Sujoy Ghosh knows flavour. Few directors are as adept at creating atmosphere so swiftly and effectively, and Ghosh soaks his cinema in a seemingly authentic world. Authentic smelling, even, given the way his new film shows us Vidya Balan shielding her nose before entering a humid crowd, and the stains of sweat around her armpits…

The intermission is a nightmare. This is true for the format in which Hindi cinema is traditionally exhibited, as the interruption creates a narrative chasm that messes up both filmgoer and filmmaker, but it is doubly true for Dear Zindagi, which ingeniously uses a bad dream to slap recess upon us and allow us out…

The film opens with Ranbir Kapoor’s character, Ayan, talking to an interviewer. She commends the singer on the fact that he’s broken through and found a foothold in music, “that too non-film,” and in a couple of lines, he calls his love “aamir” — which is to say the kind that cannot die. It is…

I wonder if Katrina Kaif is good at poker. In Baar Baar Dekho, Kaif wears an all-encompassing blankness, looking like a striking but not altogether realistic waxwork. She’s a vision, albeit one whose accent-soaked Hindi — more unbearable than ever — gets in the way of possible appreciation, and I wager she’d be an unnerving…

The good thing about casting Tiger Shroff as a superhero is that, thanks to his fluidly lithe movements, it does sometimes become hard to spot where the actual moves stop and the wire-work begins. Watching Shroff, an endearing, almost unbearably earnest performer, reminds me of those early Salman Khan days when he was a lanky…