Echoing films as diverse as Oldboy and Slumdog Millionaire, director Aditya Datt creates a reality game show-revenge saga that gathers some steam in the last act, but by then it’s too little, too late.

My review of Dabangg ended with a plea for a better story for Chulbul. Like so much else in Dabangg 2, that too remains the same. Can someone please write a terrific plot for this terrific character?

Zero Dark Thirty is deeply disturbing. There are scenes here that you can’t watch and yet you can’t look away. This film is gripping and visceral, in ways that can’t be explained but should be experienced.

If I wasn’t so exhausted, I would have been offended. Box office figures suggest that many people enjoy this school of cheerfully moronic cinema, but Khiladi 786 really isn’t my idea of a good time.

It helps enormously that the waiter is played by Shah Rukh Khan with charm turned on high-beam. In any case, you don’t go to a Yash Chopra movie to delve into realism or the messiness of relationships. You go to partake in a fantasy of swooning, idealised love – and Jab Tak Hai Jaan delivers plenty of that.

Karan Johar’s forte is excess. He creates fantastical worlds brimming with beautiful people and expensive things and yet anchors them in high emotion. His films work as both designer porn and soap opera.

By the end, I was clapping and rooting for the fly. How many films can get you emotionally invested in an insect? Makkhi is a mad roller coaster ride that’s worth taking.

Aiyyaa is a bewilderingly odd film. Rani is delightful as a woman in heat.She expertly manages to be both a simpleton and a seductress. She looks stunning and dances like a dervish. But the film can’t match her performance. Kundalkar’s story soon runs out of charm and wit. His lovely idea and original voice is stretched to the point where even Rani’s mannerisms start to feel repetitive.

English Vinglish falters in the second half. The pace drops and Shashi’s English class seems like an outtake of Mind Your Language, the successful television series about a motley group of people learning English. There’s also a clumsy sub-track about Shashi’s English teacher being gay, complete with a sermon on equality.

OMG Oh My God! is about something that touches all our lives – religion. It is a film about our relationship with God, how instead of being God-loving, we have become God-fearing. How religion has become a business run by godmen (here aptly referred to as ‘salesmen’) who aren’t in fact very spiritual at all. A note to atheists and agnostics – the film is not an endorsement of those views. It insists on the existence of God.