The focus stays firmly on Himesh, who remains blank-faced through it all, never cracking a single smile, not even when he is with his girl. All in tons of slo mo, alternating with dizzying camera angles. All drowned in loud background music.

Priyanka Chopra’s too-sophisticated unmade-up-make-up is very distracting, even in her few convincing moments. And the film goes on for far too long, even when we know how all of it will end.

The writing is patchy, with Kaushal not coming off as striking as he was in ‘Masaan’ : he’s good yes, he makes us watch, yes, but is already familiar.

‘Tere Bin Laden’, Part 2, generates start-up potential, some smiles, some laugh-out-loud lines, but it keeps petering out.

‘Sanam Teri Kasam’ , starring Mawra Hocane and Harshvardhan Rane, not to be confused with the ’82 film of the same name, is a manual of how Not to make a contemporary romantic film.

Sunny Deol the actor is still a lethal weapon and can blow his opponent all the way across the room. Sunny the director should just get out his way.

The fact that it is about women in a sporting arena– heck, that is a sports film– should be a thing to celebrate, and you can see that effort has gone into creating authenticity while training-and-fighting-in-the-ring, but ‘Salaa Khadoos’ is far too literally realized to be a really strong film.
Unlike Madhi’s hero Mohammad Ali, it neither floats nor stings. It drones.

Shefali Bhushan’s debut feature has a documentary feel to it, which is natural, given her experience with being a collator and collector of folk sounds around the country. But it works for the realistic grain of the film.

It is a subject that deserves a great deal of attention, but not in the way this Juhi Chawla, Shabana Azmi film does it.

What’s missing in between is a fluid narrative, which hobbles the film. Or is the choppiness down to cuts? Either way, this is a film which could have been more.