Handpicks : The Ten Best Hindi Films Of The Year.

I don't remember the last time I said this, but it was a great year for indie films. Last year's Ship Of Theseus, The Lunchbox and Shahid served as three promising pointers that independent cinema is slowly, but surely, finding a footing in an uncaring industry that is still averse to the idea of a brand of cinema rivaling commercial cinema. With a burst of indie films procuring limited commercial releases, one can only hope for this to persist.

While there were some definite surprises this year, I was dispirited to find that the film whose release I was looking forward to ever since I first heard about it had been pushed forward. Perhaps Kanu Behl's Titli, debuting to much brouhaha at Cannes in May, will be a global contender next year. In what one can only label a "Christmas miracle" in the truest sense of the phrase, Anurag Kashyap's dark, dire and dogged crime-drama Ugly, embroiled in a controversy for a long time, made sure we ended a most reassuring year on a cheery high.

Personally, I missed out on a few movies this year. Nisha Pahuja's The World Before Her, a documentary on two Indias seen through the eyes of two very different women, and Amit Masurkar slacker comedy, Sulemani Keeda, about two struggling writers waiting to break into Bollywood were some I regret missing out on.

Anyway, to the list. Here are my favorite films of the year, ranked in the descending order:

10.  Filmistaan (dir.: Nitin Kakkar) / Finding Fanny (dir.: Homi Adajania)

An indie and a surprise.

While Nitin Kakkar's heartwarming debut took us across the border to a land that is besotted with cinema as much as we are, Homi Adajania's bittersweet fantasy fable (with priceless, unusually imprecise Goan accents, take it from a Goan) ambled through some of Goa's most scenic locales. Both films were promoted as comedies, but they went beyond the confines of their genre to deliver a torrent of feeling to go with the occasional laughs. While they catered to the mainstream audiences, one cannot ignore their attempts to bend what "mainstream" means in contemporary Hindi cinema. Though flawed efforts also, Filmistaan and Finding Fanny were invigorating attempts at bring about a change from the usual mundane fares at the multiplexes. And they are on this list because they succeeded in doing so.

9.  PK (dir.: Rajkumar Hirani)

Oh, dear. What we expected, and what was served.

The experience of watching P.K. is like going to a great restaurant, ordering a chef's special but being made to settle for something inferior. It was easily Rajkumar Hirani's weakest film, but his most ambitious one. Some sequences carried his trademark flourish, but some came off as plain ineffectual. Some were brilliantly constructed and performed, but some were shockingly overblown. Still, for the robust arguments alone, P.K. deserved more than just a viewing. It begged rumination. Admittedly, it does channel Umesh Shukla's OMG: Oh My God!, but this one stands its ground proudly without fretting about the kind of response it provokes. I admire.

8.  Haider (dir.: Vishal Bharadwaj)

The Bard-Bharadwaj pairing seems to be an eternal romance.

Whenever the auteur fiddled with the Bard's works previously, he produced pure magic. While Haider is a respectable -- and likably impish -- film in itself, it's not as daunting a cinematic creation as Maqbool or Omkara, I'm afraid, albeit one that is painted on a grander canvas. A lethargically paced funeral should suffice as its description, but it's the setting where Haider excels. A frigid, frosty Kashmir serves as a battleground for imminent bloodshed, and the tension is piercing. And performances. Oh, the performances! The whole cast is magnificent, and that is such an understatement. But words fail me. I just wish Haider were a tauter film. Its greatness lay right there, but it was a bloated, shapeless lump that desperately needed knocking into shape.

7.  Ankhon Dekhi (dir.: Rajat Kapoor)

An engrossing parable that brought a spark into a world we have forgotten exists.

Ankhon Dekhi unfolds in a heartbreakingly nostalgic Delhi of sights and sounds that mysteriously vanished years ago. But Rajat Kapoor, armed with an immaculately-written script that breathes life into a decaying world, brought to us an affable "nutcase" whose story was more edifying than maddening. A broadly philosophical, whimsical film, Ankhon Dekhi is the journey of a travel agent-turned-ideologist who is someone we first laugh at, then get frustrated with but ultimately come to comprehend. And goddamn me if I didn't walk out of this film feeling as if this was the most progressive sermon I had ever sat through. It is Kapoor's best since 2008's Mithya, and his most personal.

6.  Ugly (dir.: Anurag Kashyap)

The aptest titled film of the year, folks.

