Manjhi is rousing, simplistic cinema, just about saved by a fantastic lead turn. It’ll do if all you want is a folk tale, but I wish the film had chipped away at Manjhi the way he chipped away at that mountain.

A large part of Shaun The Sheep Movie’s charm lies in the fact that this is practically a silent comedy. Though there’s a busy soundtrack of bleats, bangs, thuds, barks, howls and mumbles, there is no actual dialogue. The comedy is visual, rendered in Aardman’s signature stop-motion style, blending puppets with animated, sometimes actual backgrounds.

Brothers, directed by Karan Malhotra (Agneepath), doesn’t have the heart problem; if anything, it exposes a bit too much of its heart. It does have the script problem, the acting problem and several other problems besides.

A mess of good intentions and bad jokes…

Drishyam is a solid remake, but a film with Tabu as in the Vijay role and Devgn as the cop would have been so much more exciting.

Masaan doesn’t strive for effect—it achieves it by degrees. No one stands out, but everyone does an outstanding job.

When someone does something slightly different with a genre as codified and hidebound as the superhero film, it’s tempting to overrate the achievement. Yet, the truth is there have already been a number of superhero movies that have mocked the idea of, well, superheroes. Ant-Man builds on the pop smarts of The Avengers and the I’m-no-hero shtick of Guardians Of The Galaxy, just like these films built on the wisecracking Iron Man films.

In terms of directorial competence and narrative novelty, this is probably the best Salman Khan film since Dabangg. It’s also, even by Bollywood standards, a particularly transparent appeal to audience sympathies, playing on our collective weakness for children in peril, for heroes with hearts of gold, for pronouncements of Indo-Pak and Hindu-Muslim harmony.

That Rajamouli knows his way around VFX was evident in Eega, but he negotiates the massive jump in scale well. Everything is designed for maximum impact—if there are bales of straws, you can be sure they’ll be set on fire so that a chariot can be driven through them. The vistas that unfold have a digitally enhanced grandeur that’s familiar from films such as Troy and Exodus: Gods and Kings, modern versions of the old sword and sandal epics. Bhallala Dev’s chariot even has a whirring scythe attached to it—a little visual tribute to Ben-Hur.

What’s worse than a dumb Hollywood summer movie? A dumb Hollywood summer movie that thinks it’s smart. That’s Terminator Genisys for you, the fifth instalment in a series that should have ended, despite promises made to be back, after the note-perfect second film.