Tag Archives: Abhishek Banerjee

Movie Review: Toaster (2026)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

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The first movie from Rajkummar Rao’s production house Kampa Film fits right in with his recent filmography. Toaster is a Netflix Original dark comedy, just like other Netflix Original dark comedies starring Rao: Ludo, Guns & Gulaabs, and Monica, O My Darling. While the new movie gets a lot of things right, it fumbles some important parts of the story.

It also inadvertently makes a case against the current trend of starting a movie with a shocking in medias res scene to grab attention before flashing back in time. At the open, Rao’s character Ramakant is shown digging a grave in an abandoned theme park. Then the action flashes back to a few weeks earlier, as a supposedly upright politician Amol Amre (Jitendra Joshi) is shown philandering with a pair of white women. A junkie named Glen (Abhishek Banerjee) obtains a video of the affair and uses it to threaten the politician. Both scenes hint at problems to come, but we expect stakes to escalate as the story progresses. A preview isn’t always a hook.

Those scenes are followed by the audience’s chronological introduction to the miserly Ramakant, which would’ve been a much more interesting way to start the movie. While out on his morning jog, Ramakant swipes a bananas from a fruit vendor while complaining over the phone about a six-rupee discrepancy in his telecom bill. He demands a cash refund, pretending to be an elderly man near death while exercising next to an old man with a walker. We learn that he’s a guy who’s happy to lie in order to save a few pennies. The demonstration of his character is a much better hook than the two throwaway opening scenes.

For all his faults, Ramakant is devoted to his wife Shilpa (Sanya Malhotra). She’s ready for kids, but Ramakant thinks they’re a bad return on investment. That doesn’t stop him from lying to their landlady Mrs. D’Souza (Seema Pahwa) about starting a family in order to negotiate cheaper rent.

Shilpa hits her limit with Ramakant’s stinginess when he proposes spending 500 rupees (about $5) on a gift for their guru’s daughter’s wedding. Instead, she buys a fancy 4-slice toaster for 4,999 rupees. It pains Ramakant to spend that much, but he’s happy to brag about his generosity to the bride’s family.

The next morning, it’s revealed that the groom-to-be got his secret girlfriend pregnant, leading the wedding to be cancelled. Against all rules of decorum and human decency, Ramakant goes to the bride’s house to ask for his toaster back. He’s outraged to learn they donated the gifts to an orphanage, so he breaks into the orphanage to steal the toaster.

At best, Ramakant is a grey character, but his relationship with Shilpa gives hope that he can be a better man than he is. Things get more dangerous when his toaster thievery plot intersects with the politician blackmail subplot. Turns out junkie Glen is Mrs. D’Souza’s son, and Ramakant’s neighbor. Tragedy ensues, raising the stakes for Ramakant both legally and morally.

About halfway through, Toaster loses its way. Ramakant crosses a moral line that is very hard to come back from, at least not without some kind of confession, atonement, or karmic justice. But Toaster treats this as just a plot point, and Ramakant isn’t transformed by what happens, making for an unsatisfying conclusion.

There’s some very clever dialogue and really good performances, particularly from Malhotra and Farah Khan in a funny cameo as the owner of the orphanage. Upendra Limaye is also entertaining as the politician’s henchman. Rao’s performance is in keeping with the many other “ordinary man” roles he’s played over his career.

The film gets bogged down with a segment of the story that involves an elderly neighbor, Pherwani Aunty, played by Archana Puran Singh. Maybe the section will hit with Singh’s fans, but it overstayed its welcome for me and added to the sense that the filmmakers didn’t calibrate the story correctly. Of all of Rao’s Netflix Original dark comedies, Toaster ranks last.

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Movie Review: Stolen (2025)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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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: Stree 2 (2024)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

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Stree 2: Sarkate Ka Aatank (“Woman 2: Terror of the Headless“) works very well as a sequel, but its place in a shared movie universe presents complications.