In Anurag Kashyap's fraught world of slimeballs, everything is ugly. Guns are pulled, cheeks get smacked, profanities flow like mud, people get roughed up habitually. His depiction of the nastiness of human character is perturbing enough, but it is also endlessly fascinating. Ugly is an sample of what he can achieve with little indulgence and no flamboyance. An enthralling character study of a bunch of abhorrent, desperate characters trying to outwit each other for egomaniacal pleasures, it is a singularly distressing, alarming and murky tale of deceit and narcissism. And it leaves one spellbound. I was wowed.

5.  Dekh Tamasha Dekh (dir: Feroz Abbas Khan)

It's such a shame that a lot of people are still unaware of the finest horror film of the year.

Theatre veteran Feroz Abbas Khan's second feature film, Dekh Tamasha Dekh is a brilliant black comedy; a satire brimming with absurdist elements, horrific episodes and gut-wrenching truths. It showcases a part of the country tucked away in the badlands of Maharashtra, where communal tensions flare up at the slightest provocation, and the violence they lead to is met with frustrating nonchalance. It's a sour detail to digest, but it reeks of the truth. At times a tad too theatrical, Dekh Tamasha Dekh is simultaneously sickening and rollicking until the second-half kicks in, and it turns into a full-fledged spook story. Shafaat Khan's pithy dialogue and a cluster of wonderful performances (the finest of which is a cameo by old-timer Sudhir Pandey, and isn't he a beauty!) make this the year's bravest, most important film. And the scripting is absolutely spotless.

It's nothing less than a miracle that Dekh Tamasha Dekh, a film that could so easily have been a victim of livid controversies but only if it had grabbed more eyeballs, found a commercial release. It left me so enraged and yet so frightened because it was familiar. And when was the last time you walked out of a film frightened because it was familiar?

4.  Miss Lovely (dir.: Ashim Ahluwalia)

Oh, the irony of the title.

An exercise in indulgence, Ahluwalia's gorgeous and thickly atmospheric arthouse drama was a sleazy, searing, claustrophobic, melancholic and often bitterly funny odyssey through Bombay's porn industry of the '80s. Centered around the splintered relationship of two brothers, Miss Lovely was a tale of half-hearted promises, loneliness, brooding characters and their wretched thirst for fame and attention, all crafted into an elegant, poignant film. The sluggish pacing may bore some, frustrate many, but there is no denying that Ahluwalia's dedication to craft and research is astounding. This surely won't be the last time I dig a spot in my schedule for Miss Lovely, which also features a superlative Nawazuddin Siddiqui, if that particular bit interests you.

3.  Dedh Ishqiya (dir.: Abhishek Chaubey)

The cheek of the title is supremely delightful.

I felt that one would be hard pressed to make a sequel by matching the character and tone of the marvelously earthy Ishqiya, but I needn't have worried. Abhishek Chaubey's nearly flawless second film is a riot; a painfully wistful, boisterous and polished film in contrast to his exceedingly crude debut. I don't know if -- and such a case is rare -- it is an improvement to its predecessor, but Dedh Ishqiya is a sophisticated illusion of a long dead world of nawabs and begums, an illusion I would sure like to buy into. It retains some of the roguishness of Ishqiya that made it such a ravishing experience, but it's an affectionately made film clearly in love with itself. And in many ways, it is the perfect sequel.

2.  Queen (dir.: Vikas Bahl)

Only the most dreadfully dopey might find Queen annoying.

Vikas Bahl asserted that he didn't know how to "make a film" when he took charge of crafting the finest crowd-pleaser to come strutting in years, but I find his statement a bit paradoxical. Queen is a film of disarming confidence, fashioned carefully to win one over and it does in its first half-hour and spends the next hour-and-a-half fine-tuning the formula it has sprung from. Kangana Ranaut not only gives a nonpareil performance, the best of the year, but also the best of her career. She makes the film what it is. And she's also one of the folks responsible for the frisky dialogue. There is a thin line between mainstream and offbeat, and Queen toys with it. It's a film of such eternal allure and warmth, rooted so deep in Indian culture that the traditionalists and modernists can sit beside each other and enjoy it as much.

1.  Katiyabaaz (dir.: Deepti Kakkad & Fahad Mustafa)

Kanpur doesn't have electricity. This darkened battleground may have seen many a skirmish, but in the best Hindi film I have seen all year, there hasn't been one more dryly amusing.

