Though shot tastefully, the screenwriting and treatment are bland and overstretched. It is a Sanjay Leela Bhansali production where the flaws are charming, but the spark is missing. And the words that add spice to the proceedings have been muted. Conversations on body positivity and inclusivity in fashion are not new. Similarly, with the advent of private news channels, the purity of language is no longer a concern in living rooms and boardrooms. So when the makers hang the story on the twin pegs, the conflict seems overstated. The mental block, though real, remains on paper. When Shashank suggests what seems easy to others, it becomes a mountain to climb for him; it rings a bell, but the sentiment seldom seeps through the screen to grip you. While it avoids being overly melodramatic, it also shies away from deeper confrontation with the city’s harsher realities.
Ultimately, Gandhari is consumed by its own contradictions. Much like the underground network carving through Joypurra, the film's aimless maze of structural tunnels leads to nowhere.
While relationship dynamics change with time, the sight of a breathless, sweating hero fabricating a web of escalating lies is a formula that hasn’t fossilised at the box office. The narrative pivots around wedding photographer Jass (Varun), whose five-year marriage to the career-driven Bani (Mrunal Thakur) implodes over a fundamental clash in priorities.
If the original was a slow-burn mystery, the adaptation, which ironically lasts about 15 minutes longer, tastes like an overcooked recipe, eventually standing as a betrayal of Priyadarshan's virasat in Hindi cinema.
The screenplay does deliver a sobering truth. The traditional hero is obsolete, and no singular villain exists to fight. The antagonist is the collective desperation of the middle class.
In the cinematic transition of the popular OTT series, director Gurmeet Singh and writer Puneet Krishna get the mood, moments, and the motivations right but flatten the political nuance.
While Santoshi occasionally compromises the narrative with a cartoonish villain and larger-than-life action blocks, the Sunny-Shabana symphony and the film’s core message remain deeply impactful.
Hirani’s sharp editing and script choices blend small, tied-up details into powerful, effortless satire where no detail is missed, no observation is wasted.
While Javed owns the part of a Kabir-inspired tea seller, Vivaan surrenders to the surroundings in perhaps his best performance. Avantika takes time to blend in but doesn’t disappoint. Remembered for Anarkali of Arrah, director Avinash Das has a flair for imbuing progressive and liberal thought in the desi milieu. He doesn’t hold back his punches in exposing how political chameleons operate. Employing a traditional device of literature to speak truth to power, he posits the character of a madman (Ishtiak Khan). His relentless appeal for discovering the spirit of India is the sanest advice.
However, in Sky Force, they have somewhat deviated from the path. Here the star of the story is Mahavir Chakra Awardee Devaiah, fictionalised as Krishna Vijayan (played by newcomer Veer Pahariya). He is the ‘rebel’, the nonconformist in the force who was denied his name in the history books for more than two decades because of circumstances and official apathy. The character makes for a more colourful and nuanced central protagonist than Vir Chakra awardee Wing Commander O.P Taneja fictionalised as Kumar Om Ahuja, performed by Akshay Kumar with his trademark zeal, which turns out to be misplaced in the context of the film. Like the fictional name combines the star’s real and on-screen identity, the film’s gaze is tilted toward Akshay, making the storytelling and the emotional experience incongruous.
Documenting the golden era of Indian football through a moving tribute to its architect Syed Abdul Rahim, Maidaan makes space for soccer in a cricket-crazed nation. Like the fortunes of Indian football, Maidaan’s journey has also been jinxed because of several reasons. It is sad that during the making of the film we lost the fearsome trio of P.K. Banerjee, Chunni Goswami and Tulsidas Balaram that won us the 1962 Asian Games gold medal at Jakarta. However, the wait has been worth it as director Amit Ravindernath Sharma scores at least three goals. Led by a fully invested Ajay Devgn as the chain-smoking Rahim, the film attempts to remove the miasma from the period when India was a football powerhouse in Asia, a chapter that has slipped out of public memory. It records the times when football drove the aspirations of the youth of the newly independent nation, without romanticising it.
