Tag Archives: Nawazuddin Siddiqui

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: Costao (2025)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Producer Sejal Shah makes an uneasy transition to the director’s chair with her feature debut Costao. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a principled customs officer in a biographical drama that takes a lot for granted.

Set in the 1990s in Goa, the story follows Costao Fernandes (Siddiqui). He takes his responsibilities as a customs agent seriously, risking his own well-being to investigate tips on illegal smuggling operations.

Goa’s most notorious smuggler is a businessman and aspiring politician named D’Mello (Kishore Kumar G). Costao’s informer (played by Ravi Shankar Jaiswal) lets the officer know that D’Mello is planning to bring in a massive amount of gold without paying duties on it.

A last-minute tip finds Costao staking out the smuggling operation alone and unarmed, with no hope for backup in the pre-cell-phone era. He chases D’Mello’s younger brother Peter (Hussain Dalal) and stops him near a small village. Peter pulls a knife and stabs Costao several times before the agent accidentally kills Peter in self-defense. Bleeding, Costao shows the villagers the gold in Peter’s car trunk and tells them to call the customs office. He runs before the cops arrive, since they’re all on D’Mello’s payroll.

When Costao finally turns himself in days later — after the regional head of customs offers him protection — he’s in big trouble. The gold was gone before customs agents arrived at the scene, and D’Mello has made sure that none of the villagers will testify to having seen it. All Costao has is his word as to what happened, but he fled a crime scene. Soon enough, he’s on trial for murder.

The case on which this fictional story is based set an important legal precedent for the protection of civil servants against retaliatory prosecution. It has all the makings of a gripping courtroom thriller. Yet Shah and screenwriters Bhavesh Mandalia and Meghna Srivastava treat the trial portions of the story as an afterthought rather than the point of the film.

Instead, they focus on Costao’s personal life, painting an unflattering portrait in the process. In an effort to depict him as a man who puts his principles first, they portray him as a terrible husband and absent father. He frequently fights with his wife Maria (Priya Bapat), ignoring her pleas to think about the danger he’s put her and their three children in and the upheaval he’s caused by forcing them to move into secure housing.

As Costao’s murder trial proceeds, he’s prohibited from fieldwork and assigned to desk duty. He quickly gets bored and negotiates a transfer to Mumbai, leaving his family behind. Even when he’s eventually cleared of charges, he doesn’t return to them.

Whether or not this is accurate to the man who inspired this story, one could understand some reputation laundering by the filmmaker in this kind of movie. Yet it doesn’t seem like Shah realizes how unflattering his portrayal of Costao is. Rather, the story justifies Costao’s neglect of his family by having the officer’s daughter serve as narrator, closing the film with her praising his heroism without mentioning the price she paid for it.

If Costao is a movie about a man torn between love and duty, we need to see that. If this is about a man whose freedom is threatened by state-sanctioned corruption, we need to see that, too. What we get is a film that expects the audience to side with the civil servant because of his job title, regardless of how much of a jerk he’s portrayed to be. It’s a real disappointment.

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Movie Review: Afwaah (2023)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

A bystander’s good deed puts him in danger in the smart political thriller Afwaah (“Rumor“).

Politician Gyaan Singh runs the town of Sawalpur in Rajasthan. Singh’s daughter Nivi (Bhumi Pednekar) is engaged to her dad’s presumed successor, Vicky Bana (Sumeet Vyas), who has national political ambitions. Sawalpur has avoided inter-religious conflict thus far, but Vicky uses a scuffle at a rally in the Muslim part of town as an excuse for a show of force. His goons beat residents, and Vicky himself is captured on camera giving instructions to his lackey Chandan (Sharib Hashmi), who drags a Muslim butcher into a shuttered shop. The butcher is later found dead.

The melee is more than just a headache for the party. Nivi wants no part of Vicky’s violence, and she runs off while her father is in the hospital. Vicky sends his goons to track her down.

They catch Nivi in the town square right as advertising executive Rahab Ahmed (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is passing through in his Range Rover. He’s on his way from his dad’s house in a village nearby to his wife’s book launch at an historic fort a couple of hours away. Rahab stops when he sees Vicky’s men grab Nivi, and soon the two are fleeing in his car with Vicky’s henchmen in pursuit.