But it has Loha Singh, a stocky "Robin Hood" who nimbly scales electric poles and fixes illegal wires to supply impromptu electricity to power-starved locals, who idolize the chap. It's an intensely fascinating subject. But Katiyabaaz, this ace mockumentary that blew my mind like no other Hindi film this year, isn't about this strange hero; it's about his even-steven face-off with Ritu Maheshwari, CEO of KESCO, an electrical power company battling debts. Maheshwari's adamant approach to rid the company of its debts leads her to go up against this locally loved superman. What ensues is a battle between anarchism and autocracy, a droll battle, a fuming battle, where no side wants to back off, that leaves one drained. Kakkad's and Mustafa's attention to trivial details of everyday life in Kanpur and their detached exploration of the subject only amplify the eventual effect it will have on you.

However, for a film that gives one the impression of it being a pacy thriller, Katiyabaaz is also a desperately sad picture. Loha Singh's domestic life is pitiful, but not to the extent of it being a drag. When required, Katiyabaaz has emotional depth by the dozen. This tragicomedy is a brilliantly balanced, no-frills outlook on Kanpur's power crisis that doesn't preach or teach. Only engages. After 2012's Supermen Of Malegaon and Celluloid Man, it is undoubtedly an indication of Indian documentaries finally coming of age.

Review : Anurag Kashyap's "Ugly" is a dazzling nightmare.

Ugly is a fantastic ordeal, a gripping police procedural furled in a haze of soiled consciences, sardonic dialogue and obnoxious characters, and one of the best films of the year.

There's also something rather odd about this Mumbai opus, but I can't finger what exactly. Perhaps, it's this: it's the most un-Kashyap film the auteur has made in his directorial career spanning a little over a decade. There is little indulgence, hardly any bloodletting and, for once, his flamboyant style of filmmaking is covert. With his typically despicable, irascible troop of characters for whom domestic violence and violence of the mind is a way of living, Kashyap weaves a hellish character study around the disappearance of a little girl, but he doesn't focus as much on the "disappearance" as he does on its repercussions.

Ugly is a story that underlines the depths that humanity can sink to when it is propped up against a bare wall. It is aimed to appall, to agonize, smeared by the grime of a menacing Mumbai, a city that no one knows how to capture on a camera better than Kashyap. In the bleak byways of the city (splendidly shot by Greek cinematographer, Nikolai Andritsakis), the story unfolds in a stream of aimless and helpless exchanges and blame games, occasionally coupled with helpings of black humor and a plethora of cusses. It's exactly the kind of film one would expect from Kashyap, and he knows this which is why he doesn't make it like he usually does, and that's where Ugly stands out. It wallows you in a world that Kashyap has familiarized his devotees with, and yet manages to be a seemingly novel take on the internal and eternal ugliness of a human mind.

The complications the disappearance leads to are unforeseen. As her panicky father and his friend go the the police station to lodge a formal complaint, the blase cop is captivated by the wonders of modern technology. It's slightly ruffling to see someone supposed to bail us out of trouble being fascinated by something so trivial in a time of bother, but this agitating sequence is beautifully effectuated by sharp, street-smart dialogue and diligently controlled performances that make it scarily amusing. Ugly bursts with such details frequently, allowing the vexations of its characters to flow freely until they get to you.

The girl's father, a struggling actor, is someone we sympathize with until, in a shrewdly placed flashback, we find out about his dark side, which cripples our sympathy for him in a flicker. His friend -- an ungodly believer, a detail of screaming irony -- too has a nasty side to his unusually calm demeanor. The girl's alcoholic, suicidal mother, divorced from her first husband, has cornered herself in a monotonous marriage with a tough cop, who hates her first husband, the struggler, with a vengeance. While the mother uses her second husband to shield herself from the piling frustrations of her first, her deprived brother tries to involve himself to earn himself a quick penny. They all have odious consciences that are masked by their concern for the vanished girl, but Ugly is an exploration of the moral monsters lurking inside them. A dark, depressing and dreary exploration that gets increasingly flustering with each passing moment, finally reaching a point where you feel as utterly impotent as the characters do. That's where I realized how good a film -- no, how great a film -- Ugly is.

The performances are sublime. Each character is vitalized wonderfully by the actors portraying them, and each emotion is articulated by finer nuances. The screenplay is structured expertly, each twist spaced out well, each character fleshed out brilliantly. The dialogue is so sharp, it could cut glass. While it was used in Kashyap's previous effort, Gangs Of Wasseypur, to simply add color to a grey world, it is used here to spectacular effect to propel the story forward. This is some of Kashyap's sharpest writing to date.

When Ugly culminates, one realizes that it actually was a deceivingly simple story all along and was intended to be a lesson in morality. And as a character study, it's a marvelous success. It unnerves, it engages and in its closing moments, it revolts. It leaves one a lot wiser and a little insecure, just as it is meant to. Sniff around for a seamless plot, however, and it will disappoint you.

