This is a giant film, a magnum opus drunk on its own magnum-ity, and it is perfectly clear early on, as the narrative races out the gate and gauntlets are flung up in the air and shot through with arrows, that a film like this can only work as opera.

At 148 minutes, I’m not certain Spectre is the longest Bond film of all time, but — and here’s the rub — it certainly feels like it, and it doesn’t help that Mendes exhausts his bag of tricks very early on. The pre-credits scene, the banter with M, the Aston sequence, the villain’s reveal, the Monica Bellucci cameo… all those marvellous switches are flicked on in rapid succession, leaving barely anything for the tedious last hour of the film.

A film that tells its tale with calculated intent — coolly, cleverly, taking its time — mirroring the dry panache of its self-assured protagonist…

The actors work the scene sincerely but it could have been so much more.

Instead, Behl chooses not to look away when a character throws up in a sickeningly long scene, so long it feels gratuitous.

Because there’s a difference between showing the retching and the wretched.

It looks spiffy and there’s some gloss to like, but overall Shaandaar is pretty much — as Alia calls the fourth finger of each hand — useless.

It is the kind of film that several Indian filmmakers, forever mired by convention, should be made to watch in order to understand how the truly gifted can celebrate classicism instead of being trapped by it.

Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 contains some genuine belly laughs, and would have been perfect were it not for its feature-length running time…

Jazbaa is a mercifully brief movie, just about two hours long, but that’s about it in terms of the good part…

Puli wastes Sridevi on a silly, boring fantasy…

A tightly-coiled procedural made with such dryness that it seems, in parts, documentarian — resembling a reenactment more than a feature film — Talvar is one of those rare films that remains constantly aware of what it is doing and what buttons it is pushing.