Nila Madhab Panda’s film, a children’s version of Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, might have worked as a concise short film, but at some point in a two-hour-long story, the tone gets self-righteous and repetitive, and the politics whitewashed

What do you say about a film that contains the most exasperating thirty minutes as well as the most enthralling thirty minutes of the year?

There’s a twist at the interval of Satyameva Jayate that left me truly gobsmacked. Mostly because I couldn’t really believe that legitimate human beings are given millions of rupees to execute these ideas. With full consent. Without a gun to their heads. Or kerosene on their bodies. In 2018. The Gods must be crazy. 

Mulk, though, is a reminder that we are all part of that courtroom. Being surprised is a condescending emotion – and inherently a product of our own preconceived notions. It is also a reminder that the right film in this country is often better than a good one. Raazi was an example, but it was perhaps Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar that had already conditioned us expect a skillful take on the rift between mulk and mazhab. In contrast, I came out of Sinha’s film admittedly humbled, and of the belief that verdicts are best delivered after the closing statements.

Nobody seems to have told the makers that the script is daft enough to ensure that Race 3 wasn’t the worst film of Anil Kapoor’s year

If only this series had revolved around some deliciously convoluted method to eliminate real gangsters – imagine Saheb and Biwi’s mind games as a warped brand of social vigilantism. If a criminal can’t be rehabilitated, simply throw him into their clutches. But alas, this country will run out of figurative gangsters before an Indian couple acknowledges divorce as a solution.

Soorma doesn’t rouse as much as it should. It doesn’t stop to feel its own heart beat. It tick-marks all the boxes and explores none. The goalposts are broadened – it drags home the same age-old clichés, and flicks our sensibilities by the wayside.

Other than the way things are shown in director Stefano Sollima’s sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 film, there’s nothing new about what it shows…

From the trailer itself, it was clear that Remo D’Souza’s Race 3 would be a shameful exercise in Botox-injected vanity because its hero is also the co-producer. But there’s a strange kind of smug awfulness attached to this sequel. Even though the first two installments were ridiculous, there was something infectiously silly about them – because we knew they were conceived by two small little Indian uncles dressed in pristine colour-coded whiteness in an effort to come up with bombastic ideas to out-spy James Bond. The self-seriousness, naivety and datedness were almost cute – like watching our analogue dads trying to figure out the latest smartphone.

Motwane, too, much like his mentor Anurag Kashyap, proves that he is prone to indulgence – not the good kind – at the worst of times. It’s difficult, no doubt, to be such a solid craftsman that the landscape demands from you the willingness to experiment with different genres. It’s a pressure not unfamiliar to those like Kashyap – who have so many skills at their disposal that anything is possible. But that is a happy problem to have, like the batsman with plenty of time and options to execute a shot. It shouldn’t be a dull, derivative and depressing problem, like the superhero that relies on cameras and clicks to outline his legend.