Ugly is in the same vein as Kashyap's Paanch and Black Friday, and it is in that genre where he towers over his peers. Its abrupt commercial release, the last of the year, may have brightened our Christmases, but it certainly hasn't made them rosier. Many will leave the theater loathing it for its guts. And that reaffirms why Anurag Kashyap is one of our most treasured talents.

Review : Rajkumar Hirani's "P.K." is endearing but a bit too theatrical.

Rajkumar Hirani has spawned a brand of cinema that has many takers, that opens intriguing discussions and that can easily be a game changer as far as Hindi movies are concerned. He sermonizes, amuses and stirs, layers his plots with melodrama and has a knack for lacing them with throwaway gags. His films may be proudly theatrical, but they are not unnecessarily so. Hirani is a part of a phenomenon. His films are genuinely earnest in their quest to question the absurdities of life, of a system of beliefs and seek answers to questions that seem improbable, the answers to which delight us. Like the loony characters he creates, he has a certain way of seeing things that forms the nucleus of his films, and a certain way of exploiting what he sees. That is how he does what he does.

P.K. is no different. With the good part of the hype on its side and a weighty topic on its shoulders, it swaggers through a series of convivial episodes to a predictable conclusion, but it is a ride that is as flawed as it is thought-provoking.

It has neither the unflappable magnetism of the Munnabhai series nor the pure wackiness of 3 Idiots. But it is ambition and aplomb that eventually propel it over the finishing line.

In its opening moments, P.K. plays out in a manner that one would expect from Hirani. A voiceover -- critical in his previous film 3 Idiots, has no relevance whatsoever in this one, I'm afraid -- illuminates how an alien is stranded in the arid deserts of Rajasthan (I groaned, for aliens in a Hindi film look outlandish, but I needn't have worried) and is swiftly robbed of his only possession, thereby establishing an apt diegesis. In an independent strand, an inconsolable Indian girl, a victim of religious speculations, has to give up on her romance with her Pakistani partner. When the girl, who turns into a journalist upon her arrival in her home country, senses a story in the alien's attempts to retain his lost possession and realizes the worth of his curiosity, P.K. transfigures into a prudent, riotous and ultimately edifying satire.

Though the portion before P.K.'s foray into a full-blown satire is a bit cluttered, everything blends in seamlessly after. One thing that catches your eye almost instantly is its doughty approach to the material and its airy manner of expression. Living in a country that is oversensitive to the matters pertaining to religion and godmen, I was pleasantly surprised to find that P.K. has no qualms about mocking those who generalize in their name. Umesh Shukla's engrossing OMG: Oh My God! had similar intentions before it fell prey to a desire to please the believers in the audience and successfully hinder any kind of controversy, and hence ended up undoing whatever dynamic arguments it made. 

P.K. follows a similar pattern argument-wise, but it has a tastefulness that makes it easier to digest and harder to dislike. Some cleverly assembled sequences are apprising and hilarious, like a particularly lengthy one in which the protagonist is baffled with different kinds of people embracing different religions, hence different gods, who come with rules to comply in a house of worship. It's a tricky idea, but Hirani does it with such subtlety that it has the gentle pinching effect coupled with chuckles, which was the desired outcome, perhaps. The profundity found in the protagonist's naive queries is often overwhelming, a splendid bullseye. It is cathartic to see someone take intended potshots at the country's willingness to submit to religious barriers, but it does it in a refreshingly tolerant way. 

While P.K. works wonderfully well as a cogent satire in the first-half, it is the second-half where it stops being perceptive and lighthearted. As godmen culture, existing so freely in this country, is brought under the microscope, it switches to a more conventional narrative. There is an excellent sequence early in the second-half, but the lack of such potent punches makes that second-half drab. The climax is surprisingly clumsy for a filmmaker of Hirani's prestige, when the true face of godmen is unmasked in the flurry of a tear-soaked reunion and silent change of hearts, a typically theatrical touch but one that seems horribly out-of-place for a film that had little to no melodrama throughout. Or a dispensable bolt from the blue right before that. Or, as is the case in countless Hindi films, a half-baked romance that threatens to crumble the likability of the two primary protagonists in its final moments, but thankfully does not. Although these are relatively harmless defects when you look at the bigger picture, their questionable presence does irk somewhat.

P.K. has a couple of winsome elements (Sanjay Dutt's cameo is lovely, and personally my favorite part in the film) and some that don't work as convincingly. The screenplay is a bit frail in parts and heavily relies at times on coincidences, but the reasoning it brings forth deserves to be lauded. Also, rarely does it happen during a Hindi film that one sits in a theater packed with people; atheists, agnostics and believers who conform to different religions, laugh at themselves when a caricature of them presents itself on the big screen.