Stree 2 begins with a well-executed refresher on the events of the original film from 2018. The ghost from Stree arrives at the outskirts of Chanderi, the town she used to terrorize by abducting men who were out after dark. Seeing the statue erected in her honor, she turns away and leaves. Inside Chanderi, she’s further celebrated at a festival where the town’s oddball bookseller Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi) delightfully recounts her story in song form.

Unfortunately, Stree’s absence opens the door for another threat to take her place. The ghost of the conservative village leader who murdered Stree hundreds of years ago visits the town at night, abducting all the “modern” women with aspirations beyond cooking and cleaning for their husbands. Having been beheaded in life, the ghoul rolls his detached dome at his victims, coiling them in his long hair and dragging them away.

The responsibility for dispatching the monster and rescuing the missing women falls to the “Hero of Chanderi,” Vicky the tailor (Rajkummar Rao). However, Vicky is preoccupied, pining for the beautiful unnamed woman (Shraddha Kapoor) who disappeared after helping him drive off Stree years earlier. Even Vicky’s dad (Atul Srivastava) is worried enough about his lovelorn son to give him money to pay for some “friendship.”

Thankfully, the unnamed woman returns to help Vicky, Rudra, and their friends Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Jana (Abhishek Banerjee) vanquish the new threat. But will she stick around after this job is done or vanish into thin air again?

Stree 2 comfortably picks up where Stree left off. Amar Kaushik returns as director, and Niren Bhatt does a fine job taking over writing duties. The film’s world-building is terrific, and the actors fall right back into their familiar characters. It’s fun to hear Vicky’s dad speak about sex only in euphemisms again, and Banerjee’s gullible Jana is as charming as ever.

The main issue with Stree 2 comes from it being a part of the Maddock Supernatural Universe of movies, which besides Stree includes 2022’s werewolf flick Bhediya and 2024’s monster movie Munjya. Jana is a major character in Bhediya opposite Varun Dhawan’s lead werewolf Bhaskar, and both cameo in the closing credits of Munjya. What’s important is that Bhaskar plays a major role in the climax of Stree 2.

Nothing about this is inherently problematic. There’s tons of crossover within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the YRF Spy Universe promises more going forward. What those universes have going for them is that all of the properties are available on a single streaming platform (Disney+ for Marvel, Amazon Prime for Yash Raj Films). If you missed a film during its theatrical run on want a refresher before a new release, it’s easy to catch up.

That’s not the case for the Maddock Supernatural Universe movies. Stree and Stree 2 stream on Amazon Prime, Munjya is on Hulu (in the United States, Disney+ Hotstar in India), and Bhediya is on JioCinema — a service that isn’t even available in the US. If Maddock wants to embed such crossover into the narrative these movies, then it needs to make them all easy to access without unnecessary overhead and costs. You can’t weave these movies’ plots together but sell the streaming rights to each title to the highest bidder.

It’s a shame that an operational choice by the studio is the only major knock against Stree 2. It’s otherwise a fun, enjoyable movie.

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Movie Review: Apurva (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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A kidnapped woman fights for her life in the survival thriller Apurva, which is nowhere near as exciting as that summary makes it sound.

Apurva opens not with the title character — played by Tara Sutaria in what is clearly supposed to be her breakout, solo-heroine role — but with her kidnappers: a dull quartet of crude, violent thieves lead by Jugnu (Rajpal Yadav). Sukkha (Abhishek Banerjee) is second in command, with Balli (Sumit Gulati) and Chhota (Aaditya Gupta) rounding out the group. They beat people to death and have literal pissing contests out in the bleak Chambal desert. They’re too cliched to be scary, even though composer Ketan Sodha tries his best to make them seem so with some threatening background music.

After spending too much time with these dullards, we finally meet Apurva. She’s on a bus to Agra to surprise her fiance Sid (Dhairya Karwa) for his birthday. En route, Jugnu & Co kill the bus driver and rob the passengers. Sid calls during the robbery, and Sukkha answers, telling him they’re taking beautiful Apurva with them.

