Tag Archives: Indian

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 – The Bansal Murders (2025)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders on Netflix

Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Inspector Jatil Yadav returns in the Netflix Original sequel Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders. His new case is bigger and more convoluted, but the sequel retains a lot of the qualities that made the first film special.

Though this new story is built around a crime totally separate from the one in 2020’s Raat Akeli Hai, some characters from the original carry over. While nothing about that constitutes a spoiler, character development and relationship building is an important part of the first film. For the best possible experience, watch Raat Akeli Hai before this new movie (just watch it anyway because it’s a great film).

The Bansal Murders opens with a disturbing sequence. Meera Bansal’s (Chitrangda Singh) prayers are interrupted by the incessant noise of crows. One of her uncles — I think it’s an uncle, though the Bansal family tree is large and a bit confusing — feeds them outside of the palatial family mansion daily, but their cries sound frantic today. Meera walks out to find dozens of crows dead and bleeding on the ground next to a severed pig’s head.

Inspector Yadav is called to the scene, as it seems someone is trying to send the Bansal family a message. Yadav’s new superior officer DGP Sameer Verma (Rajat Kapoor) wants this handled discreetly but quickly, a request made more challenging since the family spends so much time in prayer with their spiritual leader, Guru Ma (Deepti Naval). When Yadav finally gets to question the Bansals, he discovers weak points in their security system. Guru Ma dismisses the flaws — she says they can’t stop the bad things coming for the family.

The next day, Guru Ma’s prediction comes true. The three brothers who head the family, their wives, and a few of their adult children are all murdered with a machete. Only Meera and two of the grandchildren survive. One of the security guards slept through the attack while another was seriously wounded and placed in a coma.

There is an obvious culprit. Meera’s cousin Aarav (Delzad Hiwale) was an addict, and she saw him attack the wounded security guard Om Prakash (Rahaao). Moments later, she hears Aarav fall out of a window into the pool, an apparent suicide. This answer satisfies DGP Verma, who wants to reassure the public that a killer isn’t on the loose.

However, the head of the forensics team Dr. Panicker (Revathi) wants to be thorough, and she’s the only one with enough seniority to stall Verma. That gives Yadav time to explore a few nagging suspicions. Of course Yadav is right — the case isn’t as simple as it seems.

Even with most of the family dead, there are a ton of possible suspects. One of the things writer Smita Singh — who wrote the first film for director Honey Trehan, who also returns — is great at is keeping track of all the potential plot threads. Working backwards, the solution to the mystery makes complete sense. Trehan includes just enough shots along the way to hint at the truth.

The beats of this story are very similar to the first film, and they include some lighter moments between Yadav and his mother, Sarita (Ila Arun). She’s still desperate for him to get married, even more so now that she knows he has a girlfriend, Radha (Radhika Apte). Given the otherwise serious tone of the movie, Trehan gets these scenes right. They’re amusing, but not laugh-out-loud hilarious. Going that route would’ve broken the spell.

Siddiqui is again terrific playing a character who isn’t yet the best version of himself, but he’s working on it. Apte and Arun play off him perfectly. It’s also nice to see Shreedhar Dubey back as Yadav’s junior officer and friend, Nandu. The rest of the actors are good as well, behaving suspiciously without being cartoonish.

The exception is Naval as Guru Ma, but I think that’s the fault of the director more than the actor. They lean so heavily into Guru Ma being suspicious that it becomes silly. She speaks slowly, and only in riddles. Every sentence is accompanied by a blaring horn theme.

That’s one of the ways in which the shadow of Netflix hangs over Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders in a way it didn’t over the first film. There’s even a scene where Nandu tells Yadav to stop investigating, scolding him: “We could have had a press conference by now, media would be praising us, and Netflix would be making a movie.”

Despite that, Trehan and Singh are able to make insightful critiques into the way corporations, media, and the police all work to stoke public anger and fear, then use that public sentiment as a pretext to do what they want. They also created a core group of characters and a winning story formula that could easily be brought back again and again. Here’s hoping they do.

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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: Saali Mohabbat (2025)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Saali Mohabbat on ZEE5

A mousy housewife narrates a story that feels a little close to home in the drama Saali Mohabbat. The film marks actor Tisca Chopra’s debut as a feature writer and director.