The tragedy here is that this approach works only in film; in the real world, these actions would have led to brief acts of violence and disorder. That makes P.K. a timely wonder.

Review : Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida" is melancholic and unforgettable.

Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida is a film of mystique; there's nothing exotic about it, but its potency is astonishing. Often, in film, we've been on numerous trips with a character who has lived a fabricated life and who naively digs into their past in search of the truth, and the bleak surprises await them. How good this kind of film eventually turns out to be hinges on how startling the revelations are, and how profoundly we let them hassle us. 

In Ida's case, the revelations are more dramatic than disquieting, but the sheer fluidity of its storytelling makes it an indelible experience. 

In spirit, it channels Denis Villeneuve's stunning debut Incendies, a singularly harrowing tale about a pair of twins who unmask their dead mother's cryptic past, but the comparison stops there. Pawlikowski's handling of the material is much more understated in stark contrast to Villeneuve's brutally frank modus operandi. There is no shock value, there are no loose threads. He sticks to narrating the story with as little pontificating as possible, without digressing and without emphasizing much on the disclosures. It's the characters he aims to create. And with characters so humongously, delicately multi-layered, how can one not be intrigued? On a road-trip with these two baffling female protagonists, we virtually decipher the unspoken subtleties of the human mind, and how it reacts to certain muted afflictions.

Ida is a bare film; scarce characters govern its plot, the exchanges between them are terse and the wintery landscape of Poland the film is set against makes it look dismally frigid and cramped. It's a film shot in gorgeously gloomy black-and-white, a chic touch, and scored unassumingly that complements its appearance. The imagery is aesthetic, of course; it chronicles a distinct story of its own, of post-war Poland and of nostalgia-swamped glimpses into a world we have only read about, a resourceful supplement in a film where dialogue is kept to a minimum to amplify the obscurity of its characters. And the performances (Agata Kulesza, in particular, is fabulous) are exacting and poignant. 

In the end, when the stirring revelations are done and dusted with, Pawlikowski takes Ida a step further. He proceeds to scrutinize how it has swayed his characters, exploring their state of mind with dedication and deliberation that puts Ida in the league of the best films of the year. The final half-hour is an act of reaffirming why it is a film that stands out in a stream of other films alike. Can a weak rebellion against a life of illusion diminish the harsher versions of the truth? Pawlikowski unrelentingly asks this question several times in his perusal of his lead character, but it echoes loudest in the film's dying minutes.

Ida is an expressionistic gem of a film about self-identity and forlornness that warrants lengthy reflection.

Review : Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" is a worthy sprint through adolescence.

"Coming-of-age" is a genre in film that is often dismissed as being too facile, but has more variations than what we usually surmise. In American cinema specifically, we have the kind that John Hughes served with generous helpings of humor coupled with disarming candor (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off), the kind that John Singleton showcased with such sensitivity, starkness and cognition (Boyz N the Hood) and the kind that was brutally, uncomfortably real and dour, the perverse sort that made everyone descry the obvious talents of Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale).

Which brings us to Richard Linklater, the crackerjack who has shaped a reputation of being the modern master of the genre, whose Dazed and Confused doggedly solidified that assertion. And the good news is, Boyhood, while not being his best, is certainly a doozy experiment that is emotionally productive.

It's wondrous for the umpteenth time how Linklater cheekily manages to find allure in the ordinaries of life, in our conversations, hushed and yelled, the exhibition of our suppressed emotions, and how in the end we are only a minuscule part of a larger cosmos. Observing a boy from the ages of seven to eighteen, scrutinizing his conduct in a life he never chose as he grows up is a figurative, audacious move, and who better to do this than Linklater? Time is his muse. And time has never looked so benign in any film of his.

The approach is casual. The conversations invoke an overpowering sense of deja vu, riddled with dry, throwaway humor and are nailed with an unassuming earnestness that is hard to define. Really, it's a skin Linklater is comfortable walking around in, and he hurtles through twelve years without missing a beat. His Mason is a figure of familiarity, perhaps because he is, in many ways, a specimen that represents each and every one of us, and that makes Boyhood an engaging chronicle. We are looking at us, a more realized version of ourselves in a film that aims for nothing more except bringing to us a picture of what lies beyond what we see in the mirror.