Just in case we doubted whether a man engaged to a woman who cares enough to surprise him for his birthday would actually want her back, we get a flashback and song montage detailing Apurva’s introduction to Sid and their bubbly courtship. With their mutual affection confirmed, we can rest assured that Apurva has a reason to live and that Sid will try to save her.

Thus Apurva endures one of the least-interesting movie kidnappings ever. She spends a good chunk of time knocked out after Chhota slaps her. At one point, an astrologer (Rakesh Chaturvedi Om) randomly wanders into the ruins of the village where they’re holding her, despite it being well off the road and miles from anyplace inhabited.

Things get even sillier when writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat — the filmmaker responsible for last year’s awful movie Hurdang — tries to tie the astrologer’s presence into the plot via a flashback with Sid that only highlights just how illogical his involvement is. Then again, that kind of fits in a movie where I repeatedly yelled at the main character to “just run!” when she was sitting there, waiting for her captors to find her.

Apurva is so insubstantial that there’s little chance for Sutaria to show off any heretofore unseen acting chops. She spends much of the film slowly moving barefoot through the ruins or yelling while lifting heavy objects, despite the fact that there’s nothing around to muffle sounds and her captors would obviously hear her. The thieves are a bunch of hapless jackasses, and Sid isn’t present enough for Karwa to have an impact. If you want to watch a “woman in trouble” film, watch Anushka Sharma in NH10 instead.

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Movie Review: Arjun Patiala (2019)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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In the course of spoofing Bollywood cop movies, Arjun Patiala takes a grim turn that it doesn’t reckon with, making it no fun to watch.

“Arjun Patiala” is the title of a movie being narrated to a producer played by Pankaj Tripathi, whose only requirement is that sexy actress Sunny Leone be cast in the film. The director (Abhishek Banerjee, who was great in Stree) works Leone into his narration of his movie about an upright Punjabi policeman.

The director’s description is visualized onscreen as the movie within the movie begins. Arjun (Diljit Dosanjh) finally achieves his childhood dream of becoming a police chief. On his first day in command of Ferozpur station, he disciplines two young men for sexually harassing a woman and helps lovely beautician Baby (Leone) evict some tenants from her salon.

When he first speaks with Baby — and any other good-looking woman who needs his help — Arjun imagines holding a microphone and serenading her. The other men in the room can see it, but Baby can’t. It’s one of various visual gags that remind the audience that this is just a movie. There’s also on-screen text providing additional information about the characters, but it’s written in Hindi and not translated in the English subtitles.

Such sight gags keep the audience emotionally distant from the story — which is probably good, given what’s to come.

Arjun is tasked by his superior officer (played by Ronit Roy) with eradicating crime in the district. Arjun asks Ritu (Kriti Sanon) — a gorgeous local reporter he wants to marry — to explain to him and his sidekick Onida (Varun Sharma) exactly how the local crime syndicates are organized, since apparently the police don’t know.

To this point, Arjun Patiala is a good-natured spoof of cop flicks. It maintains a lighthearted tone throughout, but the plan Arjun concocts to clean up his district is disturbing and at odds with the tone. Arjun starts by having a low-ranking criminal named Sakool (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) shoot and kill one of the underworld bigwigs. This sparks a string of retaliatory murders until there are no criminals left to commit any crimes.

There’s nothing comical about the way the murders are carried out. One guy is stabbed with a fork, and another is poisoned. There are montages of mass killings by machine gun. Arjun and Onida sit next to one of Sakool’s victims as he breathes his last, waiting until the crook is dead to call the station — giving Sakool time to get away and making it seem as though the cops arrived too late to stop the murder.

This wanton slaughter is only acceptable if one believes the criminals are not really people, as Arjun and Onida clearly do. It’s a grotesque endorsement of unchecked police power, especially since the goal is not mass incarceration but extermination.