Afwaah takes a comprehensive view of the way political power is exercised through violence and misinformation. When Vicky employs violence at the rally as a display of authority, he unleashes a force into the world that will grow and soon be out of his control. He doesn’t understand that, but Nivi and her dad do. With an army of eager thugs at his disposal and a police inspector Tomar (Sumit Kaul) on the payroll, Vicky thinks he’s untouchable.

That also makes him hypersensitive to being perceived as weak. Nivi’s flight looks bad for Vicky, as does video of him and his cronies harassing her and Rahab. That’s where misinformation comes in. Vicky’s communications guy proposes flipping the video’s narrative to make it appear as though Vicky was trying to save Nivi from being kidnapped by Rahab in an act of “#lovejihad.” Just like violence, Vicky sees bigotry as an expedient tool but doesn’t understand the danger it poses, even to him.

With such loaded themes to explore, Afwaah is very plot-dense. Add to that subplots about a botched assassination attempt on Chandan and Inspector Tomar’s romantic affair with a subordinate officer, and character development takes a backseat. Siddiqui and Pednekar give workmanlike performances, but the movie is more about getting Rahab and Nivi from Point A to Point B. The cast does the job that’s asked, even when that means letting the message command most of the spotlight.

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Movie Review: Tiku Weds Sheru (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Tiku Weds Sheru is a disjointed collection of scenes attempting to serve as a skewering of Hindi-film culture and the obstacles put in the way of outsiders. As a satire, it falls flat.

Sheru (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a part-time background actor who aspires to stardom. He blew a bunch of money to make an independent movie that never happened, and his main job as a pimp doesn’t pay enough to get him out of debt. Sheru jumps at the chance to marry a woman whose family offers a lot of money to any suitor willing to take on an “ill-tempered” bride.

The only time the bride in question, Tiku (newcomer Avneet Kaur), shows her temper is when she realizes her family is trying to marry her to a man almost 30 years her senior. (Kaur is 21, Siddiqui is 49.) The price she pays for objecting is to be slapped by her brother and beaten with a belt. She agrees to the marriage in order to get away from her abusive family and to be closer to her Mumbai-based boyfriend.

The boyfriend bails when Tiku learns that she’s pregnant. Her attempt to run away results in Sheru slapping her as well before deciding to get out of the pimping business and raise Tiku’s baby as his own.

What kind of straitlaced job does Sheru get instead? Drug dealing. All the while, he lies to Tiku and pretends to be a film financier who’s temporarily a little short on cash.

There’s probably an internal logic to why the characters act the way they do and why certain actions follow one another, but only writer-director Sai Kabir understands what that internal logic is.* This was a problem with his 2014 film Revolver Rani, too. Kabir doesn’t give his audience a reason to get invested in his characters, and there’s no real moral to the story. Is this satire or just messy people in a messy situation doing messy things?

Some of the disjointedness comes from what is likely a case of reverse engineering on Kabir’s part. It feels as though he wanted to include certain scenes in the movie and came up with the narrative justification for them later, regardless if that justification makes sense. Take for example the climax, in which Sheru appears in drag to rescue Tiku during a stage performance. Sheru’s convoluted explanation for his costume is that a certain gay politician (who hit on Sheru earlier) will be in attendance, so naturally he’d rather watch men perform, hence Sheru must appear in drag in order to get the politician’s attention. Huh?

Even individual scenes are choppy and hard to follow. The frequent, fast edits during a Latin dance number are so disorienting that the scene should’ve been left out of the movie entirely.

Tiku Weds Sheru is the first production by Manikarnika Films, the company established by Kangana Ranaut (who starred in Kabir’s Revolver Rani). Ranaut has often touted her outsider status within the Hindi-film industry, so Tiku Weds Sheru is certainly supposed to offer some kind of critique of the industry. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have anything coherent to say.

*If this article at Bollywood Hungama is to be believed, Sai Kabir may not be solely responsible for Tiku Weds Sheru‘s quality problems. Multiple sources told Bollywood Hungama that Kangana Ranaut rewrote and reorganized much of the screenplay, resulting in a film that Kabir wasn’t happy with. This would not be the first time Ranaut interfered with her director.