However, Boyhood also feels like a rushed film. I only wish it wasn't so eager to make Mason grow up, and then slacken the pace so that the "childhood" part seemed like a blaze in a reasonably long film. But this is only a minor niggle. Cramming adolescence in a film is never a cinch, especially in one that has been in the making for a little over a decade, and, rationally speaking, there are going to be loose ends that were forsaken at some point. Linklater's directorial flourishes are completely absent as well, giving the film its plain vanilla look. He was never one who would be remembered for his skill in handling a camera. But I wonder, would Boyhood have been the same if Linklater's expressive touches were present? It's a document of an ordinary soul, would visual artistry have killed it or enhanced it?

The selling point of the film, the gimmick that has irreversibly glued itself to it, will place it in my memory for a long time. It's an experiment of towering warmth, even though it doesn't seek to tell a story. It's anything but philosophical, more willing to talk about life than find meaning in it. And, remarkable as it seems, a surprisingly simple film.

On his excursion through adolescence, Linklater's Boyhood is a collage of the little moments he saw as he whizzed past them.

Review : Pardeep Sarkar's "Mardaani" is a sly masquerade.

Pradeep Sarkar seems to have lost his way after his charmingly subtle debut.

Stumbling from genre to genre, churning out bucketfuls of banality, it's hard to believe that the once-budding filmmaker who showed such competence, such sophistication with Parineeta would call the shots for a staggeringly inept rip-off that gleans its ideas from the enjoyable Hollywood twaddle, Taken. 

Except that, when hell freezes over, Mardaani isn't enjoyable. Twaddle, though, it certainly is.

Leastways, Taken didn't pretend to be what it definitely wasn't, and proudly stuck to being a crackpot cash-grab which made the film easy to assimilate. Mardaani proceeds to be a crafty charade without an ounce of tangible sentiment infusing its audacious plot. There's no avidity to neatly etch its mundane characters or carve out a rational plot, but a desperate hunger to plunge straight into its gritty subject matter. 

While the film is insatiably enthusiastic to present itself as a stringent voice on sex-trafficking, it hardly makes any noteworthy attempt to tackle it in a pragmatic, perceptive way, like any levelheaded person would. Making the audiences cringe violently at the exploitative, brusque and horrific depiction of the treatment the girls sold into prostitution are subjected to would patently fetch the right kind of response, plausibly the one that is pined for, but it comes of as a rather manipulative attempt to hide one's own ineptitude.

The intentions, though greatly admirable, aren't backed by a pragmatic script, but by a hollow, laughably quixotic one. A tiny hint of authenticity would have been quite helpful in reminding me I was watching a film that was - probably - trying valiantly to be aberrant, but it was lacking. And how sad is that, in a film dealing with a grave subject that demands eyeballs promptly, they just couldn't resist skipping the materialistic elements that show up uninvited in the second-half.

As far as my knowledge goes, I'm not aware of a cop who would brashly pursue a potential suspect without necessary reinforcements. Or a trivial lowlife who would take on a senior cop with such impudence. Or the one-person squad who, like a sunny cliche it is, singlehandedly exterminates an entire operation in a tick in the fantastical denouement. What I am aware of is that I am watching a film that isn't taking my comprehension of the subject as earnestly as I wish it would. Which flusters me.

Without the crisp performances from its largely able cast, Mardaani would have slumped immutably. What it is, is a wily commercial venture masquerading as a thoughtful, diligent scrutiny of a subject seldom explored in the film industry. It screamed for a pinch of the ace perceptiveness of Mira Nair's magically moody Salaam Bombay!. And there simply wasn't any.

The question we ought to be asking ourselves is : does a well-intentioned film merit the tag of being an accomplished film? Are we too liberal with that tag?

For me, Mardaani was nothing more than a splendid, preposterous facade.

Handpicks : The Ten Greatest Gangster Films Of The New Century.

I devour gangster films with the kind of relish people usually reserve for euphonious music. Ergo this list.

The following are the the finest gangster films of the new century I have seen, handpicked with deliberation and prudence. I don't believe I may have missed out on any film, and a film not on this list has been consciously excluded.

So, in the alphabetical order for the umpteenth time :


1.  A Bittersweet Life (2005; South Korea)

There's something strangely alluring about precipitous bloodshed.

As Kim Ji-woon admirably demonstrates in his explosively stylish fusion of machoism, morality and mania, grisly violence can only give rise to grislier violence. And acts of pugnacity can make a varmint out of even the loyalists.