Ritu suspects that Arjun is behind the bloodshed and is bothered by it, but she’s conflicted by her love for him and doesn’t seriously pursue it. One would hope that she’d be more dogged–not just as a journalist, but also because she was orphaned as a result of gun violence. The movie doesn’t pause to consider that the dead criminals might have children, too. When the story tries to make the case that the politicians are the real villains, it just makes the extrajudicial killings feel all the more cruel.

The dark turn doesn’t work because the characters don’t seem to realize it’s happened. Arjun, Ritu, and Onida are all generally cheerful from start to finish, which feels weird as the body count rises. Dosanjh, Sanon, and Sharma all give likeable performances, so the tonal shift does a disservice to them, too.

With a smaller death toll or more appropriate tone changes, Arjun Patiala could’ve been a perfectly enjoyable comedy. As it is, there’s not enough quality to make up for its disagreeable aspects.

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Movie Review: Stree (2018)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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A female ghost teaches the men of a small town to respect women in the hilarious horror comedy Stree, from the filmmaking duo Raj & DK.

Legend has it that, every night during a four-day holy festival, a ghost known only as “stree” — which translates as “woman” — steals any man wandering the town of Chanderi alone at night, leaving only his clothes behind. Residents write “Oh stree, come back tomorrow” on the walls of their homes, hoping to deter the ghost until the festival ends and she disappears until the next year.

Some of Chanderi’s young men doubt the story’s truth, none more so than Vicky (Rajkummar Rao), a gifted tailor of ladies’ clothing. He and his cronies Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Janna (Abhishek Banerjee) attend a raucous guys-only house party where one of guests is snatched — right after Vicky pees on the outside wall, washing away the protective writing.

Earlier that day, Vicky met a beautiful woman (Shraddha Kapoor) in need of a new dress, falling in love “at first eyesight,” he brags in English. The woman — who never gives her name — says she’s only in town for the festival, so she needs the dress completed quickly. After the disappearance at the party, Bittu and Janna assume that this mystery woman is “stree”, driving a wedge between the friends right when their survival depends on them sticking together.

My chief complaint about one of Raj & DK’s earlier horror comedies — the 2013 zombie flick Go Goa Gone — is that the jokes dragged on too long, but Stree‘s jokes are crisp and well-timed (as was the humor in the duo’s 2017 action comedy A Gentleman). Perhaps it helped that the duo ceded directorial duties to Amar Kaushik, who does a wonderful job interpreting their screenplay in his feature debut.

The superb cast deserves a ton of credit as well. Rao is charming as a lovestruck dope, and Kapoor gets her character’s befuddlement at Vicky’s naiveté just right. Banerjee primarily works in films as a casting director, but he’s hysterical as Janna. Khurana is great as well, as is the always reliable Pankaj Tripathy as the town’s ghost expert, Rudra. Atul Srivastava — who plays Vicky’s father —  gets a stand-out scene opposite Rao. Dad tries to talk to his son about sexual responsibility, but Dad is so uncomfortable he resorts to euphemisms for everything. Sensing the discomfort, Vicky plays dumb, goading his father to explain exactly what he means by the advice: “Be self-reliant.”

The real surprise of Stree is how deftly it conveys its message of respect for women within such a funny movie. The men of Chanderi — young and old — are all losers in love, too immature to be able to form the kinds of romantic relationships with women that might actually lead to sex (without having to pay for it). It’s a legacy that’s haunted the town for centuries, when “stree” was murdered before her wedding night. Though Stree doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, there’s a narrative justification for it, since this is a story of men learning from one another how to stop objectifying women.

Two of the film’s song numbers help illustrate the men’s progress. “Kamariya” features Nora Fatehi in a more traditional item number, dancing at the house party just before the first man is snatched. The camera focuses on specific features and body parts as she performs in the living room among all the rowdy men. This kind of item number in which a woman dances at the center of a group of male audience members — as opposed to out of reach on a stage — is intimidating, yet the number ends with Fatehi escorted from the party by two bodyguards, letting the movie’s audience know that she was never in any danger. It’s an important cue that most other filmmakers neglect to include in similar numbers.

