Tag Archives: Arista Mehta

Movie Review: Baramulla (2025)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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The dread in Baramulla builds slowly. It has nothing to do with the missing children or the creepy house filled with strange noises and shadowy figures. By the time an onscreen dedication rolls after the climax, one’s worst fears are confirmed: the goal of this film isn’t to tell an interesting story but to push an agenda.

Baramulla takes place in the titular city in Jammu and Kashmir in 2016. Controversial Deputy Superintendent of Police Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is transferred to the town after some yet-unspecified negative experience necessitated a change of scenery. He arrives with his wife Gulnaar (Bhasha Sumbli), teenage daughter Noorie (Arista Mehta), and young son Ayaan (Singh Rohaan).

The house they’re put up in is spooky as all get out, with furnishings unchanged for decades. It’s massive, with two decaying wings on either side of the main building the family occupies. From the moment they arrive, everyone but Ridwaan hears unsettling sounds, sees eerie shadows, and smells weird smells that can’t be explained.

Ridwaan is too busy with work to pay attention to his family. A boy named Shoaib disappeared during a magic show at a carnival. The cops and the boy’s father — a former politician with plenty of enemies — would prefer to blame the magician, but Ridwaan isn’t convinced. No one has sent a ransom demand, and a lock of Shoaib’s hair was found in the magician’s “disappearing” trunk. If the mage had given the boy a haircut mid-performance, there would’ve been dozens of witnesses.

Ridwaan has worked in Jammu and Kashmir long enough to appreciate the factors complicating his investigation. Politics are fraught, there are militants about, and absolutely everyone distrusts the police. But it takes more disappearances and unusual occurrences for him to accept that his perpetrator could be undead.

The setup is compelling but it isn’t sufficiently fleshed out. The taciturn characters are indistinct. Ridwaan and Noorie are supposedly in a major tiff that predates their move to Baramulla, but it doesn’t feel any different from typical teenage drama. Yet when it’s revealed what led to the frosty father-daughter relationship, it’s so terrible that it makes the characters relatively blasé behavior look bizarre in retrospect.

Director Aditya Suhas Jambhale (Article 370) — who co-wrote the film with his Article 370 producer Aditya Dhar — glosses over relationships and eschews character development. Those foundational storytelling elements are secondary to the mission: making ragebait.

Global viewers who aren’t familiar with the history of the region won’t get a lot of context from Baramulla. The film was clearly written around the post-climax on-screen dedication (which I won’t quote so as to not spoil the film). There’s nothing new about using real-world tragedy as inspiration, but Jambhale and Dhar seem to think that just doing so is enough, regardless of how well it’s integrated into the present-day story they’re telling.

The laxness about the present-day storyline is most evident in the rules governing the supernatural in Baramulla, or lack thereof. Ghosts in stories are often tied to specific locations or individuals. In Baramulla, they can be anywhere — not for any world-building reasons, but simply for plot convenience.

The climax also reinforces a pernicious thread within the film: the idea that Muslim children are all potential militants and therefore not to be trusted. Further, despite their still-developing brains, Muslim children are to be held to the same (if not higher) moral standards as adults. They are not considered victims of radicalization but equal participants.

I feel like I write this a lot, but Baramulla has all the components of a good movie. Shown through a different perspective by someone with more experience with the genre, this could’ve made a powerful emotional impact. As it is, all I can be is disappointed.

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Movie Review: War 2 (2025)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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It was always going to be hard for a sequel to reach the heights attained by War in 2019, but War 2 crashes hard.

Years after the original, India’s best soldier — well, one of India’s best, given that the War films are part of the Yash Raj Films Spy Universe of movies — Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) has left India’s R&AW spy agency and works as a mercenary. Kabir’s swoony intro in the original film is the stuff of legend, so how does he make his first appearance in the sequel?

By staring down a clunky-looking CGI wolf.

The scene somehow gets worse as Kabir faces off against a bunch of ninjas in a Japanese castle. Unlike Khalid’s (Tiger Shroff) tightly choreographed, dynamic opening fight scene in War, Kabir dodges swords in slow motion. He punches and chops dozens of helpless dopes with rapid edits between shots. There’s no sense of flow to the fight since we rarely see Kabir execute more than two moves in sequence.

Kabir’s assassination of a Japanese mob boss catches the eye of a syndicate known as Kali. Made up of wealthy representatives from India and its neighboring countries, the group wants to end democracy and take over the region — and they want Kabir to help them.

Of course this was all part of Kabir’s plan to infiltrate them, coordinated by his mentor from the original film Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana). What they didn’t expect was that Kali would force Kabir to kill Luthra to prove his loyalty. Kabir does, just days after Luthra’s daughter Kavya (Kiara Advani) is awarded a medal from the Air Force for bravery as a combat pilot.

Colonel Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor) takes over Luthra’s post as the head of R&AW. He grudgingly lets Kavya in on the hunt for Kabir, but he’s got an ace up his sleeve — a rogue soldier named Vikram (NTR Jr) who’s Kabir’s equal in skill and tenacity.