Quiet Kavita (Radhika Apte) lingers on the periphery of a noisy house party, fetching snacks for guests, even though she’s not the host. She catches her husband Vicky (Aalekh Kapoor) necking with one of the single women in attendance. He responds with a haughty look, rather than one of remorse.

When Kavita rejoins the party after her humiliating discovery, the group is debating whether a woman’s most important attribute is her looks. Notably, the woman Vicky was canoodling is considered prettier than Kavita. This prompts Kavita to speak up, telling a story of a woman in a distant city whose husband was unfaithful.

The woman in Kavita’s story is named Smita, and she’s also played by Apte. Smita is married to Pankaj (Anshumaan Pushkar), a handsome, jobless drunk with a gambling problem. He pushes her to sell a property she inherited to pay off his debts, but she’s loath to part with it.

Smita’s beautiful cousin Shalini (Sauraseni Maitra) gets a job in town, and Smita offers her a place to stay. This is a mistake. Pankaj flirts with Shalini, and she reciprocates. It’s not long before they are running around behind Smita’s back.

Pankaj isn’t the only one smitten with Shalini. A cop named Ratan (Divyenndu) dotes on her, and she lets him as well. Ratan’s a nice guy, but he’s greedy. He’s on the payroll of the gangster Gajendra (Anurag Kashyap) — the same man Pankaj owes money to.

Periodically, the action cuts between the depiction of Smita’s story and Kavita at the party as she retells it. Vicky listens, growing more concerned as Kavita recounts what happened after Smita discovered the affair. Is Kavita really the timid woman he thought he’d married?

Nothing that happens in the film can be classified as a twist since Chopra barely tries to disguise things. She’s content to let a seasoned performer like Apte hold the audience’s attention, which she does as capably as ever. The rest of the cast gets the job done, but none of the performances are particularly noteworthy.

The world-building in Saali Mohabbat is decent, albeit a little thin. Smita’s closest ally is an older man played by Sharat Saxena, and it’s not totally clear what his relation is to her. Is he her deceased dad’s friend? The family gardener? Both? Smita has a degree in botany and is always surrounded by plants, which makes the film visually interesting, at least. It’s not a bad effort for a first feature film.

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Movie Review: War 2 (2025)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch War 2 on Netflix

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: Son of Sardaar 2 (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Son of Sardaar 2 on Netflix

Hidden within Son of Sardaar 2‘s overstuffed story are some wonderfully executed performances — but, boy, do you have to sort through a lot of cruft to find them.

The sequel to 2012’s enjoyable Son of Sardaar finds naive nice guy Jassi Singh Randhawa (Ajay Devgn) waiting in Punjab for his British visa to come through so he can join his wife of 11 years, Dimple (Neeru Bajwa). When he finally gets it and reunites with her in Scotland, she immediately asks for a divorce.

Elsewhere in Scotland, a band of Pakistani-British musicians — Rabia (Mrunal Thakur), her step-daughter Saba (Roshni Walia), Mehwish (Kubbra Sait), and transgender woman Gul (Deepak Dobriyal) — is in trouble. Their leader Danish (Chunky Panday) — who is Rabia’s husband and Saba’s father — took off with a Russian woman, forcing Rabia to take charge of the group.

A chance encounter between Rabia and Jassi proves beneficial for both of them, even if she does stab him in the hand with a fork when they meet. Rabia gives Jassi a place to stay in exchange for pretending to be her husband and Saba’s dad. See, Saba wants to marry her rich boyfriend Gogi (Sahil Mehta), but his strict father Raja (Ravi Kishan) insists on meeting Saba’s family first. Not only does Jassi have to pretend to be Saba’s dad but a former soldier as well, while the rest of the women pretend to be Indian, Hindu, and definitely not musicians.

These are already a lot of characters to keep track of, and it gets worse when Gogi’s family is introduced. There’s his mom Premlata (Ashwini Kalsekar), his uncles Tony (the late Mukul Dev in his final role) and Titu (Vindu Dara Singh), and his white step-grandmother Kim (Emma Kate Vansittart). The step-grandmother’s backstory brings several other characters into the mix, and Sanjay Mishra shows up with a bunch of sidekicks as well. Heck, the movie even starts with Jassi dancing with Dimple and their four children, but that turns out to be a dream and they don’t actually have kids. There are too many people as-is without introducing imaginary ones.