Contrast “Kamariya” with the closing credits song “Milegi Milegi”. The men in the audience are along the sides of the room while Kapoor dances in the middle of a group of female backup dancers. There are no closeups of specific parts of Kapoor’s body. When Rao joins in, Kapoor first manipulates his body to dance the moves she wants him to before he starts dancing alongside her. It’s a clever way to show the characters’ moral development while also making sure there are enough catchy tunes to fill out the soundtrack.

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Movie Review: Pari (2018)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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10/2024 Update: I rewatched Pari in preparation for participating in the Bollywood Horror Top 13 episode of the Bollywood Drafts podcast and enjoyed the film much more on a second viewing. I found it to be a thoughtful examination of trauma and anxiety about child birth. I updated the star rating at the top of the post to reflect my updated opinion.

Despite its sometimes disorganized story structure, the horror film Pari: Not a Fairytale (“Fairy: Not a Fairytale“) views maternity and childbirth through a compelling sinister lens.

Debutant director Prosit Roy’s movie opens with a boring scene of two single people — Arnab (Parambrata Chatterjee) and Piyali (Ritabari Chakraborty) — chitchatting on a rooftop after being set up by their parents. They aren’t very interesting, and any information about them that may eventually prove relevant could have been introduced later.

The movie should have started with the next sequence. Arnab’s parents drive him home from the meeting on a rainy back road. Their discussion of a possible marriage proposal intensifies, and a distracted Dad accidentally hits an old woman, killing her.

As the police investigate the deceased’s identity, they find a frightened young woman named Rukhsana (Anushka Sharma) chained inside a ramshackle barn. Rukhsana has had no contact with the outside world, hidden by her mother — the dead woman — from a nameless man who wants to kill her.

Early on, Pari is largely a collection of horror movie must-haves, like sudden loud noises and people appearing abruptly in frame. There’s no finesse in how the jump scares are applied. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, which seems to exist only to prepare the audience for more blood to come — although that later gruesomeness reinforces the movie’s themes, while the early stuff doesn’t.

The story hits its stride when Arnab becomes Rukhsana’s reluctant caretaker. She’s been so sheltered that she eats out of the garbage bin, not knowing that there is food in the refrigerator, because she doesn’t know what a refrigerator is. Arnab isn’t sure if Rukhsana’s mystery man is real, but he accepts that her fear of him is.

Of course the man is real, and he’s hunting Rukhsana. Professor Quasim Ali (Rajat Kapoor) is obsessed with stopping a doomsday cult from disseminating the bloodline of the djinn Ifrit. The professor takes more than a little pleasure in destroying those he suspects are connected to the djinn.

In Pari, Ifrit’s influence is tied to the female reproductive cycle, the sanguine nature of which drives director Roy’s visual style. Roy and his co-writer Abhishek Banerjee use Ifrit’s influence as a mechanism to explore the unique physical connection between mothers and their offspring. The gore associated with this aspect of the story — in the form of injuries visited upon the female characters — makes sense, evoking the bloody nature of childbirth.

Another theme related to that mother-child connection is its corollary: the lack of a physical connection between father and child, and how that frees men to abandon their unborn progeny at will. Professor Ali personifies society’s desire to punish women for out-of-wedlock pregnancy (consensual or not).

Kapoor’s performance as the professor is the spookiest element of Pari. He coolly partakes in murder and torture as an ordinary part of doing business. The dull opening scene featuring Chatterjee and Chakraborty is a blip, with both of them getting better and better as the story progresses. Sharma commands the screen, as always, though it would’ve been fun to spend more time with her character as Rukhsana discovers the modern world.

For all of its flaws, Pari is a film with a lot of interesting ideas. Just don’t expect too many scares.

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