Joker is a blazing Joaquin Phoenix grinder. It is out-and-out Oscar bait. While satisfying on the acting and technical fronts, the where, why and how of pop culture’s most mythologised villain is deeply unsatisfying. Joker could do better than avenging just an impoverished, traumatic childhood.

Barve and his team of collaborators leave much to interpretation, but Tumbbad, derived from the works of Marathi pulp horror writer Narayan Dharap (he is known for his Stephen King adaptations in Marathi), is a thrilling cinematic experience just as a horror film. For film lovers, the genre-bending is gratifying. It has been a while since a horror film spoke so eloquently about something as primal as greed and remained true to its Indian (Marathi) setting.

Bisexuality, emotional courage and the pain of loss are Bose’s spindles for the story. The setting is important in as much as it shows how a city allows a person with disability freedom and confidence of mobility. We see that Delhi is far behind New York, but not through dialogues or long-drawn scenes.

PK is a dialectic on religion on the big screen, without much of the splendour of cinematic technique. It is rooted to dialogues, scenes and characters, as does Hirani’s other films. But the director’s biggest feat is the idea, its effortless translation and its politics. Someone in the broad stroke canvas of populist Hindi cinema has finally spoken on behalf of the agnostic. Given the news headlines, how much more relevant could that get?

The climactic scenes of mass hysteria and death have some powerful moments and make you wonder why we don’t remind ourselves of this tragedy more often. But apart from the provocative end, Bhopal: A Prayer For Rain is a wasted opportunity.

Govinda steals the show. He obviously relishes the role of the animated, absurd, irreverent ageing Bollywood hero—doubly zany since he is on the comeback trail himself. The scenes in which he appears are unremittingly funny—and possibly the reason Happy Ending was not entirely a waste of time.

Kill/Dil is an amalgam of Hindi film clichés, the most obvious being the orphans, set to uninspired gimmicks. A waste of a Govinda comeback.

Rang Rasiya is a wasted opportunity for a layered portrait of a colourful and bold figure in Indian art.

There’s plenty in Interstellar for a geek and much for the passionate movie-goer willing to surrender to a space opera, a magnificent cauldron in which time, love, mortality, parenthood and astrophysics bubble and elegantly spill over.

Happy New Year is like a Bollywood Night in Dubai on loop, with a few stale heist tropes thrown in. Some of Farah Khan’s tricks to propel her story are painfully old-fashioned, one being the villain discreetly mixing a pill in to the drink of the good guy so he becomes unconscious. So much staleness, packed in to a running time of 3 hours, is revolting even to the brain-dead stupor that we, fans of Hindi movies, sometimes habitually get into, just for the sake of time-pass entertainment.