As we go through our humdrum living getting accustomed to regularity and blind to the unfamiliar, a story like Traffic gives us a reason to reflect on this extraordinary world that we live in. That is perhaps worth the dough you shell out at the box-office.

Ideally, you’d leave this film alone and befriend Netflix this weekend. However, if you have a ritual where you visit a movie hall every weekend, and you can satisfy yourself with good-looking people and good-looking frames, and you are very clear that you’ll watch no film where you might need subtitles, then you can perhaps catch Baaghi.

DiCaprio’s may be an effortful and even masterful performance, but it isn’t a great one. Just like how the film is effortfully and masterfully made but will not be remembered or even re-watched after the hype dies down. What’s missing, we can’t easily articulate. We can’t give it a name. But we can tell you where to look for it – Tom Hardy’s performance.

The striking thing about Aligarh, as with Shahid, is that it doesn’t give in to the temptation of having to make someone else a villain. There is subtle bespeaking of the less-than-noble intentions of the university administration, but there is no scene where they are actively being villainous. The film just doesn’t dwell on them, and spends its time on its protagonist’s story alone. If you finally feel he had been given a bad deal, then the film has registered its success without having to point a finger at anyone.

Neerja stops being a well-made but rather distant film about a hijack and a hero, and transforms into a souvenir you’ll hold close to your heart. You now have to look at it from the mother’s moist eyes. You’ll have to register the indescribable difficulty of never being able to see her child again. But you’ll also have to comprehend her steeling up to the responsibility her daughter’s sacrifice entails for her – of staying strong and spreading the inspiration.

For an audience used to templates, formulae and stereotypes, it is interesting to see a hero who isn’t about landing blows on the enemy but about taking blow after blow and still trudging on. It is even more interesting where patriotism isn’t about hating someone with a passion but loving our own people and doing something, anything, for them.

It doesn’t try to entertain. Not for a long while, at least. Therefore, much of the mainstream audience is out. The more vocal ones will dismiss it as a proper film. Further, it doesn’t emphasise on the viscerality that Tarantino is known for – there is violence, of course, but it isn’t the point of the film. But that’s possibly because the so-called ‘gratuitous’ violence just met with some ‘gratuitous’ chopping at the censor board. That accounts for the sleeping members in the audience. For a lot of people, it would be quite unfathomable on why the film even got made.

…this is the most festive release this week, and barring those rather minor flaws you’ll find lots of reasons to like Soggaade Chinni Naayana. Might as well take the risk, eh?

It’s like opening the newspaper to find a small four-panel comic, chuckling, being moved, and moving on.

Historical inaccuracies aren’t new or undesirable to Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind is a bare shadow of Slyvia Nasser’s book). His strengths usually lie in bending real incidents to suit his drama requirements. If he’d stuck just to thrills or just to drama, the film would have been greatly satisfying. However, he attempts more here and ends up with less. A pity.