…despite the best of intentions, Ekkees Toppon Ki Salaami is a tiresome film and at least half an hour longer than it should have been.

Haider is an immensely effective reimagination of Shakespeare—and the film’s biggest triumph is that the provincial, in this case Kashmir and the characters defined by its reality, shine in a universal and timeless tragedy.

Gone Girl has none of the moral ambiguity and depth that these two characters demand. In fact, we see little of them or know little of them. Will she stay gone? Will Nick get the death penalty in Missouri? Towards the climax, I somehow lost interest about the film as a whodunnit, caught as I was, with Fincher’s supreme cleverness in crafting a story without telling you much about his two protagonists apparently so gone in their heart and mind.

The noble intention of the film is undoubtable. In execution and storytelling it is a mess. The Hindi “social issue” melodrama usually has the stamp of a maker whom mainstream star-driven Bollywood has dyed purple, and with all that conditioning, and there is an attempt to break out and make a meaningful film.

Shashanka Ghosh’s Khoosurat is an all-round disaster. It reminds me all over again how confident a film-maker Hrishikesh Mukherjee was, and how sympathetic he was to his characters.

All I cared about till the end was how the woman was ducking, weaving, bouncing and punching, without knowing much about the sport’s nuances. So despite all the Northeast claptrap and the thoughtless film-making, Priyanka Chopra makes Mary Kom worth watching.

Raja Natwarlal is unimaginative pulp; it begins and ends on a lukewarm note.

Kanpur’s power crisis in a film that awkwardly straddles fiction and documentary. It is heartening to see documentaries release on the big screen, and Katiyabaaz is the clever new avatar of this genre that turns the mundane and the extraordinary in reality into marketable and watchable cinema.

It’s a really long Salman Khan act—he’s the messiah, the crazy ‘dil se’ man. Just don’t count it as cinema…

The writing has some awkward turns. Some dialogues and scenes stretch the sugary all-is-well credo too far, which do not stop Begin Again from being an immensely enjoyable musical. The original music by Gregg Alexander is intoxicating Mitchellian graft.