New characters are dropped into the film following abrupt cuts, and it takes a while to figure out how they connect to the main story. Subplots sprawl and expand while previously introduced characters get less and less to do. The lack of focus forces the audience to keep track of threads and relationships when they should be allowed to sit back and laugh. Then again, there aren’t many standout bits, save one near the end involving Dimple.

Son of Sardaar 2 isn’t all bad, thanks to the actors. Devgn is still endearing as the innocent guy who stumbles into trouble. Thakur’s feisty energy pairs well opposite Devgn and keeps the story moving. Sait plays her musician character as charmingly caffeinated, and Kishan’s straitlaced performance as the strict dad defines the stakes for Jassi and crew.

The delightful surprise of the film is Dobriyal’s portrayal of Gul. Dobriyal is a tremendous actor with plenty of stellar work on his resume, but the fact that he brings such gravity and tenderness to a character in a rather silly comedy is impressive. Gul is the voice of reason and authority when things get too chaotic. I can’t speak to the authenticity of the way she’s written as a trans woman (there’s some dialogue about the man inside her versus the woman inside her that feels odd), but Dobriyal plays her respectfully. Her being trans fuels some jokes, but she is never the butt of the joke. Dobriyal won’t let her be.

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Which Scenes Were Censored in Homebound?

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On the day of Homebound‘s global theatrical release, Indian journalist Aroon Deep published a list of edits demanded by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) before the film could play in India. These changes weren’t required for the international theatrical release of the movie, and audiences elsewhere were able to watch the original version. I saw the unedited version of Homebound, and I loved it.

Fans across the globe should care about this, because Homebound‘s streaming partner Netflix is likely to carry the edited version. [Update: Netflix is carrying the censored version.] The Indian government presumably wouldn’t allow the original to stream on Netflix in India, and it wouldn’t make logistical sense to carry a separate version just for subscribers outside of India.

Given the sensitive nature of the film’s subject — discrimination faced by Indian Muslims and Dalits — what kinds of changes did the CBFC demand from Homebound? Here’s the list Aroon Deep published on September 26:

A few of these are standard requests, such as showing the title in both English and Hindi and adding alcohol warnings. But a number have to do with changes to dialogue and visuals, some of which could alter or dilute filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan’s intent. Note how vague many of the instructions are, like Cut No. 10: “Deleted and suitably replaced the visuals of news.” There’s no way to tell what was cut or how it differs from what replaced it.

Since Aroon Deep and I have both seen Homebound in the versions available in our respective countries — him the Indian edit and me the international original — we compared notes to see what was changed. I’m mostly reliant on English subtitles over spoken Hindi, so any dialogue is from the translated English subtitles unless otherwise specified. We looked at four key cuts:

Cut No. 4: “Deleted the dialogue ‘Aloo gobi… khate hain’ at TCR 11.33”

This is from a scene where an older Muslim cop encourages Shoaib to go work in Dubai. All the note tells us is that the original dialogue was something like: “Aloo gobi… is called.” What the cop says is, “At least over there, no one will ask you, ‘Is your aloo gobi halal, too?'” That’s what I could gather from my limited Hindi. The English subtitle is translated as, “At least over there, no one will ask you, ‘Do you slaughter your vegetables, too?’.”

Cut No. 9: “Deleted the scene at TCR 01.22.19”

Though much of the scene where Chandan pretends to be of a higher caste in order to find out his exam results from a police administrator who complains about the quota system is the same, one closing line appears to be absent. The administrator — who knows Chandan is lying — says as he’s leaving, “If a pig wears a lion’s skin, it doesn’t become a lion.”

Cut No. 10: “Deleted and suitably replaced the visuals of news.”

A news report explains how migrant workers are forced to return home on foot due to prolonged COVID-19 quarantine measures that closed businesses. A closing segment of the report is missing from the edited version: “Last week, some officials accused a Muslim missionary group of being a ‘super-spreader.’ Calling this fake news, the opposition condemned the allegations and urged citizens not to spread rumors on social media.”

Cut No. 13: “Modified the visuals of the car passing by at 01:38.20 mins. approx.”

