‘Nil Battey Sannata’ has a strong message about how education can change your life. It does underline the message, but stays just short of being preachy or message-y. And leaves you with a warm glow.

The film is meant to be based on two `real life’ incidents, but it doesn’t tell us which. What we get, to begin with, is a scary inside view of the kind of skullduggery that goes on between places and people who are meant to be engaged in saving our lives, and are instead, busy lining their pockets, criminally indifferent to the dangers they pose.

Fan is an out-and-out Shah Rukh Khan show, in which the star proves again that he can greenlight roles completely out of his comfort zone, and deliver.

The Bhatts’ long-standing promise of giving us fully adult men and women bursting with carnal desires and twisted motives used to be backed by storylines. This one gives up quickly.

Great to see the premise– send a woman out, keep a man in, and reverse gender expectations- on screen : it just needed to have been sharper and deeper.

Everything is all over the place in this Goa over-run by ‘Roosis’​,​ and dark​ night clubs, and organ traders, and scenes of extreme, hard-core violence. Remind me again, why are we watching this one?

Sidharth brings to the table a loose-limbed pleasing vulnerability which he reveals slowly. Fawad plays his straight, and he doesn’t lift off the screen. Rishi gets some laughs in.

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.