The insipid writing, functional performances by an ensemble cast that includes Satish Kaushik, Kitu Gidwani and Parmeet Sethi, and contrived emotions add up into a stale serving of a cinematic sub-category that has run its course.

In Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (Mexican slang for hitman), Del Toro plays Escobar’s ghost. Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay tries to imagine what it would be like if Escobar re-entered a game whose power centre has moved to the borders of the US. What might the Colombian, who died in a shootout in 1993, and whose Medellin cartel self-destructed soon after, make of the levels of brutality in Mexico that exceed the imaginations of the most lurid-minded scriptwriters?

Sanjay Gupta’s remake of a Korean hit is designed as a comeback vehicle for Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, but Irrfan holds sway all the way.
The movie loses momentum after the interval and the contradictions pile up as in a train wreck, but there is always a scorchingly lit corner in a never before-seen shade of yellow or green to gaze upon.

Talvar makes an elegant and convincing case for the Talwars, but it ignores one of the biggest factors behind their conviction. A separate, cautionary tale can be spun on how news anchors in hot pursuit of ratings and tabloid-influenced editors stacked the odds against the couple. Avirook Sen’s book Aarushi provides several instances of how unverified claims about the private lives of the Talwars created an unassailable image of the dentists as scheming and swinging monsters.

The latest movie from the director of Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated has nothing to give and is most uncomplicated. The novelty factor of the premise of Nancy Meyers’s The Intern and the casting wears off within the first hour. The rest of the running time is spent on padding up the potentially interesting but severely underdeveloped encounter between generations.

…a throwback to the 1980s and ’90s, when comedies featuring clandestinely bigamous and harried husbands were common enough to qualify as a sub-genre. In television star Kapil Sharma’s big-screen debut, the stakes are doubled: his character Bholu has three wives, none of whom knows about each others and none of whom he particularly cares for, as well as a girlfriend he actually loves.

The killings are swift, brutal and plentiful, executed with a businesslike chill that hangs over the whole movie. Black Mass is a better adaptation of non-fiction books than most, but the experience is ultimately as cold as Bulger’s heart.

…the 128-minute takes its own sweet time to get around to whatever it wants to convey – which is, in its cheerfully nihilistic way, nothing. As six kidnappers hatch frequent plots to amass money in the canteen of the college where they are supposedly enrolled as students, the screenplay luxuriates in their insouciant banter and complete lack of urgency.

Everest takes us right to the top but is in such a hurry to get back to base camp that it ignores a question posed by travel journalist Jon Krakauer’s character to the summiteers: why is scaling Mount Everest so important? The struggle between human will and the mountain’s unbending nature is conveyed in the most basic and obvious terms. The movie shows us how the climbers reached the top, but isn’t interested in understanding why some of them died.

The humour misses its mark and the romantic entanglement rarely locks into place. This is a rom-com low on rom as well as com.