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“There has never been a set of developments like this in the history of the modern world." “There never ever has been a man, a criminal, like Veerappan.” With these proclamations of formidable foreboding, so opens the explosive documentary on dreaded dacoit Veerappan by director Selvamani Selvaraj, another visionary production by Netflix, featuring a spectacular cast of interviews with top police chiefs, a journalist with an impressive baritone voice anchoring this epic narrative, and a whole slew of insiders who spill the secrets on this rip-roaringly dark Indian chapter. Director Selvaraj’s thrilling four episode series fuses the best of documentary and cinema in a dazzling feat of true-life story-telling, requiring not one, not two, not three but all four writers – Forrest Borie, Apoorva Bakshi, Kimberley Hassett and the helmer himself. What is seared into consciousness is the blood-‘n’-bombs saga of a legendary forest brigand who butchers elephants, cuts down and smuggles a whole forest’s worth of precious sandalwood and mounts daringly barbaric attacks against the police whose STF (the custom-designed Special Task Force) rips apart people in their equally blood-thirsty pursuit of him. Full Review @ Upnworld

‘Jawan’ is a terribly made film about a group of vigilantes who hold the government to ransom and then surprisingly make it do good deeds. All this is just re-treaded territory, first ignited by visionary mass director S. Shankar, and now Atlee, his former assistant director, who does his usual lazy shtick by simply rehashing the old stuff with overboiled, done-to-death, screamingly melodramatic direction – I badly wanted to exit the theatre at the 1.5 hour mark but forced myself to finish the nearly 3 hour punishment. It is painful to see storied superstar Shah Rukh Khan degenerating so badly in the later decades of his career. This artiste who toplined such excellent movies as DDLJ, Dil Se, Devdas, Asoka, Swades has stopped caring about quality from a long time and only lusts after more box office triumphs no matter how shoddy his recent films are. Notice he has long since stopped working with good directors and the few good ones he has recently worked with have been compromised by poor collaboration (Imtiaz Ali – ‘Jab Harry Met Sejal’). Vijay Sethupathi’s acting deficiencies are severely exposed, while the performances across the board are mediocre. Good taste and cinematic quality are repeatedly butchered in ‘Jawan’ in the relentless hail of gunfire that drags on here – SRK meanwhile has his champion sights firmly fixed on the Rs.1000 crore box office mark. Upnworld

Many of you would have borne witness to the original ‘Gadar’ (2001) – a fantabulous, box office-igniting smash featuring Sunny Deol who uproots a water pump, single-handedly bashes up all Pakistan and returns to Bhaarat Mata with his abducted wife. It’s Lahore in place of Lanka, with Hanuman subsumed into Ram, and Luv-Kush rolled into one. Fast Forward to present : Mrs. Gadar realizes with alarm that hubby dear has become the nation’s top-most Modi bhakt and desh desh naa raha with Hindutva zealots running amok, so she re-packs her old Louis Vuitton and flees hoping she’ll find a better deal in Imran Khan. An enraged Sunny Deol waking up to see his begum has disappeared again, dials up Anil Sharma to kill the box office and shoot Gadar Part 2. That would have been a plausible plot but there are some variations in the actual Gadar 2. Sharma and Deol return to deliver a script written with the maturity, poise and perspective of a seven year old. Neither Indian superheroes nor Pakistani caricatures triumph here, instead the supreme victors are sheer stupidity and gross crudity, which bomb to smithereens every tract of this 170 minute disgrace. It’s 1971 and Tara Singh (Sunny Deol) and his son Jeete (Utkarsh Sharma) are ensnared in a deadly game of snakes and ladders in Pakistan, orgiastically fighting, escaping and getting captured again, while thousands of Pakistani attackers who come their way get blown up, butchered or bludgeoned. Will this be the end of Tara & Jeete? (imagine a different Tom & Jerry where both team up and blast apart their attackers). Are you kidding? If anything happens to Tara and Jeete (Sakeena is forgotten anyway), what will happen to Gadar 3 and 4? Full review @ Upnworld