…well-judged performances, richly atmospheric cinematography, attractive production design, and further proof that advances in computer-generated imagery tend to make human beings redundant. A good-looking muddle about men, machines and money

Like most films of its type, Lone Survivor works fine as long as its characters maintain their fingers on the trigger and keep the armaments industry in the black. It’s when they stop firing and start looking around them that the overall lack of geopolitical sensitivity becomes painfully apparent.

Of all the genres that Bhagat dips into for the mish-mash that is One By Two, the gross-out American comedy was an ill-advised choice.

Every nation wants a biopic that reminds it of a time when it produced great souls. Accordingly, Mandela is drenched in nobility. Given the difficulties that Mandela and his fellow South Africans have endured, it’s possible to ignore the two-hanky sentimentality, soaring finale and the experience of a half-done portrait that’s waiting for a more clear-eyed artist.

What we get from Jai Ho the movie: Salman Khan saves his family honour and, by extension, the honour of the nation, in slow motion, single-handedly dispenses a battalion of baddies, rattles off repeat-value dialogue, romances a freshly excavated young female whom we might never see on screen again, divests himself of his upper garment and wriggles his bottom.

Indeed, the entire experience, in which visual and sound are inseparable, is designed to satirise the very small-town nostalgia that is the movie’s most accessible legacy. Om-Dar-Ba-Dar is the original vernacular spectacle that has been endlessly imitated by advertising, music video and popular cinema.

Made solely to keep costume designers, prop suppliers and computer effects providers orphaned after the wrap of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator gainfully employed, The Legend of Hercules reduces the torturous life story of its storied Greek hero to a few, easily comprehensible words.

It’s a zeitgeist film, of course, given all that has happened on Wall Street and the rest of the world in recent times, but it’s also a study of addiction, to money, drugs, sex and the kind of outré hedonism that now seems outright obscene. The movie doesn’t have a single totemic image that captures the obscene wealth and privilege on display—there is no Antilla, no Scarface cocaine bath. Rather, the parade of outrageousness continues from the beginning to the end, dominated by DiCaprio’s smarmy visage that suggests a Gatsby gone irredeemably rogue and transformed into a coked-out raging bull.

The never-ending turn of events is eventually as tiresome as a junk food binge, but the colours, shapes and inventive fruits and vegetables are truly ravishing, and some of them stake their claim to Minion-level cuteness.

Khan, who was billed as one of the big draws of the latest Dhoom, turns out to be one of its biggest liabilities. Pushing his body to the limit but limiting his facial movements, Khan sets himself up for a year’s worth of supply of parody through attempts to convey determination and purpose by knitting his brows together.