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Movie Review: Heropanti 2 (2022)

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Entertainment Factor: 3.5 Stars (out of 4)
Quality Factor: 1 Star

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This review is a tribute to Dr. Julia Bulgaria, the star of Heropanti 2. She’s a veterinarian who wears a sash that reads “Prom Queen” over her cleavage-baring lab coat. She utters the line, “There’s a zombie party down the road,” with a straight face. Her name is DR. JULIA BULGARIA!

Heropanti 2 — which has nothing to do with the original Heropanti from 2014 — is an objectively bad movie. But Dr. Julia Bulgaria (Amber Doig-Thorne), flamboyant feather jackets, and Tara Sutaria’s casual champagne-tossing all play their part in making Heropanti 2 so bad it’s good.

Even before my new hero Dr. Bulgaria appears, the movie gives plenty of warning that it exists in a parallel universe where normal rules do not apply. The story opens with the villain Laila (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, whose commitment to his bonkers performance is unimpeachable) interrupting a magic show that he is performing in order to meet with his crew of henchmen. Laila’s plan is to steal all the money from every bank account in India on Tax Day. Laila stabs a guy to death while wearing a suit jacket with feathers on the shoulders and a bedazzled eagle on the back. Lesson? Don’t mess with a guy with such outrageous fashion sense.

Cut to Tiger Shroff, who plays a nerd named RJ. He wears glasses and suspenders and rides a bicycle throughout the Yorkshire town where he lives.

By this point, if you think this movie is not for you, cut your losses and move on. It’s doesn’t get any better.

RJ runs into Inaaya (Tara Sutaria) — England’s youngest self-made billionaire. How’d she get rich? “By making a game.” Inaaya thinks RJ is her ex-boyfriend Babloo, who ran off more than a year ago. And wouldn’t you know it, she’s right! “RJ” is really Babloo: a genius hacker who’s been in hiding after double-crossing Laila — who is Inaaya’s brother!!

With Babloo’s cover blown, Laila’s men track him down. Cue the acrobatic fight sequences — the whole reason anyone watches a Tiger Shroff movie. Babloo flips over cars and swings around poles, with the occasional assist from Inaaya.

During a pause in the fighting, Inaaya does something inexplicable and hilarious. She seductively offers Babloo a glass of champagne, pours a glass for herself, then — instead of setting the bottle down on the table behind her — casually tosses the bottle to the side as if she was tossing her jacket onto a chair. Off camera, we hear the sound of glass breaking. Now there is broken glass and champagne all over the floor! Why did she think that was a good idea? Such reckless insanity makes me love Inaaya — though not as much as I love Dr. Julia Bulgaria.

The sexy veterinarian enters the picture when Babloo and Inaaya flee to the countryside in search of a doctor to remove a bullet from Babloo’s behind. Babloo’s butt is so muscular that bullets cause only minor damage to it, allowing him to dance at the aforementioned “zombie party down the road” immediately after surgery. Dr. Bulgaria’s high level of skill also plays a part, no doubt.

For all its faults, Heropanti 2 pulls out all — well, most — of the stops to make its action sequences and dance numbers visually interesting. Not that they’re all good, but they are made with good-faith attempts at grandness. Tiger Shroff is a very good dancer, and Tara Sutaria is even better, so their performances hit the mark. A. R. Rahman’s soundtrack is inconsistent, with catchy tunes like “Miss Hairan” and boring slogs like “Dafa Kar” (the zombie party song).

Nothing about the story makes a lick of sense, and a plot structure that bounces around in time doesn’t help. Yet everything is so over-the-top silly that inconsistency doesn’t really matter. If whatever the hell it is that Heropanti 2 is doing works for you, you’ll have a great time. I did.

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Movie Review: Mom (2017)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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In a vacuum, Mom is an engaging revenge thriller that fully utilizes its star’s considerable charisma. Yet the film’s very existence raises the question as to whether the genre has exhausted its ability to add to the conversation about rape.

Sridevi plays the titular mother, Devki, a secondary school teacher. She has a young daughter Priya with her husband, Anand (Adnan Siddiqui), who brought another daughter — 18-year-old Arya (Sajal Ali) — with him into the marriage. The strained relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter is exacerbated by the fact that Devki is Arya’s Biology teacher. When a fellow student, Mohit, texts Arya lewd material during class, Devki throws Mohit’s phone out the window.

