’t that kind of movie. Pradeep introduces Shailaja and Dipankar to his wife and kids right away. Shailaja has her reasons for not dwelling on her time in Vengurla until it becomes clear that, someday, she won’t be able to remember those days at all.

Everyone in Three of Us is nice. The story is packed with emotion even though no one yells, deceives, or fights. The conflict is with a force that can’t be fought, as Shailaja’s memories slip away and as she and the people she love ready themselves for the changes that will bring.

Shah plays Shailaja with subtlety. When she loses her place or gets overwhelmed, she clams up and quietly retreats. If we didn’t know about her diagnosis, she might just seem shy. Ahlawat’s Pradeep is a steadying presence, which might have been why Shailaja liked him in the first place. Kirkire is the workmanlike hero of the film, playing Dibankar exactly like a guy who’s hanging around with his wife’s old classmates and feeling a bit like a third wheel should be played.

Throughout all, director Avinash Arun — who also co-wrote and served as director of photography on the film — resists rushing the characters, letting us observe them as they just exist. It’s soothing.

Arun made his name in the industry as a cinematographer, so it’s no surprise that Three of Us is stunning to look at. He knows how to perfectly frame shots, position the characters in space, and follow their movements. The natural scenery around Vengurla is breathtaking, but the built environment of a small town slowly decaying is melancholy and evocative as well.

As if this weren’t enough beauty, Arun includes a scene where Shailaja returns to the dance studio where she learned Bharatnatyam. The school’s current star pupil Manjiri (Payal Jadhav, the film’s choreographer) gives a jaw-droppingly beautiful performance that alone would make Three of Us worth watching. Add that to the sweet story and pitch-perfect performances, and you’ve got yourself a really charming little film.

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Movie Review: Alienoid (2022) & Alienoid 2 – The Return to the Future (2024)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Rent/buy Alienoid on Amazon
Watch Alienoid 2 on Amazon Prime
Watch Alienoid on Hulu
Watch Alienoid 2 on Hulu

I’m venturing out of Bollywood for this review because I love the Alienoid movies so much. I’m combining Alienoid and Alienoid 2 in to a single review, because they tell one complete story and were filmed together–kind of like Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2.

Writer-director Choi Dong-hoon’s duology Alienoid and Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future defies genre, because the films contain elements of nearly every genre. Calling them historical-action-fantasy-thriller-sci-fi-martial-arts-comedy-time-travel-family-dramas comes pretty close. Choi pulls off his audacious project with incredible finesse.

In the version of reality that Choi presents in the films, Earth serves as a jail for prisoners from an alien civilization. The aliens implant their prisoners into the brains of humans who live their lives unaware of their cranial stowaways. When the humans die, so do the prisoners, who can’t survive more than five minutes in Earth’s atmosphere.

Occasional breakouts happen — resulting in the violent alien controlling its human and rampaging outside its human cage (in five-minute bursts) — so a Guard (Kim Woo-bin) stays on Earth to recapture escapees and minimize casualties and witnesses. Prisoners are sequestered in different time periods, so Guard uses his shape-changing computer/vehicle/doppelgänger sidekick Thunder (also Kim, trust me, it makes sense) to travel wherever and whenever he’s needed.

The story begins in a Korean village in 1380. Guard and Thunder battle and capture an escaped prisoner whose human host dies in the melee, leaving behind an infant daughter. They bring the baby with them to the present — Seoul, 2012 — and raise her, naming her Lee Ahn.

Ten years later — Seoul, 2022 — and perceptive 10-year-old Lee Ahn (Choi Yoo-ri) suspects that her “Dad,” Guard, isn’t human and that his car might be sentient. Her curiosity puts her in danger when the deadly alien prisoner The Controller is brought to Earth, and his lackeys attempt to free him. After a devastating attack on the city, Guard and Thunder grab Lee Ahn and travel back to 1391 to trap The Controller in the past. But things don’t go as planned.

The story cuts between scenes in contemporary Seoul and a Korean town circa 1400, where the main character is a magician named Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol). There’s a big bounty for something called The Divine Knife, and Mureuk wants to find it and cash in. But men far more dangerous than Mureuk are also looking for the knife, as is a beautiful thief (played by Kim Tae-ri). Soon enough, Mureuk is in over his head.

With all the aliens, robots, and spaceships, you’d think director Choi would content himself to stay in the realm of science fiction. But magic is very real in the world of Alienoid, and the characters who wield it are some of the best, funniest characters in the movies. Mureuk himself is hilarious thanks to Ryu’s deft physical comedy. Mureuk’s two sidekicks — Left Paw (Lee Si-hoon) and Right Paw (Shin Jung-geun) — are a pair of cats who live in his magical fan and can turn into humans (trust me, it makes sense).

Then there are the Sorcerers of the Twin Peaks, Heug-sol (Yum Jung-ah) and Cheong-woon (Jo Woo-jin), the film’s most reliable comic relief. Like Mureuk, their laughs typically come from the unintended consequences of their own spells. While they are great in the first movie, they’re complete scene-stealers in the second.

