…the film attempts to deliver a mixed message about how animals living in captivity need to be saved from avaricious developers. In the process, as they set aside their selfishness, this collective of crazies finds their conscience and we find a quick exit from the cinema.

The timeline of Thackeray is conveniently engineered to delete the unflattering, the sensitive and the problematic mandate. What remains are elements that buoy up the founder of the Shiv Sena and paint him in resplendent saffron. The colour-agnostic are likely to find this portrait as fascinating as it is disturbing.

Emraan Hashmi plays conman with flair but is bogged down by convoluted screenplay

I came away with Akshaye Khanna’s smug smile and his jaunty walk. He is conspiratorial throughout, occasionally pensive and seemingly having the last laugh in an inelegant adaptation.

What Dhar squanders on the screenplay, he makes up for in the details. Stefan Richter’s carefully designed and executed action scenes, Sashwat Sachdev’s thunderous background score, sound mix, sound design and special effects simulate authenticity. As far as war dramas go, Uri: The Surgical Strike is a confidently made film that comes out guns blazing. And when the guns are not blazing, Kaushal certainly is.

As a pure fantasy feature, there was an interesting idea in Zero. Carefully designed to appeal to Khan’s core demographic – the family – while providing scope to invent an endearing character. The flaws of Zero lie not in the physicality of the characters, but in the story. Too ambitious in its vision and indiscriminately illogical, Rai falters in exploring both inner spaces and outer space. Even at 164 minutes, the narrative lurches from scene to scene, and before you can say ‘Houston we have a problem’, incredulously Bauaa is suiting up for a space odyssey.

Khan shines in these later scenes, shedding the earlier self-consciousness to throw it all into the physically challenging finale. Rajput is natural as the compassionate Mansoor, though at times he seems to be searching for the soul of his character, which could have been another casualty of a confused script.

Fortunately for Kapoor, the performances manage to keep things afloat, taking the emotions to a crescendo matching nature’s wrath.

Describing the band to manager John Reid (Gillen), Freddie says, “Now we’re four misfits who don’t belong together, we’re playing for the other misfits. They’re the outcasts, right at the back of the room. We’re pretty sure they don’t belong either. We belong to them.”

This is why Queen remains iconic and, even though the movie may not do either the band or the singer justice, you will be singing Bohemian Rhapsody all the way home.

Like previous works, which include Tashan and Dhoom 3, Acharya’s Thugs of Hindostan is big but hollow.

Arjun Kapoor, Parineeti Chopra’s romance suffers from a dull, infantile script…