Arya later rejects Mohit’s advances at a party, so he enlists his sleazy cousin Charles (Vikas Verma), security guard Baburam (Pitobash), and drug dealer Jagan (Abhimanyu Singh) to kidnap her. They gang rape Arya and leave her for dead in a ditch. Upon waking, Arya bitterly tells Devki that the men told her “Call your mom!” during the assault.

When the justice system inevitably fails to convict the men, Devki realizes that her relationship with Arya will be irretrievably broken unless she takes revenge upon them herself. She enlists a private detective named DK (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) to track down the rapists before the lead police officer on Arya’s case, Mathew (Akshaye Khanna), uncovers her scheme.

There’s a lot to like about Mom, chiefly Sridevi, who is most heartbreaking in moments when Devki futilely tries to connect with Arya. Ali, for her part, nails the moody teen role. First-time feature director Ravi Udyawar maximizes Sridevi’s legendary beauty in a number of strikingly composed shots. (Udyawar’s camera direction is less successful in a hard-to-follow chase scene.)

Debutant screenwriter Girish Kohli provides his actors with memorable dialogue, and Khanna and Nawazuddin Siddiqui deliver their lines with style. Adnan Siddiqui gives gravity to a role that requires him to stay in the background in order to keep Sridevi in the spotlight.

Things get tricky when considering whether we need another movie about avenging rape. I’ll concede that living in America my whole life has exposed me to many stories about this topic, both fictional and non-fictional. The Hollywood film The Accused brought the story of justice for a gang rape victim into the mainstream back in 1988. Until recently, many Hindi films treated the rape of a woman as nothing more than a catalyst to provoke a male hero into action. Real-life sexual assaults in India in the last several years have shifted the focus of fictional stories — such as 2016’s Pink — onto the victims themselves.

So while there is still a desire among Indian filmmakers and audiences to confront the horrors of rape, I’m not sure that Mom treads any new ground in doing so. There is a cliched shot of Arya in the shower following the rape, scrubbing her skin so hard that it bleeds. A man is raped in jail and is laughed at for it — as though male rape is less serious than female rape. There’s a belief that the perpetrators deserve punishment that damages their sexual organs, and also a belief that doing so will restore Arya to her former self, at least to some degree.

All of these ideas have been presented so often in movies that we’ve taken them for granted. But are these ideas actually valuable, or do they just feed off the sense of helplessness experienced by bystanders to rape, whether immediate or from afar? Too many films about rape function as a kind of call-to-action fantasy for someone other than the victim — only this fantasy requires someone to suffer in order to bring it to fruition.

Director Udyawar does the right thing by not showing the acts of sexual violence, focusing instead on the aftermath. It removes any chance of such violence being sensationalized or depicted as titillating. He also fairly assumes that the Indian justice system (like the American justice system) is rigged against rape victims. But other than establishing those benchmarks for future filmmakers, Mom covers a lot of familiar territory. It’s a well-made movie, but I’m not sure it’s a story I needed to see again.

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Movie Review: Raees (2017)

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raees2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Raees (“Wealthy“) stars one of Bollywood’s most charismatic actors, a fact that the screenplay takes for granted. The story of a gangster’s rise to power lacks emotional depth, relying on the audience’s familiarity with Shah Rukh Khan’s dashing heroes of the past to fill in the blanks.

Raees (Khan) spent his childhood running liquor for Jairaj (Atul Kulkarni), a dangerous job given that Gujarat is officially an alcohol-free state. As a young man, Raees wants to branch out into his own boozy enterprise with his best friend, Sadiq (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), much to Jairaj’s resentment. A Mumbai don named Musa (Narendra Jha) helps Raees start his business after witnessing the Gujarati beat up a warehouse full of men while using a severed goat’s head as a weapon, all because someone dared to call the bespectacled Raees “four-eyes.”

As Raees’s illegal empire expands, he draws the attention of a straitlaced cop, Inspector Majmudar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who makes it his mission to put Raees out of business. This sets up a cat-and-mouse game that is never quite as clever as one hopes.

The nature of the criminal operations in Gujarat and Mumbai makes it difficult for Raees to keep his promise to his mother that no one should ever be harmed for the sake of business. Granted, most of the people Raees kills tried to kill him first, but he willingly puts his employees in danger during one fiery political protest. There’s some retroactive rephrasing to imply that what Mom really meant was that no innocents should be harmed, but that’s not what she said (at least according to the English subtitles).

