You will get the money shot of John Abraham and co. walking in slo-mo to swelling background music, enveloped in a comic book feel. You will not get crucial nuance and detail, essential requirements for a film to be to taken seriously.

Some of the film is pleasing in the way it brings out the dull familiarity that plagues a well-excavated relationship, and both Sanjay Mishra and Ekavali Khanna feel sufficiently lived in.

Daas Dev, starring Rahul Bhat, Richa Chadda, Aditi Rao Hydari, Saurabh Shukla, Vineet Kumar Singh and Dalip Tahil among others, has lofty ambition but not enough impact: the film lives in moments, but droops as a whole.

The Abhay Deol, Patralekhaa and Manu Rishi starrer has one or two lines which leave us chortling, and a situation or two which is genuinely surprising: one or two in a film of two hours? You do the math.

The bright-eyed Ishaan Khatter has something, a flicker in his eyes, and gets some zest into his part. Malavika Mohanan is great on the eyes, but clueless in how to fill her part.

Karthik Subbaraj has had fun with the undead in Pizza, and the unlovely in Jigarthanda, but this one is a much-too stretched out misguided mess, masquerading as a parable.

October tells us that romance doesn’t necessarily have to play out in the metric of song-and-dance-and-high-pitched-melodrama; that it can be low-key, and unusual, can be conducted through speaking glances, rather than words.

How do you manage a casting coup (Manoj Bajpayee and Tabu) and then waste those talents so spectacularly? How do you create an alleged plot that’s so witless?

The Irrfan Khan starrer begins promisingly but descends pretty quickly into flatness and sluggishness, a classic problem of not knowing quite how to play out a perky idea.

The trouble with a full-on masala film going in search of a plot is evident in the way the film unspools. The bare bones are borrowed from Telugu thriller Kshanam, but the fillings are all strictly Bollywood.