The most effective and affecting thing about the film is, it’s glimpse of the fecund and fertile Punjabi pop/folk industry and how the unassuming kings of that world (who are offered seats by fans in crowded local buses) could lose their identity and get exploited when they head to the city. That story deserves a standalone film.

Filmmaker Raja Krishna Menon fashions a taut, engaging feature film out of an incident which would, on paper, appear to be more worthy of a documentary.

Bachchan is reliable as ever, particularly with grief written all over his broken face…It’s Farhan of the first half, plunging the depths of emotions, who makes you take note of him as a dramatic performer. However, by the time we get to the end even he seems jaded and lacklustre. Like the film itself.

The deliberate attempt to repackage and sell the Kajol-SRK romance of yore backfires, seeming like a pale shadow of the magic there once was. The two seem like caricatures of Raj-Simran. Much water has flown under the bridge and all that. Yes, nostalgia can, at times, suck. So Gerua can’t be a patch on Sooraj hua maddham. And Shetty can’t a Chopra-Johar be.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali returns with another visual spectacle that wilfully takes liberties with the past that it depicts. But it does manage to engage even as it exhausts.

Perhaps because what the film portrays doesn’t quite go beyond the newspaper headlines, there are no new insights, perspectives to enlighten, added to what you already know nor is there anything to jolt you. Perhaps we have become too inured. Or may be the film needed to be more intense than it has turned out.

Things get way too predictable with twists and turns that are a yawn. The dialogue is cringeworthy with archaic gems like “Kab tak bekasoor auraton ke aanchal ke peeche chhupta rahega” (How long will you hide behind an innocent woman). If you were to take the film seriously then women who possess brains along with beauty are dangerous. The plot, incidentally, is Maggi-inspired. How?

Tamasha goes a step ahead from these seminal questions to dwell on something even more significant: finding your true, inner self that has been lost in the robotic work life, to discover and embrace the clown lurking behind the automaton in you. In that sense Tamasha could well be the next part in the Ranbir Kapoor-In-Evolution series of Hindi cinema that boasts of films like Wake Up Sid, Rockstar and Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani.

Watching X: Past is Present is like being in a trance or a dream. Some moments remain vivid even after the film gets over, others way too hazy to recollect. There is a big idea here, which gets communicated to the viewer at times and eludes at others. The film moves from moments of instant connect to those which demand that the viewer see things from a distance.

Perhaps it’s my own fatigue with the Bond franchise and the knowledge of exactly where it will go and how things will turn out that makes the old-fashioned and nicely campy Spectre not as gripping a ride as I would have wanted it to be.