DHURANDAR aka MASTERMIND*****

DHURANDAR is an epic super-long spy-mafia-thriller set in the political powder-keg that is contemporary Indian-Pakistani politics.  And let's be clear up front:  writer-director Aditya Dhar (URI: THE SURGICAL STRIKE) is definitely in the Indian nationalist camp, telling his story from the perspective of a country trying to defend itself from horrific real-life terrorist attacks like Mumbai 2008.  There is no attempt here to understand the Pakistani side of the conflict although there is nuance to the lead Pakistani character, Rehman Dakait.  How else to explain a proud Balochi helping the state that oppresses his people?  As a result, for those of us critical of Narendra Modi's Hindu Nationalist politics, it's easy to write this film of as propaganda.  Your mileage my vary.  I found its handling of recent terrorist attacks fair.  My only problem with it - and it's a big one - was a statement in its final minutes that not only is the Pakistani state behind attacks such as Mumbai (fact), but that it's behind "ninety percent of all terrorism" (not fact). That's a dangerous piece of hyperbole but I trust the audience to parse the fact from the propaganda, all the while enjoying what is a really superb film.

The movie opens with Indian officials negotiating the release of airplane hostages, and then zips through the terrorist attack on India's parliament building.  This prompts the Indian security services to send in a sleeper agent to infiltrate the gangs that work in cahoots with Islamic terrorist and the Pakistani state.  This infiltrator is "Hamza", played in a series of glorious hair-pieces by the ever-charismatic and muscle-bound Bollywood superstar Ranveer Singh.  

Hamza poses as a Balochi waiter in Karachi's Lyari district and slowly infiltrates the gang of the aforementioned Rehman. Rehman is himself pursued by Pakistani cop SP Aslam. Later Hamza will romance a rival politician's daughter, presumably so we can have some filmi romance scenes and songs.  More pointedly, Hamza will witness Major Iqbal planning the Mumbai attack, but fail to prevent it.  All of this is based on real-life criminals and real-life politicians and real-life terrorists. In the most searing moment of the film, the director Aditya Dhar chooses to show real life audio from the night of the Mumbai attacks, with the handler egging the terrorists on to greater acts of violence.  It's a brave and powerful moment. 

Come for Ranveer, stay for the golden oldies!  The joy of this film is not in Ranveer's physically committed performance, but in seeing so many older actors given superb roles and sinking their teeth into them.  There's been a lot of internet chatter about just how good Akshaye Khanna is as Rehman, and boy he acts everyone else off the screen.  From affable wedding guest with a memed weddding entrance, to a truly scary purveyor of vengeful violence, to a skilled populist politician. Khanna has the prime role in this film and it's one for the ages. It's an Oscar-winning performance that dominates the film and transforms it into something really special.  But kudos also to Sanjay Dutt as SP Aslam and an almost unrecognisable Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal.  And Madhavan is always great - not least playing Ajay Sanyal here.

This film is so good that after nearly four hours of viewing I could easily have watched it again, and cannot wait for its sequel.  This is Bollywood at its most provocative and handsomely produced. 

DHURANDAR has a running time of 214 minutes and is rated 18 for strong violence. It was released last December and is now on Netflix.

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES*****

It's decades since I watched the original rock-mockumentary SPINAL TAP, so I can't remember the specifics of any of the jokes bar 'turning it up to eleven", Stonehenge and ill-fated drummers. And since then we've had the tragic murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. I just didn't know how I was going to react to this sequel.  I am happy to report that it's just delightful:  silly, sweet, sometimes melancholy, with some insane cameos and so many moments where I was guffawing out loud. 

The movie opens with our ageing three rockers retired and variously running a cheese shop, a glue shop, and writing muzak for crime podcasts.  The daughter of their old bandmate wants to bring them back for a shameless cash-in reunion concert in New Orleans, masterminded by a thinly veiled evil Simon Cowell-Simon Fowler-style impresario played with relish by Chris Addison (The Thick Of It).  Along the way we get old beefs rehashed, and the introduction of a new drummer played by Valerie Franco.  We get to see Tap interact with evident real-life fan Elton John in an extended and tremendous cameo.  It's just a bloody good time - just so well-meaning, so funny and so full of people pretending but actually writing good rock songs and enjoying playing them. In fact, the final 25 minutes is basically just a filmed real Tap concert.  Loved every second of it.

God bless Rob Reiner and all who sailed in him. 

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated R. It was released last October.

H IS FOR HAWK****

H IS FOR HAWK is a deceptively simple, desperately moving, but never manipulative, film about a middle-aged woman coming to terms with the death of her father. Its success rests on a typically brilliant central performance by The Crown's Claire Foy as the protagonist, Helen. We spend so much time with her, trying to parse her feelings as she hides away from her grief, her family, her colleagues and her friends. Her distraction mechanism is caring for a goshawk called Mabel - a beautiful and fiersome creature of epic strength, who ties our protagonist back to her father's love of nature. At the peak of her depression, Helen literally hides away in a large cardboard box, and we are alone with her and Emma Levienaise-Farrouch's string-heavy ethereal score. This is a film that has the courage to allow grief its appropriate space, and to depict it in all its oppressive power. It takes quite the actor to take on this kind of role, and quite the director to understand what this kind of story needs.