A Bittersweet Life follows a frustratingly predictable pattern narratively and thematically, but remains an exhilarating joyride purely because of the abstruse characters that it serves with a colossal serving of the old repellent ultra-violence. What we get here are a bunch of diabolical fruitcakes intent on causing mayhem and ridding the world of each other, but in the stray moments, we find that the film is actually about the thorny relationship between a master and his flinty servant, both of them a part of the Korean mob. About how, even when brutishness seems inevitable, an act of magnanimity can trigger complications beyond one's realm of understanding.

And the complications are delightfully dark.

It's a profound, cheekily coolheaded and supremely well-orchestrated little gangland drama that demands to be seen for the characters that it carves. Fish around for a plot, however, and you'll end up with a mouthful of cliches.

2.  A Prophet (2009; France)

Oh, my! What a beautifully bestial film this is!

I have often spoken of my outmost admiration for Jacques Audiard's hypnotic masterpiece, which is unyielding in its depiction of impetuous violence in prison, and how a youth does his growing up by dealing with guilty hallucinations. And at its crux, A Prophet is about a murder so terribly brutal and unsettling that it changes the course of the film, and leaves us gasping in horror. In a calculated move of creative acumen, Audiard skillfully hinders his protagonist from turning into a hero. And what he gives us instead is a dissolving and often poignant nightmare, a brilliant one that petrifies and gnaws. That propels A Prophet into the league of modern masterworks in film.

Perhaps the greatest of all crime films of its generation, A Prophet is as flawless as a film can possibly get.

3.  Animal Kingdom (2010; Australia)

Who knew the usually diffident Jackie Weaver would slide into her role of a fickle mafia godmother with such unnerving menace?

David Michod did. And the socko hunch paid off, lucky us. The appropriately titled and devilishly slick Animal Kingdom hardly looks like a directorial debut of someone, a crime film of such prodigious power and artistic maturity that we hang on for every fiendish twist it pitches, spellbound and speechless. The reliable Ben Mendelsohn shines through and through in his role as the sinister older brother of a crime family, providing the film its much-exploited atmosphere of dread and dreariness, and the balance in terms of performances. But it is Weaver, the wondrous Weaver, who takes the cake here. She's absolutely invigorating.

If you haven't seen many Aussie crime films, Animal Kingdom would be a fine one to get cracking.

4.  City Of God (2002; Brazil)

Now, ain't this a visual treat to behold?

Fernando Meirelles' City Of God is breathtaking in its scope, flawless in its storytelling and spunky in its style, a rip-roaring gangster film that is one-off for reasons more than one. Fusing arresting images of the scuzzy favelas of the City Of God and ebullient details, Meirelles employs a visual style like no other film in recent memory to chronicle a story of a young man's adolescence in a violence-plagued city where mob wars are commonplace. And its flaws are so scant that I can count them off my fingers and still have some to spare. If not for anything else, City Of God warrants a peek for the consummate storytelling gifts of Fernando Meirelles. However, let it be known that it is a tad difficult to watch at times. If you cringe at the harrowing sight of children toting guns or getting shot, it will more disgust than rivet you.

Expertly directed, bracingly edited and colorfully shot, City Of God is genre-redefining.

5.  Eastern Promises (2007; UK/Canada/US)

Trust David Cronenberg to make a crime film on the Russian mob, and Eastern Promises is exactly the kind of film I envisaged him cranking out.

After his compelling A History Of Violence, Cronenberg, one of the finest filmmakers of his generation who remains persistently snubbed for reasons uncertain, took a deeply distressing story of rape, violence and sin in London's Russian mob and turned into a tasteful, alarming and elaborate film that offered intelligent fodder for the mind and thrills for the starved senses. It is a film that strings together a few sequences of crackerjack filmmaking -- most notably the nude brawl in the Turkish baths, which is the kind of stuff that turns films into indelible memories -- and spine-tingling brusqueness in its portrayal of the waywardness of a person devoted to violence. And the stifled horrors it illustrates so brashly had me cowering.

Eastern Promises is nauseatingly violent, at times to a fault, but has an incisive story to tell and does it without much foofaraw.

6.  Gomorrah (2008; Italy)

If your impression of the Italian Mafia stems from the swanky aesthetics of The Godfather or The Sopranos, here is a brute of a crime film to get you au courant with the changing times.

Set in a far-flung world of grubby alleys and sooty tenements in modern-day Naples where a crime syndicate operates with his claws digging, worming their way into the thwarted existence of its helpless residents, Gomorrah doesn't cut you some slack. It's an absolute doozy. Intermeshing five stories of how organized crime affects the uninvolved, it's a concise, controlled explosion of sheer filmmaking power. It is styled like a stark documentary, nosing about for grim realities to bludgeon us with, acted with the kind of naturalism you don't usually associate with opulent mob movies, thereby flinging you headfirst into this abject world of power, corruption and greed. That's what makes Gomorrah a bleak affair; you live the characters.