Lee Hanee also deserves praise for playing the flirtatious single aunt of one of Ean’s school friends.

The first film does the heavy lifting from a plot standpoint, which makes sense with a story this dense. The second movie provides some different viewpoints on events from the first and introduces an important new character: a blind swordsman played by Jin Seon-kyu, who also wants the Divine Blade.

Both films successfully blend comedy, character growth, and action to maintain story momentum. There isn’t a dull moment in either Alienoid movie. Action sequences range from comical hand-to-hand combat to large-scale scenes of destruction that feel more tangible and impactful than much of the city-wide carnage in recent Hollywood superhero films.

Alienoid 1 & 2 are totally immersive, but they’re also something to marvel at from a meta perspective. As giddy as I was while watching, it was hard not to wonder at how Choi manages to make all the disparate elements of the story work together so seamlessly. But the mechanics of how he does it ultimately don’t matter, when the movies are so darn much fun.

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Movie Review: Jaane Jaan (2023)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Jaane Jaan / Suspect X on Netflix

In Jaane Jaan (also known as “Suspect X“) — filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh’s adaptation of the novel The Devotion of Suspect X — Ghosh showcases the same gifts for establishing atmosphere and directing actors as he displayed in 2012’s brilliant thriller Kahaani.

Much of what made Kahaani so engrossing were the subtle interactions between characters, like the tender way Officer Rana looks at pregnant Vidya, the woman he’s helping search for her missing husband. He’s smitten with her, even though he (and we) know they can never be together. Jaane Jaan is full of poignant glances and meaningful expressions that command the audience’s attention even more powerfully than a flashy action sequence.

Kareena Kapoor Khan plays Maya, a single mother living in the West Bengal hill town Kalimpong with her 14-year-old daughter Tara (Naisha Khanna). One day, the nightmare Maya has feared for almost fifteen years comes true: her husband Ajit (Saurabh Sachdev) — a sleazy Mumbai cop who dabbles in human trafficking — finally tracks her and Tara down. Though Maya assumes that Ajit is there for her, his intentions are more sinister.

Maya’s next door neighbor Naren (Jaideep Ahlawat) — a respected but aloof mathematics teacher — is reticence personified, but he’s a keen observer. He puts some clues together (thanks in no small part to their apartment building’s paper-thin walls) and determines that Maya is in trouble. He knocks on her door at a crucial moment, offering mother and daughter an unexpected but desperately needed lifeline.

Days after Ajit’s arrival, another stranger comes to Kalimpong: dashing Mumbai police officer Karan Anand (Vijay Varma). He hopes to find Ajit and use him to bring down the human trafficking racket he’s a part of. Soon enough, Karan figures out Maya’s connection to Ajit. And he’s surprised to meet his old college buddy and fellow martial artist, Naren.

By the time Karan arrives, Ajit is nowhere to be found. The three characters engage in a delicate dance, careful not to disclose more information than they should while trying to figure out what each other knows. It’s a dangerous situation because Naren knows how smart Karan is, and it won’t be long before he assumes Maya is involved with Ajit’s disappearance. Complicating things further is that both men are attracted to Maya.

All three of the main actors give some of the best performances of their careers in Jaane Jaan. Varma moves Karan through the world with the easy confidence of a man with looks, brains, charm, and authority. He instantly befriends his new partner on the local police force, Sundar Singh (Karma Takapa). Even when Karan is focused, he’s physically relaxed.

Karan is the opposite of Naren, who Ahlwat plays with imposing rigidity and minimal expressions. Ahlawat’s job is to convey the complexity of Naren’s feelings through microscopic movements of facial muscles and barely perceptible changes in appearance. It’s a daunting challenge, but Ahlawat pulls it off beautifully. Naren is a fully realized character of great emotional depth, even though those around him can hardly tell. He’s misjudged, but he also engages in some problematic behavior, so he’s more complicated than just a sympathetic underdog.

Kapoor Khan is excellent in guiding Maya through the storm that upends her life when Ajit and Karan come to town. Whether Maya is afraid, resolute, standoffish, or vulnerable, Kapoor Khan executes everything that’s asked of her with precision.

The masterful acting isn’t limited to the main three characters and their battle of wits. Sachdev’s Ajit is a total slimeball. Khanna is wonderful as a young teen forced to shoulder unfair burdens. Characters like Officer Singh and Maya’s well-intentioned but nosy co-worker Prema (Lin Laishram) are delightfully performed and give Jaane Jaan a real sense of place.

Kalimpong is the perfect location for a mystery, full of twisting roads, hidden alleys, and towering hills. Low-hanging clouds obscure and conceal, yet its beautiful vistas and lush forest invite exploration. With Jaane Jaan, Sujoy Ghosh shows again that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

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Movie Review: RRR (2022)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

*This review is of the Telugu version of RRR on Zee5. A Hindi-dubbed version of RRR is streaming on Netflix.

Filmmaker S. S. Rajamouli is the master of the “what if…” scenario. The plot of his latest epic RRR ponders what might have happened had two real-life Indian revolutionaries from the early 20th century met and become friends. Rajamouli’s style pushes the boundaries of “what if…,” showing us the delightful possibilities that can only happen thanks to movie magic.