The Indian spies track Kabir to Spain, where he’s meeting his adopted teenage daughter Ruhi (Arista Mehta). The girl exists purely to call back to the first film and set up an action sequence. In grand Bollywood tradition, she is never mentioned again.

The Spain action sequence is inspired very, very heavily by Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Instead of Tom Cruise and Haley Atwell in a Fiat careening through the streets of Rome chased by Pom Klementieff in an armored vehicle, we get Kabir and Ruhi in a Mini Cooper pursued through Salamanca by Vikram in a Humvee. The duo’s little car bounces down a bunch of stairs and eventually winds up on top of a speeding train about to crash — another sequence from the same Mission: Impossible movie.

There are plenty more plot parallels with the first War movie to come, with twists, betrayals, and secret relationships from the past. Kabir has his requisite dance sequences with both Vikram and Kavya (undeniably the best parts of the film). The whole thing ends with a fight in an ice cave, just like the original War did.

War 2 collapses under the immense pressure on it to be new and fresh while also being the same as War. The absence of Siddharth Anand — who directed War and co-wrote both the screenplay and the story — from War 2 makes it clear just how responsible he was for the first film’s success. Aditya Chopra is again credited for creating the sequel’s story, Shridhar Raghavan returns as screenwriter, and Abbas Tyrewala is once more responsible for the writing the dialogues. The continuity they bring is evident, but there’s no life in the sequel.

The new kid in town is Ayan Mukerji in the director’s seat. He earned his spot by directing the big-budget supernatural action spectacle Brahmāstra Part One – Shiva, but that was a passion project of his own creation. Here he connects all the dots, but the film lacks sparks — except for those created when Vikram inexplicably competes in a Formula 1 auto race in a powerboat.

All of the actors are fine, but that’s it. They’re all better than this.

War 2 is just too silly for its own good. No one person is solely responsible for its failure. Rather, it’s the product of a bunch of talented people turning in subpar work on a project too expensive and high-profile to warrant anything less than their best.

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Movie Review: Sharmajee Ki Beti (2024)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Sharmajee Ki Beti on Amazon Prime

First-time feature director Tahira Kashyap Khurrana (wife of actor Ayushmann Khurrana) shows a lot of promise with her comedy-drama Sharmajee Ki Beti (“Sharmajee’s Daughter“). The story peeks into the lives of five women and girls–all with the last name Sharma–living in the same apartment building, as they deal with different gender-related problems.

Kashyap Khurrana makes the mistake that plenty of filmmakers have made before by treating “women’s issues” as a single theme that can be addressed in its entirety in one film. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it does make the screenplay — which was written Kashyap Khurrana — feel unfocused at times.

The character whose arc least successfully integrates with the rest is that of Tanvi Sharma (Saiyami Kher), a single woman living in the building. She’s a state-level cricket player, but her actor boyfriend Rohan (Ravjeet Singh) only cares about her looks. Kher does a fine job showing Tanvi’s attempts to reconcile her self-image with the one Rohan wants her to present, but it’s a thin premise. The movie wouldn’t have suffered without her plotline.

Kashyap Khurrana had everything she needed for a full film with the four remaining Sharma ladies: the mother-daughter pairs of Jyoti (Sakshi Tanwar) & Swati (Vanshika Taparia) and Kiran (Divya Dutta) & Gurveen (Arista Mehta). Daughters Swati and Gurveen are 13-year-old best friends. Jyoti teaches at a coaching center, while Kiran is a stay-at-home mom.

Between them, Jyoti and Kiran face a lot of the problems of modern motherhood. Jyoti struggles to balance her career and the satisfaction it gives her with her duties to her sweet husband Sudhir (Sharib Hashmi) and to Swati. On the flip side, Kiran feels isolated after moving from Patiala to Mumbai, especially with her businessman husband Vinod (Parvin Dabas) acting distant and staying out late. Tanwar and Dutta are both terrific, but Dutta really makes the most of her sympathetic role.

The real stars of Sharmajee Ki Beti are the girls, Swati and Gurveen. The whole movie could have been about them. Their story arcs are that endearing and their performances are that charming. Swati is OBSESSED with the fact that she’s the only girl in her class that hasn’t gotten her period yet. Gurveen tolerates Swati’s constant menstrual talk, while coming to grips with her own preoccupation with one of the pretty older girls at school.

Kashyap Khurrana’s strongest attribute as a director is her faith in her actors, and that faith extends to the two teens playing Swati and Gurveen. The girls have long dialogue exchanges that are shot in one take, and Taparia and Mehta are more than up to the task. Their scenes together are the most immersive in the movie, because they feel like real friends. Keeping the camera on them for as long as Kashyap Khurrana does while both of them are in frame adds to the immersion.

I cannot say enough wonderful things about Vanshika Taparia as Swati. She gives an outstanding performance. She’s hysterically funny when bemoaning her delayed puberty. She’s also crushing in the way only a teen girl can be when her mom forgets to pick her up from school. The recent boom (comparatively speaking) in Hindi movies about teenagers gives me hope that we’ll get to see more of Taparia sooner rather than later. Her performance alone is reason enough to watch Sharmajee Ki Beti.

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