To all the romanticized mob movies we were forced fed in the past forty years, Gomorrah is a fortifying contradiction.

7.  Infernal Affairs (2002; Hong Kong)/ The Departed (2006; US)

Two, because I can't make up my mind which one is better than the other. So, two.

While Infernal Affairs is a heavily-stylized cop-and-con thriller pretending to be no different than what it is, The Departed feeds off on its ever-developing emotional core. Both films are masterfully directed, loyally carrying an irrepressible flavor of their respective cultures, peppering the plot with wildfire, urgent dialogue and arbitrary bouts of bloodbath. While Infernal Affairs lacks the earnestness that makes The Departed a far more soul-stirring film in comparison, it cashes in on being coldly detached and very nearly manages to shift the focus on the slightly cockamamie plot instead. Directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak only moderately succeed; Infernal Affairs works rather well as a character study albeit a half-baked one. But it is a hell of a punchy film, the kind you want to let you sweep you off your feet willingly and relish the coddling.

On the other hand, The Departed is an assured remake, conscious of the job at hand and working its way slowly to knock it out of the ballpark. The flamboyance of manner makes a rather delightful appendage, I must say. Working with minmal gore and relying heavily on oppressive tension, Martin Scorsese creates a palpable set of conflicted characters that are sculpted with great attention, and their woolly relationships with each other deftly add sprinkles of mystique to them. However, in terms of unmitigated audacity, it slumps vulnerably before Infernal Affairs.

While one's more of a plaintive drama, the other one's a turbulent thriller. Pick your fix.

8.  Outrage (2010; Japan)

Outrage can be described best as prolonged carnage.

But you have got to hand it to Takeshi Kitano, the orchestrator of this bang-bang, who skillfully hinders the film from turning into a pantomime. The multi-hatted auteur creates a baroque plot that brags of a thousand promises, and doesn't let it die down till he's done. Outrage may not be a levelheaded yakuza film, but it is a thoroughly entertaining fare that gloats of the most polished gore since the two volumes of Kill Bill. It is one of those crime films where the director would rather wipe out his characters in the most inventive way possible than be bothered about where the plot is headed. Though the tall body count in this film has some wild, plausible logic behind it, I'm just not sure if it was requisite. However, when a hotshot filmmaker is flying off the handle, it is best to stand back and watch him do his trade.


Outrage is a triumph of bravura over brains. For once, I readily basked in something like that.

9.  Sexy Beast (2000; UK/Spain)

In my fantasies, I often wonder what Gandhi would have made of his reel version's performance in this brawny bop of a film.

Because, like countless other film-lovers, I usually associate Ben Kingsley with his portrayal of Gandhi in Richard Attenborough's magnificent biopic at the mention of his name. Or the bumbling Jewish accountant he played so adeptly in Steven Spielberg's magnum opus Schindler's List. But Ben Kingsley as a presumably deranged, diabolical lowlife? That's an unimaginable first. But as Don Logan, the stuck-up, perpetually mumbling and dangerously volatile gangster, he not only delivers one of the finest pieces of acting I have seen in modern cinema, but also a masterclass in acting. The guy zaps the whole cast with his towering persona and makes it look like a cinch.

But the film's ravishing visual style is no less stupendous. Debutant Jonathan Glazer narrates as much with the imagery as the characters do with their garrulous lines. The characters aren't the affable sort, of course, which makes this crafty, subtle ride all the more intriguing. It's a slick and satisfying journey into their chaotic consciences that will give you gooseflesh.

Sexy Beast will come at you with the impact of a seething knockout punch. Best greet it.

10.  Viva Riva! (2010; the Congo)

My jaunt in African cinema began with a cabochon.

The only Congolese and African film I have seen, Djo Tunda Wa Munga's Viva Riva! is evidence of the kind of artistic talent they nurture in that part of the world. It is a film at par with any great crime films made with a bulkier budget and with far superior resources. It is a film that is noirish in its approach, working with a plot dunked in atmosphere and panache, and with an unmistakably authentic African setting. It steadily evolves into a brutal, brutal film, briskly paced and enjoyable to boot. To get a notion of how enjoyable this film is, the exclamation mark in its title is a gracious sample. However, those who despise acts of violence and sleaze would prefer to keep away from this maelstrom.

Viva Riva! opened a door into a world of cinema that I was oblivious to. And I'm stoked it did.

(Not For Reproduction)