Ultimately, Murugadoss makes you wonder if you should be making a movie simply because you’re allowed to make a movie.

When there are so many factors going against a movie, you expect the story to compensate things. Sadly it’s paper thin, and crumbles under the weight of the film’s mediocrity. You might argue that it’s unfair to compare City Lights to Metro Manila, and that this film was made only for those who aren’t familiar with the original film, but those people do deserve better, more polished material.

A disaster of a film with terrible animation…

The best thing that could be said about Heropanti is that it is not as terrible as Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar films. The second best thing about it is that Tiger Shroff may be effeminate, but he’s a likable guy who can do some truly amazing stunts.

It has hints of pulp, a dash of slapstick, a helping of noir, some serious drama, shootouts. But the pulp is not pulpy enough, the comedy is not funny, the action is lame, and our heroine Rani, played by the wonderful Kangana Ranaut has nothing to do except overcompensate for the film’s half-baked nature.

Dharma’s trademark visual style and a few moments of comedy aside, 2 States is mostly a chore and periodically infuriating. The filmmakers had a chance to go against all odds and make a classic and they blew it. Critical appreciation might not be the film’s target anyway, because it’s been marketed well enough to make a truckload of money.

As a result, a rare, powerful story of how a young girl was able to get justice for herself has been turned into a film that tries to cash in on India’s surging interest in women’s rights and violence against women. Lakshmi is a hero to lakhs of distraught women across the country. She deserves a well-made film; not manipulative, awfully directed, woefully shot, soulless tripe.

There is a good film somewhere within Gunday, and I wish it showed its face fully. This is the film where a shootout in the movie theater ends with Bala firing a bullet through the screen and Alisha Chinoy’s ‘I love you’ echoing as the screen literally tears apart. I wish they made that movie instead of this uninteresting one.

…the worst thing about Jai Ho is neither the lousy jokes nor the turgid songs, it’s the antiquated and aggressively stupid attempts at emotional wrangling. You get gaudy dramatic music when a woman receives an urgent kidney transplant from her son in law. You get a 30+ year old ‘brilliant’ college student who commits suicide because of a traffic jam. You get a set of goons who gel their hair, drive posh cars, wear gansta hoodies, play rap music and boast about raping women.

Miss Lovely breaks a lot of Bollywood rules. You can bristle at its indulgences but, I’ll still root for a movie that fiddles with the rules over an easy commercial one. Especially if it has a climax that features blood and a Nazia Hassan song.