Don’t be fooled. This is not a sequel to ‘Jannat’, in which match-fixing shenanigans in high profile cricket matches gave Emran Hashmi and Kunal Deshmukh a fertile hunting ground, and us a watchable film. ‘Jannat 2’ is, for the most part, a badly-done, badly-acted enterprise, lifted only a notch by a couple of performances.

Upon watching ‘Tezz’, a dull and derivative film which is a mash-up of ‘Speed’ and a few assorted thrillers based on speeding objects meeting unmovable body parts,Kapoor is the cop who is put in charge of finding the bomber, and the bomb. He also tackles racist colleagues, and angry wives, and plays second fiddle to the main act. A fellow cop asks him : who do you think you are, Dirty Harry?Dream on.

So what we get is an oomphy, oozy femme who is uninhibitedly fatale, and capable of steaming things up, but stuck in a story which starts off as credible but all too soon plunges us into a pit of disbelief. And treatment which drags it out too long, minus slickness. We are not going near the plotholes because that would be a long list. Suffice it to say that they are so glaring in places, that you miss out on some not-so-bad parts of this film, chief of which are a few strong scenes by the main performers.

A few minutes into ‘Bittoo Boss’, and you start to think that this might, just might, turn into the kind of hilarious risqué comedy Bollywood has been trying to create, inflated not by lazy vulgarity but smart writing. The suggestive lyrics of the opening song in which there are references to ‘giving and taking’ (sorry approximations of nudge-wink street-slang ‘lena aur dena’) featuring a strapping wedding videographer, make us smile and lead us to believe that we might be in for some tongue-in-cheek fun.

There were some so bad they were terrific. As the end neared after almost three hours, in which the cast is gathered in one place and let loose upon us, I came to this conclusion: ‘Housefull 2’ is better than ‘Housefull 1’, but only by a whisker. That’s the only metric to judge this film by.

The new ‘Agent Vinod’ checks off each item on the list, holding out the promise of a well-crafted, high octane spy thriller. But practically from the moment it started to unspool, I began being assailed first by doubt, then with sinking conviction : this was not the Sriram Raghavan film I’d been waiting for. This around-the-world in two-and-a-half very long hours is all dressed up, with some slick set-pieces, but it spends most of its time in plodding through genre conventions. Where’s the crackle?

‘?’ (Question Mark) gets shackled by too much explanation about ‘spirits’ and ‘paranormal activity’, and it could have done with more crispness, and a little less amateurishness. But as an attempt which stays true to its purpose, of providing uneasy chills, ‘?’ (Question Mark) pretty much does its job.

‘Ekk Deewana Tha’ brings back that hoary tradition of love-at-first-sight in a film that exasperates you more than making you sigh : I’m happy to note that it can still be done, this business of losing your heart to a beautiful stranger at one glance, but not in this stuttering, near-obvious way.

When a film calls itself Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, it wants you to have no doubts, not even for a second, that this is what you are in for : one boy, one girl, and a rom com. In this instance, uptight boy and giddy girl meet cute in Vegas. You know that in the first half they will be in situations where his uptightness and her giddiness will get full play. In the second, they will try reaching an accommodation, leaving the last few minutes for a suitable ending.

Madcap characters in SoBo (South Bombay), Doing Whacky Things, Speaking Hinglish. The formula has been around, but it’s always up for some re-jigging. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Rafeeq Ellias’s debut feature gives us an heiress with her doggie, her non-performing asset of a husband with his murderous mommy, his singing sexpert with his quartet. Also, a tarot-card reader with her Elvis-lovin’ lover, a theatre-director who doubles up as a dispenser of ‘suparis’, a muscle-bound jock with a thing for the environment, and a Russian-Israeli hood who goes about saying Mamma Mia.