N. T. Rama Rao Jr. plays Komaram Bheem, a leader of the Gond tribe. He makes it his mission to rescue a girl named Malli (Twinkle Sharma) who’s been kidnapped by the British regional governor Scott Buxton (Ray Stevenson). The sequence in which Scott’s wife Catherine (Alison Doody) coolly asks to bring the girl home for her entertainment is infuriating.

Bheem’s rescue plan is audacious and relies upon his affinity with the natural world. An early scene in which he tries to trap a tiger in a net gives a preview to the wild action RRR has in store.

The British know that Bheem is in Delhi looking for Malli, but they don’t know where he is. They’re also scared of what might happen when they find him, given his fearsome reputation. Only one man is brave enough to track Bheem down — Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan), an Indian Imperial Police officer known for his tenacity and an unwavering dedication to his job.

It so happens that Bheem (in disguise as a Muslim mechanic named Akhtar) and Raju meet while saving a boy from a fiery train wreck. They find in one another a kindred spirit: someone brave and strong enough to risk his life for the sake of others. They become friends, with Raju going so far as to help shy Bheem meet Governor Scott’s beautiful niece Jenny (Olivia Morris), who is as sympathetic as her aunt and uncle are cruel.

Given that Bheem and Raju are secretly working in opposition to each other, it’s inevitable that they’ll wind up in conflict. When they finally do during a party for the Governor, it comes in one of the most fantastical action sequences ever brought to the big screen, including the reappearance of the tiger Bheem faced off with earlier.

RRR is larger than life, and Rama Rao Jr. and Charan take full advantage of the scope they are given (especially since the film is by no means biographical). Their characters can jump higher and run faster than normal men. Their muscles are bigger and stronger. Their gifts aren’t superpowers but a kind of idealized masculinity with heavy emphasis on physical strength.

Rajamouli uses the considerable resources at his disposal to make bombastic action sequences that are a joy to watch. Realism is not the point, and why should it be? RRR is a great reminder that a cinematic world need only be consistent with itself to be believable, not that it need conform to the rules of our world.

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Book Review: This Place | That Place (2022)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Buy This Place | That Place at Amazon

*This Place | That Place will be released on June 14, 2022

The innovative format of Nandita Dinesh’s This Place | That Place, along with its timeless subject matter, make her debut novel an absolute must-read.

Dinesh’s background in theater and the study of protest movements informs how she constructs This Place | That Place. The novel is primarily a dialogue between two characters, organized to read almost like a screenplay. The conversations are supplemented with other documents, including excepts from a guidebook and a developmental materials for a curriculum, along with notes from the character reviewing the document. The inclusion of these materials reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

The (sadly) evergreen subject of This Place | That Place is military occupation. Conversations between the two main characters — a man from the occupied country and a woman from the occupying country — take place inside his house during the first few days of a surprise military curfew.

In order to make her novel as universal as possible, Dinesh doesn’t assign names to either the countries or the characters. The book could be about Ukraine and Russia or Palestine and Israel, etc. Yet the setting is clearly inspired by Kashmir (“This Place”) in 2019, when India (“That Place”) revoked Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 and cut off access to the outside world. Fans of Hindi films will appreciate the characters’ discussion of a “Shakespeare adaptation” set in the region, clearly referring to director Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet.

Conversations between the main couple tend to focus on limits: practical limits on the movements of people under curfew; the limits of her ability to understand his experience of living under occupation; limits on the ability of individuals and groups on either side to change the terms of the occupation. The pair deliberately avoid addressing the romantic tension between them in order to delay the most frustrating discussion of all: the limits the occupation places on their possible future as a couple.

The woman from “That Place” is in “This Place” to pilot a (secret) course to deprogram occupying soldiers, similar to tactics used to deprogram cult members. The goal is to get soldiers to question their orders, rather than follow them blindly and to view the local citizens as people, not enemies. It’s one of an array of interesting resistance tactics discussed in the book. Editorial notes attached to the woman’s curriculum give further insights into the characters.

Perhaps of most interest to those of us lucky enough to live outside of a military occupation is the man’s document on how to endure prolonged periods of curfew. Most of the man’s solutions involve taking control of time — the only thing one has in abundance when locked inside one’s house — or at least the perception of it.

As the book explains, despite an outsider’s best efforts to empathize, it’s almost impossible to truly understand what it’s like to be trapped with no access — physical or virtual — to the outside world for days or months. Dinesh does a wonderful job guiding the reader to empathize with the situation right up until the point when the reader realizes that it can’t really be done without personal experience. It’s a an effective call to action.

Dinesh uses her wealth of experience to craft a thought-provoking novel that doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Rather, This Place | That Place invites further exploration and provides a new lens through which to see the world. As one character states: “One of the things that people without the experience of curfew don’t understand, is how easy it is to keep entire nations subjugated when its citizens cannot access information.” That’s a warning all of us should take to heart, no matter where we live.

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