It had the potential to be both smart procedural, and spiffy action, but ’26/11′ sinks somewhere in the middle.

‘Race 2’ looks exactly like ‘Race’. Which may have been intentional because plush locations and pretty playthings and buff men are very much Abbas Mustan trademarks. But all it does is cause a dismally same-same feeling. So much so that the new characters start feeling old within a few frames. Even the plot, which has a one-line pitch, Ranveer out to avenge the death of the love of his life, becomes subservient to the larger cause of looking glossy.

Inkaar could have been truly radical. But it becomes a film that prefers to cop out, rather than deliver on the promise it held out so bravely in its initial passages.

The film passed me by in the first hour. It enticed me back again in the second half. But not enough to make me forget the inert prologue, which is minus drama, which is Bhardawaj’s true forte.

A sequel to this sequel may be too tempting to pass up for Chulbul and gang. I just hope they don’t kill it with same old-ness. “pyaar se nahin, thappad se bhi nahin, boredom se darr lagta hai.”

In the end, I was left looking at a straw to clutch. Any little thing. I found, dear viewer, none. Not. A. One.

‘Talaash’ starts out as a smart, well-written noir-ish thriller, and then slips between the tracks. Pity about the second half.

The title of Yash Chopra’s swan-song has a retrospective bitter-sweetness to it : the veteran director did not live to see his film in the theatres. ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’ has released, in old YRF tradition, on Deepawali, but what the title manages to say pithily takes the fllm nearly three very long hours, and the pay-off isn’t as sweet as it should have been.

1920-Evil Returns’ has a threesome in a house that looks similar, doing ditto. It may not be a sequel, but it uses the same old notes to scare us. Creaking doors.

Everyone in ‘Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana’ speaks in Punjabi. Not the kind of exaggerated, colourised ‘zubaan’ of your average Bollywood potboiler. The everydayness of the language in this likeable film is one of its pleasures. As well as that it has been shot on real locations, not Bollywood’s idea of what a Punjabi’s ‘pind’ should be.