The word ‘Omerta’ means a code of silence that members of crime groups adopt when caught by the law. This film shows us how Omar was happy to kill in the name of religion. The staccato storytelling style and the constant shift between past and present is distracting at best. Unfortunately there is no emotional takeaway from the story, so you watch the stabbings and the kidnappings wondering ‘what was that?’

Is it a comedy? Is it horror? Is it social drama? Is it funny? Is it a weird love story? No one quite knows and when everything is piled on so thick, you begin to wonder as audience if you have lost your capacity to care. The background music is ideal for saturday morning cartoons and is so loud you want to order ear plugs. At 132.47 minutes, you idly wonder if they would be easily delivered before you would turn permanently deaf.

Majid Majidi comes to India and falls for the poverty is beautiful trap. After that, he simply rolls from one cliche to another and another until you just shake your head in despair. Ishan Khattar who makes his debut shows flashes of talent and is let down by a 70s style poverty porn. And the other star of the film is the city itself. But that just isn’t enough to make you want to spend multiplex money.

Four lads and a girl are at a school reunion and are happily partying when they accidentally run over someone. They find themselves trapped in an old abandoned factory at the mercy of a madman. The terror is doubled because the protagonists are speech and hearing impaired. It’s an interesting experiment but the loud background music fails many, many times. As does the overacting.

Shoojit Sircar has managed to turn a singing, dancing, goofball called Varun Dhawan and shown us that the lad can get the audience to cry and laugh and be on his side. October is an unlikely film for Bollywood so used to boy meets girl and falls in love narrative, that a story about human empathy is rare. The film falters because it takes it own time and feels like it is stuck in a loop, but if you are patient, the reward is wonderful.

Sushant Dubey and Aparna Dubey check into a Mauritian resort late night with their very unwell daughter Titli. By the morning, the child is missing. Everything literally begins to unravel as you watch cringeworthy hamming from greats like Tabu and Manoj Bajpayee. To add to the mess Annu Kapoor shows up as a cop overacting as always. It’s been touted as a ‘murder-mystery’, because they murdered cinema and it will be a mystery why these good actors chose to ‘act’ in this film.

A toilet paper salesman attempts to infuse some life into his marriage and comes home early to find his wife in bed with another man. Instead of confronting them, he chooses to blackmail them. This sets off a series of what ifs and what then scenes that seem super chaotic and funny, but nothing makes you really care. If Irrfan Khan weren’t as talented as he is, this film would have fallen apart within fifteen minutes.

Hollywood gave us Rambo and his ilk in the late 80s. Bollywood seems to be still stuck there. Baaghi 2 is pure homage to these bad action flicks. It’s full of corny manufactured situations and characters, and dialog that make you choke on the cheese nachos. So bad, it’s good.

An honest Income Tax officer leads a team in a raid to find hidden assets of a local heavy, a political leader, at his bungalow called ‘White House’. The dialog is tight, the good guys are as smart as the bad guys are clever, the danger seems real and it’s money well spent when you watch this film. If only the thrill of watching money tumbling out of walls was not marred by silly songs and a whiny wife.

If you manage to stay awake during the first half, which is wasted entirely in establishing the ‘quirky-ness’ of the characters, then you’ll wonder if the second half is from another script altogether. But not even Taapsee Pannu’s little chirpy gal turned corporate act nor Saqib Saleem’s daft selfish lad in love act can save this film. When the two fall into the Thames (or is it the sea?), you wish they will never be rescued…