ven at this modest running length, Kya Dilli Kya Lahore feels stretched and half-baked, less of a big-screen experience and better suited to an intimate stage production. The accusations and counter-accusations traded by Samarth and Rehmat—much of it in un-subtitled Punjabi—aren’t particularly insightful about the intractable problems plaguing both nations, while the overwhelming sense of nostalgia for an undivided India doesn’t do the Pakistanis justice.

The movie feels a few decades old despite moments and ideas stolen from Guy Ritchie’s anachronism-packed Sherlock Holmes films and the popular British series Sherlock.

Revolver Rani has a bit too much going on at any given point, but it is cast well and has an interesting set of actors who give the material much-needed heft. Vir Das makes a convincing foil to Alka’s brusqueness, balancing the comedy of his daily tortures that result from Alka’s blinkered love with the tragedy of his pawn status.

The overly busy screenplay, which clocks at 155 minutes, is packed with so many ideas that it unfolds at the pace of a multi-phase election. A documentary montage of poor Indians is one of many heavy-handed gestures in a movie that could have benefitted without them.

For a movie that asks birds in particular and nature in general to be left alone, Saldanha can’t resist anthropomorphising the creatures to the extent that they sound and behave an awful lot like humans. Perhaps this franchise needs to be more bird-brained than it is at the moment.

As if to compensate, there are ample displays of Varun’s sculpted body, his fighting skills, his dancing abilities, and his general heroism. The title says it all.

As city films and portraits of ordinary people taking a step towards an extraordinary light go, Aankhon Dekhi is an enjoyable confection, delivered by an ensemble cast, especially Sarao as Bauji’s daughter and the ever-dependable Brijendra Kala as his partner in crime, that brings immense energy and vitality to the show.

Of all the tributes to Sampat Pal’s debatable feminist politics, this one is the narrowest, and the silliest.

With more thunder thighs than in a Silk Smitha retrospective, 300’s sequel displays yet again the perils of pitting bare-chested fighters against a cavalry of archers. More clothes could do the trick in the inevitable sequel, in which The Man with the Golden Underwear will be given more to do than just distract audiences from the unrelenting carnage.

It’s only when the monuments men realize that the Nazis have stashed away the art in various mines that the movie belatedly gets going. The fact that Oscar-nominated cinematographer Phedon Papamichael doesn’t deliver a single artistically composed and lit frame to showcase the fabulous paintings being saved, tells you everything you need to know about this shadow of a sketch of the impact of war on art.