Tag Archives: Movie Review

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: 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: 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)

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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: Greater Kalesh (2025)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Netflix’s enjoyable Diwali movie Greater Kalesh has real affection for its characters and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Director Aditya Chandiok and writer Ritu Mago wisely opted to make their film a “featurette” with a runtime of under one hour rather than try to stretch too small a story to feature length.

Twenty-something Twinkle Handa (Ahsaas Channa) returns to her family home in Delhi to surprise her parents — dad Ranjan (Happy Ranajit) and mom Sunita (Supriya Shukla) — and younger brother Ankush (Poojan Chhabra) for Diwali. Before she can even open the door, she hears the sounds of arguing and pottery breaking.

Her folks are certainly surprised to see her, and happy as well. They try to pretend that their argument was nothing serious, but Ankush spills the beans. Turns out, the Handas don’t actually own their house. They’ve lived in it for free for almost 30 years due to a deal with Ranjan’s business partner, but now the real owner wants to sell. The family is about to be homeless.

Also, the whole neighborhood knows about Ankush’s “secret” relationship with an older woman, and Mom is sick of being gossiped about. She’s planning to move to Bangalore to live with Twinkle, which is news to Twinkle, of course.

Twinkle is furious with everyone for hiding things from her, ignoring her own hypocrisy for not telling her family her own secret: she has a serious boyfriend. Fueled by anger, Twinkle sets about trying to fix everyone’s problems, whether they like it or not — which is probably why everyone was so reluctant to tell her anything in the first place.

Chandiok and Mago do a wonderful job portraying a family in a very specific stage of development. Both of the kids are adults, and Twinkle even lives independently, yet no one has an accurate perception of how mature the kids actually are. Twinkle overestimates her worldliness, while the parents still try to shield their kids from their problems. Relationships within the Handa family are evolving in ways none of them really understand, and the changing dynamic hits a boiling point during their Diwali party.

The cast does a fine job making the family relatable. While plots driven by unnecessary secrets can sometimes drag, the actors successfully convey why every character feels like secrecy is their best option. Other than a silly subplot about a thief slowly making off with the family’s sentimental valuables, everyone acts in a way that is understandable.

The knock against Greater Kalesh is that it has a tendency toward soapiness. From Twinkle’s voiceovers to the musical cues to the lighting, all of it makes the film cornier than it needs to be. Thankfully, the filmmakers knew just how much story they had, and the movie ends before the soapy style gets too grating.

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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: Bhagwat Chapter One – Raakshas (2025)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas on ZEE5

Arshad Warsi gives a standout performance in Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas. Director Akshay Shere and writer Bhavini Bheda reunite for their first feature in fifteen years, producing a compelling and unexpected crime drama.

The film opens in the North Indian town of Robertsganj in October, 2009. An unmarried woman named Poonam fails to return home after a dental appointment, and her family knows something is wrong.

On the tenth day of Poonam’s absence, Robertsganj gets a new police chief: Inspector Vishwas Bhagwat (Warsi). This isn’t a promotion for Bhagwat. He’s reassigned to Robertsganj — accompanied by his wife and young daughter — as punishment for his violent temper. Maybe his mandated anger management courses will mellow him out.

Bhagwat immediately demands an investigation into Poonam’s disappearance, which has been dismissed by police as a simple elopement and weaponized by politicians as a case of “love jihad.” Bhagwat’s second-in-command Mahto (Devas Dixit) isn’t thrilled by his increased workload, but he and his fellow officers soon uncover more cases of missing women throughout the jurisdiction. Whether it’s human trafficking or forced prostitution, Bhagwat and his officers fear they’ve stumbled onto a conspiracy.

Meanwhile, we see an adorable romance brewing between local teacher Sameer (Jitendra Kumar) and a young woman named Meera (Ayesha Kaduska). She rebuffs him at first, but his respectful persistence wins her over. Their shy courtship is adorable, but we know the good times won’t last, given how many other women Meera’s age have disappeared.

Shere and Bheda — who previously collaborated on 2010’s The Film Emotional Atyachar — craft a story that takes unexpected turns without feeling like the twists exist for their own sake. Clever storytelling puts the audience in the same position as Inspector Bhagwat, who also can’t be completely sure how things will turn out.

Warsi is in top form as Bhagwat. Due to tragic events in Bhagwat’s past, he spends every moment trying to keep from lashing out, his sense of powerlessness manifesting as violence. We don’t see any of his anger management sessions, but they must work, as he gets better about holding back as the movie goes on. His newfound patience is rewarded with the information he needs to find justice for the missing women.

Kumar and Kaduska do a wonderful job as the lovebirds. A lot is asked of both of them as the film progresses, and they’re more than up to the task. Also credit to Dixit for doing a fine job as Bhagwat’s beleaguered assistant, who grudgingly accepts that his boss may know what he’s doing.

I hope that Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas truly is the first in a series. The lead character is interesting, with plenty of room to grow and backstory to explore. Shere and Bheda set a tone for their thriller that is emotional and gripping without being so intense that one might not want to go back for more, as with an anxiety-inducing crime flick like Sector 36. There’s real franchise potential here.

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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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