Despite its flaws, I find myself looking back at Dil Dhadakne Do and smiling.
Dil Dhadakne Do translates to let the heart beat.

The heart, it wants what it wants, and that’s all very well, especially if it wants the kind of watery climaxes where hugs solve everything.

But ah, how I wish this film hadn’t gone doggystyle.

Bombay Velvet is an obviously shallow film, an all-out retro masala-movie with homage on the rocks and cocktail-shakers brimming with cliche…

It is a film with tremendous heart — one that made me guffaw and made me weep and is making sure I’m smiling wide just thinking about it now — but also a sharp film, with nuanced details showing off wit, progressive thought and insightful writing.

Take a bow, Juhi Chaturvedi, this is some of the best, most fearless writing I’ve seen in Hindi cinema in a while.

Even as an exploitative gimmick, it could have been used more cleverly, but here we have a full-length cinematic equivalent of Bali Brahmbhatt’s Gabbar Mix. Using the very name of the most fearsome villain in our cinema should mean something, but here it just gives the filmmakers an excuse to cast a dark-skinned actor as an executioner just so Akshay can tease him (even though he’s just an innocent fellow doing his job) with the “Tera kya hoga Kaaliya?” line. Ugh.

Stay away from theatres, I’d say. 50-kos away, even.

This is the first truly great film of 2015. It is a film worth watching and recommending and loving, like a novel you can’t wait to lend to friends you care about. And as the end-credits rolled with Golden Years playing, I realised even David Bowie’s older now, too. And that doesn’t seem so bad. Just look at Woody Allen.

…may well be a mainstream milkshake of a film, but it is one of those madly indulgent shakes — featuring Snickers bars and dark chocolate sauce and gourmet coffee and spiked with a few swallows of something decidedly adult. Something that’ll keep you giggling and energised and awake far longer than it should.

As Tony Stark would say about thousand-year-old whiskeys, drink up.

Court — a singularly strong directorial debut — gives us stunning snapshots which should work sensationally well for a festival audience, but, to the Indian viewer, are not truly new or holding any strikingly original thought.

We know this, all of this.

But perhaps the point Tamhane is trying to make is that it isn’t important that we should know, but that we know better.

The multiple Byomkesh adaptations Bengal keeps churning out might not make for great cinema, but, based as they mostly are rather slavishly on Saradindu’s work, enthrall new audiences regardless.

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is the best looking and least captivating of the current lot.

Hunterrr is a deeply problematic film, and fails rather miserably…

Well shot and featuring mostly minimal background music, NH10 is starkly different from what we are routinely served up at the movies.

It is a scary, compelling ride featuring an actress who surpasses herself.