Six months of 2016 are almost up, and as tradition dictates, it is time to take stock. Here I step back and take a look at what’s worked and what hasn’t. 

The Good

The Top Films

For me, there have been three standout films in 2016 so far, and these couldn’t be a more diverse mix. Neerja is a story about a hero worth celebrating, finally told the right way without feeling the need for embellishment. Fan is a fascinating exploration of the nature of celebrity coming our way from a megastar’s genuinely unique vantage-point. Udta Punjab is a rollicking film that amuses us in order to open our eyes and show us just how dismally drugs have sickened a state we like to label healthy.

The Top Performers

Think what you may of the film itself (which I love), Shah Rukh Khan is jawdroppingly good in Fan — both as the 25-year-old young admirer and as the jaded but determined ageing movie star. It is an immensely brave performance demanding stunning commitment, and he shines.

Udta Punjab boasts many a great performance, with Shahid Kapoor finding magic in the manic, Alia Bhatt delivering a remarkable dialogue-driven scene that continues to haunt, and actors Manav Vij and Diljit Dosanjh bringing immense credibility to the film.

Sonam Kapoor is brilliantly cast in Neerja, and she shrugs off her Sonamicity to play a girl the audience roots for — despite the fact that we know the ending to her sad story. It is the kind of part that enables an actor to graduate to another level, and Kapoor rises to the occasion. Standing right by her and barking orders is theatre actor Jim Sarbh, who really turns up the heat as a feral terrorist.

Another film with a striking ensemble was Kapoor & Sons, and I feel it important to single out Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak Shah, who, as a miserable married couple, create characters who are grounded and flawed and heartbreakingly believable.

Finally, some sensitivity

Is this the year ‘mainstream’ Hindi cinema is waking up to sensitive portrayals of homosexuality? Fawad Khan is great as a young man pretending he’s straight when his family’s looking in Kapoor & Sons, while Manoj Bajpai is at his most endearing in Aligarh as the soft-spoken and articulate Professor Siras. Both are a far cry from the campy, limp-wristed portrayals we’ve seen before, and one hopes this maturity lasts — it was particularly disheartening, for example, to read about the number of leading men who weren’t secure enough in their own sexuality to take up Khan’s role.

All hail the new dude

How has it taken Hindi cinema this long to nab a Sikh leading man? Considering just how much Punjab we’ve been force-fed over the years, its stunning that we’ve had to wait this long to see a true-blue Sardar hero. Diljit Dosanjh, with his quiet, understated intensity, is the leading man in Udta Punjab, the character who follows the hero’s journey and the film’s most evocative performer. Let’s make sure we don’t lose him, because the man is sensational.

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The Bad

The worst films

Oh, where does one start? Possibly with Buddha In A Traffic Jam, but then, rather like MSG – Messenger Of God last year, that can barely be called a film: it is one of the most incompetent theatrical releases I have seen in quite some time, an amateurish and juvenile collection of ideas thrown at the audience through bad actors and awful direction. There is Fitoor, an overblown adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, made here with lavish production values but a leading pair who cannot act — or cannot be bothered to try. There is Jai Gangaajal, a film ostensibly with Priyanka Chopra in the lead role as a tough supercop, but really a vanity project for the director Prakash Jha to try his own hand at acting. There’s Azhar, a toothless film about the meatiest cricketer story we know, one that tries to laugh away sins by coming up with some nonsensical excuse. And then there’s Ki & Ka, a film about gender equality which tries to show how men are better than women even at doing what women do.

The Sunny Leone situation

Whatever do we do about Sunny Leone? She’s got a bright smile, intelligent eyes and knows how to whip a misogynist television interviewer, but what are we doing with her? On one hand we make her cavort in the hideous Mastizaade, and on the other we try to declare her as unapologetic and progressive in One Night Stand — just before we cut to another song letching at her. Sigh.

The year Amitabh Bachchan starred in the same bad film. Twice.

Sure, Wazir and TE3N are different films. We know that. They’re set in different cities, made by different directors, have other younger actors trying to decipher what Amitabh Bachchan is upto. And yet both films hinge on the exact same twist involving Bachchan. Not just is it a predictable reveal in both cases, but also both films end up concentrating on Bachchan and the identical twist with such reverential self-love that the climaxes derail any good work that may have been done so far. 

A year of awful makeup.

Aishwarya Rai in Sarbjit gets older and browner and greyer and more rubber-skinned with nearly each scene, even as her hysterics gets screechier. Tabu beats her, however, with the oddly raccoon-like fashion her eyes sink into dark black holes as she goes from striking redhead to scary Rekhaish crone in Fitoor. And then there’s Rishi Kapoor, prosthetically older in Kapoor & Sons, where they make him so distractingly prehistoric it becomes dashed hard to concentrate on his (middling) performance.

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First published Rediff, June 29–30, 2016