The film is directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and is based on a tremendously successful book by Helen MacDonald.  Lowthorpe, who previously adapted THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, adapted the book alongside screenwriter Emma Donoghue, who worked on the Oscar-winning ROOM. I wonder if there's something in the fact that a lot of the behind-the-lens talent is female, because this film is a rare depiction of how vital and at times life-saving true female friendship can be.  We should all wish for the kind of friendship that Helen has with Christine (Andor's Denise Gough).  In that respect, this film reminded be of Eva Victor's SORRY BABY, insofar as it showed how sometimes friendship is all about persistance.

H IS FOR HAWK has a running time of 119 minutes and is rated PG-13. It played Telluride and London 2025 and is released in the USA and UK today.

DRAGONFLY****

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams (LONDON TO BRIGHTON) has created a really haunting and stunningly well-acted film in DRAGONFLY. It's basically a two-hander between Brenda Blethyn as Elsie and her next-door neighbour Colleen, played by Andrea Riseborough.  As the film opens, Elsie has had a fall so her well-meaning but distant son arranges for her to have a carer come to the house. The carers are heavy-handed and cut corners and don't actually listen to what Elsie wants and needs. This is where Colleen steps in.  She is a traumatised and introverted woman hiding away from life with her gigantic dog - menacing to all others but clearly providing some kind of emotional safety support to its owner.  

The brilliance of Williams' script and Riseborough's performance is that we can never quite figure Colleen out. Is she using Elsie financially, or even emotionally? They seem to form some kind of genuine odd-couple friendship, bound together by mutual loneliness in a world that wants to park the damaged and the elderly out of sight and out of mind. This is the attitude summed up in Elsie's son, played in a brilliant cameo by Jason Watkins. He seems to be suspicious of, and resent, Colleen's help but unable to step up and provide that care himself. Something that Colleen is not afraid to point out, with devastating conseqences.

I really loved this film. It's spare and taut and keeps us in an increasing state of suspense and anxiety. The ending is brave and will sit with me for quite some time.  Kudos to all involved. 

DRAGONFLY has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated 15. It played Tribeca 2025 and opened in the UK last November.

LOLLIPOP****

Writer-director Daisy-May Hudson's debut feature LOLLIPOP is a beautifully acted, deeply moving portrait of a single-mother ex-con caught in a well-meaning but ultimately brutal social care system.  As the film opens, our protagonist Molly (Posy Sterling) is shocked to discover that her young son and daughter are not with her mother, as she had thought, but have been given up to social care. The problem is that she cannot apply for housing for all three of them until she gets them back, but can't get them back until she has a place for them to live.  

Living with her mother is unfeasible.  Her mum only has a two bedroom house but it's also really clear that beyond the logistical issues, it would be completely unsuitable emotionally.  Molly's mum is a grieving widow and alcoholic who is deeply manipulative of her daughter. We see this in a chilling scene where she forces her daughter to sing at a wake. That said, she's not a pantomime villain:  we understand that there is deep loss and sadnes at her core, and that a lot of her isolation and drinking is a coping mechanism.

And so we see poor Molly driven to distraction and anger by well-meaning but ultimately "computer says no" bureaucrats who cannot help right an entire system that is set-up to thwart her.  We often see Molly lose her temper, in a way that would seem to justify the system's judgment that she is a borderline unfit mother, except that we know what she's going through. Her judgment is often bad, her reactions volatile, but we know beyond doubt that she does love her kids.  

Apparently the writer-director wrote this film based on her own experience and it absolutely comes across on screen.  There's a grinding authenticity to the way women like Molly are judged and boxed-in and given no substantive help.  There's also a lot of brilliantly depicted internalised self-judgment.  When Molly comes across a childhood friend, who is also a single-mother, called Amina, we soon realise that Amina is being standoffish because she's ashamed of living in a half-way house.  The kids are also really well-portrayed - the mixture of loving their mum but being frustrated by her broken promises and their unsettled lives. 

This is a quiet, brilliant film featuring a really strong central performance from Posy Sterling that's really worth seeking out.

LOLLIPOP has a running time of 100 minutes and is rated 15. It was released in the UK in June 2025 and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

THE CEREMONY****

Writer-director Jack King's directorial debut is a fascinating and beautiful social realist drama.  It takes us into the lives of people we might see at car-washes in our supermarket and municipal car-parks but not really give a second thought.  His film is set in a car-wash in Bradford, in the north of England, that is staffed by a hodge-podge of illegal immigrants from Central Europe and beyond.  The action begins when a client accuses one of the car-washers of stealing his Rolex from his BMW.  Cue lots of bigotry, not just from the client, but from within the workers, with men of all nations mistrustful of each other, not least because they don't speak the same language.  The tension is greater because the men know that any police investigation is going to put a spotlight on their illegal immigrant status. And so, when the accused man (Mo’min Swaitat) shows up dead, the gang boss Zully asks Romanian migrant Cristi (Tudor Cucu Dumitrescu) and Kurdish Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz) to throw the body in the back of a white van and dump it somewhere out of sight.

The first half of the film is sparky and spot on in its depiction of contemporary Britain's diverse official and unofficial population and the thin economic thread upon which everyone's lives are built.  But for me it's the quieter, more melancholy, more contemplative second half of the film that really impressed. The black and white cinematography of the bleak, oppressive Yorkshire landscape is stunning and I loved Yuma Koda's off-kilter, spare score. We get snatches of backstory and a deeper understanding of their situation.  The final burial scene is one of beauty. 

This really is an extraordinary, sometimes beautiful, insightful and deeply humane film.

THE CEREMONY has a running time of 92 minutes and is rated 15. It was released in the UK last August. It is available to rent on all the major streaming services.