The director casts two attractive people where he ought have chosen a couple of actual actors instead, and thus it becomes hard to care about the protagonists or their sundered hearts, and despite aesthetic appeal, what we end up with is — at best — a screensaver…

It has competent moments, but is too generic to be memorable, and that’s a shame for it could so easily have been a winner.

As it stands, Wazir is the one thing a chess player can never afford to be: Obvious.

Sure, there is a sparkle here and a gleam there of what could have been — and Kajol looks beguilingly beautiful, better here than ever — but Dilwale is an absolute dud.

We expect insignificant froth from the director, but this particular can of Rohit Shetty has been lying open too long. The contents are not merely un-fizzy but, unforgivably, flat.

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.

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.

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…

Katti Batti is an imbecilic, cliche-ridden embarrassment that made me want to punch it in the mouth…