Raja Natwarlal has some smarts but tragically lacks the skill or the sleight-of-hand. When we sit down to a con movie, we shouldn’t be able to see what will happen next — we want to be finessed into the con. We’re already watching closely, you see.

The action is daft-but-enjoyable in the beginning but soon gets repetitive, no thanks to the audience forced to plug up ears with their fingers.

If I were to review it in one word, I’d say Ek Villain is… Unnecessary. Given free tickets, sure, you could escape Humshakals in theatres this weekend with this mediocre effort, but I say do yourself a favour and seek out the Korean DVD. (Uncover it, even.) Now that’s bloody special.

Holiday is about the brave men and women fearlessly serving the nation and making sure you rest easy. The men and women who take on unthinkable odds, waking up and rushing to theatres first thing in the morning to catch a movie starring the hero and heroine from Joker and made by the guy who made Ghajini.

We watch, and we warn, so you may not have to. Because a critic is never off duty.

Kochadaiiyaan, alas, is a fundamentally flawed dud, one without anything to applaud besides grand (if self-glorifying) ambition. And little is as heartbreaking to witness as utterly failed ambition.

The new Spider-Man film gets everything wrong except the girl.
For now we can go home, turn up the real Spider-Man 2 and watch Peter Parker try to deliver pizza.

Bhoothnath Returns has a few laughs but it ignores the basics. Despite the hiccups, the film is relatively strong up until midway, when suddenly, without warning, it turns into a poor-people montage, a bewildering collection of moments showing poverty and riots — set to song, no less — and ending in a bunch of stills of people pushing carts and pulling rickshaws and looking perfectly happy with their lives, if a trifle puzzled by the photographers.

O Teri, despite being loud enough to jolt any laash alive, targets the right scumbags and has more than a couple of fun ideas, not least a soothsaying dog who — like Paul the Octopus, or a particularly cute magic 8-ball — predicts the future. Now if only they’d kept the pooch around during the edit.

It seems exasperating that with this amazing story — and, indeed, these stakes — Clooney couldn’t bring about a rousing, breast-beating, educative motion picture. Such paintings, such sculptures, such little art.

Director Ali Abbas Zafar has directed a monstrous film, one with a repellent 70s-set storyline that makes no sense whatsoever, and a cast who should all hang their heads and offer up a minute’s silence for assaulting their respective filmographies.