Half Girlfriend is a gorgeous-looking film with no real relevance beyond its Valentinian boundaries, with  plenty of unspoken chemistry between the lead pair. It could have done with less schmaltz and more raw passion, less cuteness and more real emotions.

But here is the thing. It delivers exactly the charming  confection thatChetan Bhagat’s novel attempted to be.

Watch Sarkaar 3 for the way Varma frames the familial feud in flames of fury. The performances are largely effective specially those byRonit Roy and Amit Sadh. The latter comes into his own as Mr Bachchan’s uncontrollable grandson. But above all, this is one more triumphant  celluloid outing for Amitabh Bachchan who invests his role of the aging tiger-neta with a kind of cosmic resonance that goes way beyond that famous baritone.

Yes,Baahubali 2 is much bigger than the first film in every sense. It is far deeper and dreamy,drawing us into its magic and magnificence with a seamless swoosh that sucks us in. We fall into the ravine of ravishing courtly machinations with no desire to pull ourselves out of the hypnotic spell that Rajamouli casts on  us.

Noor is not one  of the best films on journalistic ethics. It doesn’t do to the contemporaryMumbai media world what the Paul Newman-Sally Field  starrer Absence Of Malice did  30 years ago . It pricks at the conscience in a rather undemanding way. Noor takes  sly and slender satirical swipes at sensationalism in journalism , more delectable for its many jibes than the actual prick at the conscience.

In creating a world where women rule the roost, the film misses the wood for the trees. Or sex for the sleaze.

Though this film tells us why death need not be feared, I came away from it feeling a profound sense of melancholy . It makes us experience the final futility of life without disrespecting the art of living.

And that’s no small achievement.

Take a bow, Mr Bose. Poorna is not just a tale  of the triumph of the human spirit. We all have a Poorna  inside us waiting to conquer our own  Everest.

Naam Shabana is a film of rude awakening, reminding us how much maturity in vision treatment execution and the performances a film can achieve provided  it stops looking for reasons to make audiences happy.Watching this film is a joy, although nothing really happy happens to Shabana. We are just happy that she can fight her own battles even when the odds are stacked skyhighagainst her.

It’s hard to imagine Trapped working so effectively withoutRajkummar Rao. He lives every second of Shourya’s struggle for self-preservation.His journey is so illustrative of a migrant’s metropolitan melancholy as to make any attempt to add signboards to the storytelling is akin to shining torchlight to supplement sunlight.

Logan humanizes the  super-hero to a level of supreme surrender . We have never seen a comicbook hero who is so vulnerable and so challenged by a 9-year old girl who is played by a child who has the ability to project herself as much older than she actually is, without seeming precocious.

We’ve never seen a hero so ready for the fall.We probably never will.