Member Reviews

पहले एक सच्ची कहानी सुन लीजिए। 1965 में हुई भारत-पाकिस्तान की जंग में भारतीय वायु सेना ने पाकिस्तान के भीतर तक घुस कर उनके सरगोधा एयर-बेस को न सिर्फ बुरी तरह तबाह कर दिया था बल्कि अमेरिका से उन्हें तोहफे में मिले बहुत सारे लड़ाकू जहाजों को भी नष्ट कर दिया था जबकि वे जहाज भारत के लड़ाकू जहाजों से कई गुना बेहतर थे। इस अभियान में एक भारतीय लड़ाकू विमान भी नष्ट हो गया था और उसका पायलट लापता। वायु सेना ने उस पायलट ए.बी. देवैया को ’मिसिंग इन एक्शन’ घोषित कर दिया लेकिन उसके करीबी विंग कमांडर तनेजा को हमेशा लगता रहा कि वह पायलट जीवित है। क्या हुआ था उस पायलट के साथ…? क्या वह सचमुच लापता हो गया था…? मर गया था…? या फिर…!

Sweet Dreams has a sweet premise. It begins with a J.R.R. Tolkien quote, setting the stage for a fantasy-coded romcom. And it opens with a dreamy date between a flirty Diya (Mithila Palkar) and the cool Kennith (Amol Parashar) at a cafe. We soon learn that this is a shared dream between two strangers — a recurring habit for both — leading completely different lives. Kennith, an influencer and recycle artist, is newly single and he speaks to his psychiatrist (Faye D’Souza; a surprise-but-meek cameo) about this mysterious girl he keeps meeting in his dreams. He’s convinced she exists. Diya, a career drifter who writes and sings, is in an autopilot relationship with Ishant (Meiyang Chang); she, too, is baffled by how real and tangible her dreams feel. The film follows their attempts to find each other and (re)unite.

“This will be a tour about pain,” cautions James, the earnest British guide shepherding a group of American Jews on a tour of Poland. The small group includes David and Benji, two cousins from New York on a visit to Poland to honour their recently deceased grandmother Dori, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. Best known for this starring role as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg writes, directs and stars in this holocaust comedy playing David, who like Eisenberg, suffers from OCD and anxiety disorder. David has a regular job, a wife and child and uses pills to deal with his anxiety. He’s socially awkward and envies Benji’s ease and charm. Benji road-rolls his cousin and trivialises his life choices.

This week last year, a film released that seemed to epitomise popular Hindi cinema’s decline over a decade. Fighter might have set out to cash in on the success of Top Gun: Maverick, but it played like an advertisement for the sitting government at the centre. Releasing months before the general elections, the film—like Uri: The Surgical Strike in 2019—showed the prime minister as capable commander in chief while engaging in hysterical Pakistan-baiting. “Unhe dikhaana padega ki baap kaun hai (we’ll show them who daddy is),” the PM in the film says, a statesman-like sentiment befitting a Republic Day release. Sky Force also takes a ‘baap’ jab at Pakistan, but it’s a half-hearted swipe. As a fighter pilot film releasing on the weekend of 26 January, there are certain jingoistic beats directors Sandeep Kewlani and Abhishek Anil Kapur must feel they have to hit. And they do, but their heart isn’t in it. On the face of it, there’s not much to recommend this film—it’s underwritten, square and tries to pull off elaborate action on a clearly insufficient budget. But where Fighter tends towards rabid nationalism, Sky Force stumbles awkwardly in search of reconciliation.

There are two ways to be disappointed with Sky Force. One, through the lens of its creators. Up until now, the production company Maddock Films — on a high following the dizzying success of its horror-comedy multiverse — has managed to innovate and stay interesting without conforming to mass trends and jingoistic patterns. It’s worth noting that Sky Force is its first real foray into this zone. But within the contours of the herd-mentality move, it tries something different. It chooses to dramatise a real-life story that’s equal parts war movie and investigative drama.

A year ago, almost to the day, when Fighter released and didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, director Siddharth Anand put forth a bizarre claim. He said that the Hrithik Roshan-Deepika Padukone starrer, described by its makers as “India’s first aerial action film”, had not found much favour with the audience because “90 per cent of Indians haven’t flown in planes”. By that logic, one would have to be an Italian mafioso to appreciate The Godfather. The good thing is that you don’t have to sign up for a fighter pilot licence before you walk in for a show of Sky Force. This bi-annual Akshay Kumar deshbhakti dose — ‘a fictional story inspired by real events’ — has the kind of thrill and drama that every viewer, brought up on a steady diet of Bollywood patriotic films, is familiar with. Which is both a good and a bad thing.

Have you spared a minute to check if your bank balance has an insignificant discrepancy? Would you invest precious time and energy to make the bank accountable for Rs 27.50? It’s precisely this common customer lethargy that makes suave and merry Micky Mehta (Neil Nitin Mukesh) make dizzy sums like Rs 20,000 crore. Small amounts that don’t tally, interest credited just a day later, inconsequential figures that account holders ignore. Micky preys on just this customer ignorance to live life like a party. But there’s always one aam insaan whose brain works like a calculator. Senior Ticket Collector Radhe Mohan Sharma (R Madhavan) arrives laden with oranges that he generously shares with passengers. “I don’t touch stolen goods,” huffs passenger P Subhash (Kirti Kulhari). His enthusiastic reply about taking oranges to balance what the fruit seller owed him as change, delightfully introduces Radhe’s quirk. Debits and credits must tally. He’d once rejected a marriage proposal too because the girl was weak in Maths.

The title of director Dhinakaran Sivalingam’s debut film Bottle Radha makes its intentions clear. It is about alcohol addiction, and it is about Radhamani, who is an alcoholic. While there is no doubt that the movie trains all its focus firmly on Radhamani and his seemingly never-ending tryst with the bottle, some of the best moments of the film comes in the scenes involving his wife Anjalam. This is also due to the fact that Bottle Radha feels like being an anonymous fly during one of the many meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it is the portions involving Anjalam gives the movie a refreshing change of pace. The opening shot of Bottle Radha is a drone shot that captures the expanse of the Chennai city that is not often shown in our films. We see Radhamani creating a ruckus over being admonished for coming drunk to work. Interestingly, the entire opening stretch wonderfully introduces the world of Radhamani, and how despite being around near and dear, the allure of the bottle takes him to unsavoury places. Again, the places he goes to might not seem really dire, but the look on Anjalam’s face when he comes home drunk says a lot more than what pages of dialogues could do. She feels insulted. She feels violated. She feels neglected. She feels distraught. And all that she can do is stand resolutely with tears streaming down her face. But Radhamani doesn’t see any of this because he is blinded by the booze, and when one things leads to another, and he finds himself arrested by the police, Bottle Radha decides to take a different route to tackle the issue of addiction.