As Shoaib and Chandan walk along a deserted road, a car passes them but does not stop. The car in the edited version is a plain white SUV, but the car in the original had a red light on top, indicating it to be some kind of government or police vehicle.

Thanks again to Aroon Deep for making the censor sheet public and helping me figure out what changed from the original. You can follow his reporting on X (née Twitter) here.

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: Saiyaara (2025)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Saiyaara on Netflix

Cinema needs the occasional overwrought, youthful, romantic melodrama, and director Mohit Suri has made it his mission to supply them. Saiyaara nicely exemplifies the sub-genre thanks to earnest performances by its talented leading couple.

We’re introduced to the deep-feeling poet Vaani Batra (Aneet Padda) as she’s stood up at her courthouse wedding by a jerk named Mahesh. She’s so devastated that she passes out. She spends six months convalescing at the home of her supportive, progressive parents — Mom is played by Geeta Agarwal and Dad by Rajesh Kumar — before reentering society.

Mahesh’s betrayal zapped Vaani’s ability to write, and she hopes she can get it back by doing celebrity interviews for an entertainment website. On the way to her job interview for the site Buzzlist, she sees a handsome bad boy on a motorcycle. Later, the same guy hands over the journal she left outside the office — Vaani has a habit of forgetting things — before beating up one of the site’s writers for an insufficiently flattering article about his band.

The angry young man is Krish (Ahaan Panday), lead singer of the rock group Josh. Krish has temper issues stemming from his mother’s death when he was a kid, followed by his father’s turn to alcoholism, which resulted in Krish becoming his caretaker. Krish wants the world to give him all the love and adoration he missed out on as a child, and he wants it now.

Having peeked at Vaani’s journal before returning it, Krish realizes she’s got talent. He uses some of her lyrics in a song and proposes a partnership. Vaani isn’t sure she’s up to the task, but spending time having fun with Krish restores her creative abilities.

Naturally, the two fall in love. Thanks to their songwriting partnership, the band becomes a sensation, putting fame finally within Krish’s reach. Their bliss is short-lived, however, as Vaani experiences health problems that change the terms of their relationship and impact Krish’s career path.

Not to diminish the severity of Vaani’s condition, but it’s presented in a very film-friendly way, making it more of a plot point than an in-depth look at a specific condition. It’s meant to raise the stakes during a period in the characters’ lives when their emotions are already experienced at maximum volume.

The emotional intensity in the story almost makes Saiyaara feel more like a movie about teenagers than one about people in their mid-twenties. Their fervor feels like an outwardly expressed version of what the characters in Twilight were supposedly holding back via Kristen Stewart’s and Robert Pattinson’s, um, restrained performances. But Bollywood doesn’t make movies about teenagers, so instead we have college graduates yelling, “I love you, Krish Kapoor” at the top of their lungs.

That said, the passionate performances work because Padda and Panday play their parts with complete sincerity. There’s no trace of ironic detachment, and it helps to build a world where where passion can move mountains. There’s an idea in the film that one could write a song so heartfelt that it could bring a lover back no matter how far the distance between them. It’s similar to themes in some Japanese role playing video games (JRPGs) of the power of human will to alter the very nature of the universe and time itself. I really enjoyed that aspect of Saiyaara.

The undeniable takeaway from the film is the star potential of both Padda and Panday. They seem much more experienced than their collective three IMDb acting credits (all Padda’s) would indicate. She performs with a charming combination of vulnerability and strength, and he brings depth to a character that could have been one-note. They have electric chemistry together, and the film is quite sexy as a result.

As in Mohit Suri’s 2013 film about a troubled rockstar’s romance — Aashiqui 2 — music plays a central role in Saiyaara. Again, power ballads carry the soundtrack, but I like the way they work in Saiyaara better. The yearning in the title track (sung by Faheem Abdullah) fits the notion of being able to reach a loved one across time and space. The soundtrack propels the story forward and keeps it from ever losing momentum.

Saiyaara isn’t the most unique movie — it can’t be, as it’s inspired by the 2004 Korean film A Moment to Remember. But it scratches a certain itch for stories about undying devotion and all-consuming passion. What a bonus if we get two new Bollywood stars out of it.

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