…despite its Adults Only certification, doesn’t spend much time in dingy bedrooms, or with the girls. Though it lectures and breathes heavy sometimes, it’s more interested in the men who run these rackets — men you may see hanging out at a coffee shop, or jogging in your colony park.

Katiyabaaz is a funny, moving and very well-researched documentary that’s definitely worth watch. It’s also deeply reassuring. As the wires of bureaucracy cross with political live-wires, a bulb goes off — Ritu Maheshwari. But that we have such officers gives us some hope.

Pizza has all the horror paraphernalia — dead bodies with axe embedded in their heads, little girls with dark circles calling out papa, chaabi-waale eerie toys, doors that slam shut, phones that are dead. Even a red doll. But it’s all restrained, controlled and not hysterical.

All of Pizza’s scary stuff is spiked with humour, and it’s easy on special effects.

Hate Story 2’s story is the barest-minimum required for a revenge saga. It has none of the layers, substance of the original. And its characters are like chess pieces programmed to play single-line roles: bad man, bruised girl. He moves one square, she moves one square.

As cinema it is absolutely flat. Talking heads talk and they are often repetitive. Director Nisha Pahuja seems to have no sense of the visual medium that is cinema and that makes her rather informative film boring very soon.

The listlessness then is evenly spread. There’s a certain decrepit feel to almost every scene, interaction and character that’s not easy to accomplish when you have young boys fist-bumping each other. Yet it’s strong, this stench of been here, seen this.

The entire film is a conversation between the two men, with just two more characters appearing. It is beautifully sparse and keeps us more than just interested. We are involved. We begin the viewing cautiously, watching carefully to see if the Indian is a bad guy, or the Pakistani. The film allows our prejudice to take its course and then shows us our own idiocy, through the two other characters who appear.

Bhoothnath Returns tries to strike a high moral tone in its social messaging, but creatively it doesn’t flinch from being crassly exploitative. It made me cringe so often that I wished this clever concept had been handed over to a director with a light touch.

Though Jal’s story is earthbound, it takes occasional flight, like a good, compelling dastan. But the film has an intermittently sparse and jam-packed screenplay and it tells its story in a style that’s a mix of documentary and theatre — an affected, stylised narrative borrowing both form and spirit from various folk dance traditions. The film is marred by an uneven screenplay that rises and dips a lot initially. But once the story picks up, after interval, it’s a delight to watch Purab Kohli.

It is a sure-shot test: The more you laugh during this film, the lower your IQ. The most interesting thing about Main Tera Hero is its music, from its foot-tapping songs to the background music most of which is stolen, including from James Bond.