This distinction is important, because Raees goes from emphatically rejecting violence to shooting up a room full of crooks without batting an eye. Raees himself doesn’t seem bothered by the morality of his actions, and no one holds him to task. It’s as though writer-director Rahul Dholakia expects Khan’s ardent fans to see him in the role of Raees and thus assume that his character’s actions are justified, no matter what they are.

In many gangster dramas, the role of the protagonist’s conscience often goes to his love interest, but Raees’s wife Aasiya (Mahira Khan) is a willing bootlegger. Mahira Khan is something special, teasing Raees with an irresistible smirk. She’s one of the film’s highlights, and she does a fine job in her musical numbers.

The movie’s showpiece song sequence to the tune of “Laila Main Laila” is eye-catching, juxtaposing Raees’s brutality against Sunny Leone’s shimmying. The best dancing in Raees, however, is Siddiqui’s Michael Jackson impersonation, a scene that is far, far too brief.

Khan, Siddiqui, and Ayyub are all good in Raees, but they could have been even better with a script that did more to develop their characters.

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Movie Review: Lion (2016)

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lion3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Lion releases in theaters across North America on Christmas Day.

Lion‘s heart-wrenching international odyssey is carried on the tiny shoulders Sunny Pawar, the adorable star of this true story of a lost Indian boy’s attempt to find home.

5-year-old Saroo (Pawar) lives in a village in Madhya Pradesh with his preteen brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), baby sister Shekila (Khushi Solanki), and their mother (played by Priyanka Bose). Guddu and tiny Saroo do a variety of odd jobs — legal and otherwise — to supplement their mom’s wages as a laborer.

One night, Guddu takes Saroo with him on the train to look for work in a neighboring town, leaving Saroo asleep on a bench on the train platform. After Saroo wakes up alone, he searches for Guddu on an empty passenger train before dozing off in one of the seats. When Saroo wakes again, the train is moving, and it doesn’t stop for two days.

Saroo ultimately winds up in Calcutta, more than 1,000 kilometers from home. He doesn’t speak the local language, and he couldn’t explain where he was from even if he did because he’s just a little kid. As far as he knows, his mother’s full name is “Mom.”

His cleverness and adaptability help him survive on the street for months, staying fed and avoiding child traffickers. He’s so competent that it’s easy to forget that homelessness is just as new to him as the city and the language.

What makes this sequence so effective is that little Sunny Pawar is the picture of childhood vulnerability, with skinny limbs, chubby cheeks, and giant, brown eyes. His very being calls out to evolutionary parental instincts: “Protect me!” Yet, as Saroo, he’s overlooked by most adults as just another street kid. (A note at the film’s end states that 80,000 children go missing in India every year.)

Eventually, Saroo winds up in an orphanage that looks more like a prison. The staff do what they can to find the boy’s mom under the limitations of Saroo’s knowledge and communication technology circa 1986 (i.e. an ad in the local newspaper). When their efforts fail, kindly Mrs. Sood (Deepti Naval) shows Saroo a photo of John (David Wenham) and Sue (Nicole Kidman) Brierley: his new adoptive parents from Australia.

After a typical Tasmanian childhood, Saroo (played as adult by Dev Patel) moves to Melbourne for a course in hotel management, falling in with a group of international students that includes some Indians. Meeting them awakens buried memories of his birth family, inspiring a years-long quest to determine exactly where he’s from.

When Saroo starts his search in 2008, he has at his disposal the satellite images of Google Earth and tables of historic data on train speeds. Even if he’d wanted to look for his birth family at a younger age, the technology to do so wasn’t widely accessible.

Despite the cast’s star-power, most of the supporting roles feel peripheral to the story. That applies especially to Rooney Mara as Saroo’s American girlfriend, Lucy, who exists just to be pushed away by Saroo as he becomes obsessed with his research. Wenham is solid in his few scenes, and Kidman shines in a monologue about why she adopted Saroo.

An important character who could have used more screentime is Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), another orphan from India the Brierley’s adopted after Saroo. Young Mantosh (played by Keshav Jadhav) arrives in Australia with a load of emotional and behavioral problems, probably as a result of whatever accident left all the scars on his head. The boys share a fraught relationship that boils over when Saroo’s search reminds him of the kind older brother he had before Mantosh.

Bollywood fans will recognize a number of actors like Bose, Naval, and Pallavi Sharda. Stars Tannishtha Chatterjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui have small but memorable parts as well.

