The film hangs on a plot thinner than a strand of hair: Wild, untamed boy Ronny (Tiger) is sent by his father to a Kalaripayattu guru to get trained in martial arts. Before you can say “another Karate Kid?” there’s also a Tezaab inspiration lurking in the background.

There are plot points you could nitpick on but at the end of the day Nil Battey Sannata remains a warm, feel-good film which offers hope and the promise of upward mobility that doesn’t depend on the social strata you come from but your own will and diligence.

A jumbled up messy film, Laal Rang could have done with a little more focus. It lacks spit-and-polish and style. There are no frills and flourishes, no slickness to the filmmaking. That, ironically, is its strength, the reason why it feels so real.

It’s rarely that I have seen an audience step out of the theatre so sombrely after a Shah Rukh Khan movie. Perhaps in the mood and flow of the film which isn’t quite as light-hearted and feel-good as SRK starrers are preordained to be. Fan is completely out of SRK’s comfort zone. There is hardly any romance, not a single song, little to laugh about. Instead there is plenty of action, chases and unbridled emotions of the very dark and serious kind – in a film that’s all about a fan’s pursuit of the star and then the star trying to hunt down the fan.

‘Love Games’ is a C Grade film trying hard to be cool (pitches itself as urban-thriller) making it worse for itself. If the whole point of giving us a truly adult film was to tom-tom the sexually expletive terms well, then what more can one say?

The ‘thriller’ boasts of not a single edge of the seat moment. You wait for things to happen but nothing consequential does. The film comes in the midst of a debate about legalisation of marijuana, for medicinal as well as cultural reasons. This could have been a cracker of a film to take the debate forward. But it prefers to remain hazy and tepid in a pointless world of its own.

Ki & Ka stays sympathetic with Ka and speaks with the hero’s voice. Not only does he take care of the home well but will eventually be the protector of the woman and thereby prove his manliness (‘chaddi check’) too. Meanwhile, in the time-honoured tradition of Hindi movies, it portrays the ambitious woman as the one who is, eventually, in the wrong.

An adaptation can always be done with one’s own distinct touch. But Rocky Handsome is happy and satisfied in living off borrowed aesthetics even while clinging to its Indian self for all the wrong reasons. It ends up being neither here nor there. The nowhere film alienates, makes for a pronounced disconnect and also makes one long for the return of the good old fashioned, home grown Indian action hero who knew what he stood for. I will take a Ghayal Once Again over this any day.

Like Piku, Batra brings the family, parent-child relationship under the scanner in Kapoor & Sons but he doesn’t quite rebel against or throw away the construct entirely. He questions the family only to reassert its primacy.

Despite the shrillness and breathlessness of action it deals with a significant issue in all seriousness. A film that might be loud but does talk sense.