Patel’s performance is compelling, as Saroo’s life crumbles under the weight of trying to appease two mothers: one who’s still searching for him and another who’s afraid of losing him herself. The cocky young man who starts the program in Melbourne is gradually replaced by a shaggy haired, wild-eyed loner who hallucinates his long-lost family.

But Lion ultimately belongs to Sunny Pawar, who is quite skilled for such a young actor. It’s impossible not to fall in love with him.

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Movie Review: Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016)

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RamanRaghav23.5 Stars (out of 4)

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A man tells a woman hiding in a locked bedroom: “I can do anything to you and get away with it,.” That line is spoken not by the serial killer in Raman Raghav 2.0, but by the police officer hunting him. Being one of the “good guys” doesn’t make you a good guy.

The cop who utters the threat — Raghavan (Vicky Kaushal) — is introduced not in uniform, but at a dance club, high as a kite. His sexy intensity attracts a call girl named Simmy (Sobhita Dhulipala). She waits in her car while Raghavan pays a visit to his “uncle,” a drug dealer.

Raghavan finds the man murdered, unaware that the killer — Ramanna (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) — is still in the house. When a neighbor checks on the commotion, Raghavan’s un-cop-like reaction reveals that he’s not the hero type.

Each section of the film has its own chapter title, complete with dates. Following the events of the prologue (described above) and a trippy opening credits sequence, Chapter One jumps the story ahead two years. Ramanna turns himself into the police, claiming credit for multiple murders. Raghavan and his fellow officers assume the skinny, homeless fellow is lying, and they beat him and lock him in an abandoned building from which he escapes.

Raghavan is still with Simmy, though he treats her like garbage and won’t publicly acknowledge their relationship. The context that writer-director Anurag Kashyap and his co-writer, Vasan Bala, provide for Raghavan’s appalling behavior highlight the cop’s sense of entitlement. Raghavan is a violent drug addict because his powerful father is disappointed in him. Boo hoo.

On the other hand, Ramanna’s background makes his sadism seem almost inevitable. He’s a sexual abuse survivor who believes that he can communicate with the God of Death. At a young age, he turned his perverted rage outward, venting it on animals and his sister, Lakshmi (Amruta Subhash).

The entire sequence involving Ramanna and his sister is riveting in a gut-churning way. He turns up outside of her apartment, wondering why her six-year-old son doesn’t recognize his uncle. Lakshmi asks how Ramanna found her address. The retrained terror in Lakshmi’s eyes as she tries desperately not to do anything to provoke her brother is chilling. Subhash handles the role perfectly.

Fans who complained that Siddiqui was too understated in Te3n will not be disappointed by his crazy turn in Raman Raghav 2.0. Nevertheless, his character is at his most intimidating when he’s calm, the sinister content of his words at odds with the relaxed manner in which he delivers them.

Kaushal’s performance is likewise compelling. Whether it’s because of Raghavan’s job or the fact that Kaushal looks like a movie hero, we keep waiting for Raghavan to be a better man than he is. Dhulipala is a fitting match as world-weary Simmy, who diffuses Raghavan’s temper with glibness.

Raman Raghav 2.0 isn’t as soul-crushing as some of the South Korean thrillers of the last decade that have dealt with similar themes. Kashyap uses music to provide emotional distance during the most disturbing sequences. Ramanna’s most heinous crime is accompanied by a somewhat jazzy tune featuring a woman singing about what a bad guy he is.

Kashyap’s film is also less gory than other recent thrillers from elsewhere in Asia. Most of the violence in Raman Raghav 2.0 takes place out of frame. That, along with the prominent music and evocative city scenery give Kashyap’s film a real Indian identity, in contrast to recent Hindi remakes of South Korean movies that barely deviate from the original (such as Rocky Handsome).

There is one element to the Raman Raghav 2.0 that confused me. The movie opens with a note that Raman Raghav was an infamous serial killer in Mumbai in the 1960s. As the story progresses, Ramanna repeatedly states that he is Raman, and “Raman needs Raghav.” Wouldn’t that be like someone saying, “Charles needs Manson”?

That confusion aside, Raman Raghav 2.0 sews up every loose thread, answers every question. It’s not a movie for the squeamish, but it is a gripping character study about the darkness lurking in the human heart.

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