V(Telugu, Amazon Prime): It is appalling how the language of the Great Indian Masala Dossier is looked down upon as an inferior brand of cinema by some critics, just because it engages the audience without the conventional tropes of “serious” cinema, such as a brooding melancholic background score and actors who look like they could do with a bath and a stiff vodka.V is drunk on drollery. It is a conventional streetwise sassy savvy potboiler with no claims to being anything else. Within the restrictions of its genre V is masterclass in mass entertainment. The story of the serial killer and the cop , here played by Nani and Sudheer Babu, has been done to bludgeoning death. But seldom with such vivacity vigour and humour rendering the violence more comic bookish than real, more rumbustious than raw.Nani’s cop-baiting killer act is a jaw-dropping winner. He is cool brash and sometimes brutal . But he also has a sense of humour. In my favourite sequence the killer Vishnu(Nani) travels on a bus with an elderly man who is watching the brutal Korean serial-killer film I Saw the Devil on his phone.The way Vishnu convinces his petrified co-passenger that the killer instinct exists in every individual , is a masterstroke of writing.Elsewhere before ruthlessly slitting a victim’s throat Nai discusses the cinema of K Raghvendra Rao with the trembling victim.I saw skilled writing in many places .Alas, much of the taut treatise on sporty slaying comes undone in the second-to-last act when all hell breaks loose.A communal riot, a pretty victim(Aditi Rao Hydari) , an act of retribution… and voila! The killer is not a serial killer after all, but something else.This turning back costs the narrative heavily in terms of credibility. But writer-director Mohana Krishna Indraganti manages to stop the plot from dead-ending in a stumble and a fall to the ground with a last-act confrontation between Nani and Sudheer Babi (shot on a scenic sea-facing location) which, like much of the rest of the film,is skillfully written ,handsomely shot and effectively directed. I also liked Sudheer’s courtship with the attractive Nivetha Thomas. It is adeptly woven into the thriller and could be considered the comic relief in the tense drama, were it not for the fact that Nani’s track as the in the thriller is inherently laced with a wicked humour that I have not seen applicable to death since Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and Death Becomes Her.V maintains a firm grip over the grammar of giggly gore, letting go only towards the end but catching the beast before it falls to the ground.

Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare(Hindi, Netflix):Post-feminist cinema in India suffers from a post-coital fatigue. It goes around and around wearing the same heart on the sleeve, same save-woman-save-the-planet logo on the teeshirt, same obsession with caddish husbands and rebellious wives , sex-seeking selfish boyfriends, etc etc.Alankrita Shrivastava’s third feature film has one of both, a caddish husband and a selfish boyfriend.There is a power-driven inner-driven intensity about Alankrita’s storytelling which sucks us into its characters’ famished world of inchoate desires.Sexual fulfillment and the Big O are huge concerns in Alankrita’s cinema. In her last highly-acclaimed Lipstick Under The Burqa, Konkona Sen Sharma lay listless under her heaving husband. As Dolly, Konkona is still stuck in the same place. But with a lot more problems this time than Dolly can handle,like a hyper-intense cousin from Darbhanga Kajol, aka Kitty whose Jijajee(Amir Bashir) wants to have s*x with her. Dolly laughs at her sister’s hormonal delusions about her husband.Dolly has bigger problems, to deal with , like a son who prefers dresses to men’s clothes and the female loo to the male. Dolly has also gone frigid on her husband who slips into the bathroom after a few heaves to masturbate in peace.“I don’t feel anything down there,” Dolly divulges to Kitty who is more than willing to lend an ear.Kitty’s big specialty is listening in. She works in a phone-sex company .Her aural encounters with sex-starved men would have been funny were it not so sad.An inquisitive young gentleman calls in to ask Dolly the size of her breasts.“They won’t fit into your hands,” she confidently reassures the hormonally challenged brat.At times it seems Alankrita has taken on more on her plate than one would imagine she can handle. Miraculously the director balances out her two heroines’ imbalances, hormonal or otherwise , cleverly and smoothly and with bracing shots of humour and irony.

I did encounter some clunky writing towards the end when all hell breaks loose at a public rally for vaginal rights, if you please. The endgame is a bit of a hurried sendoff before both the cousins Dolly and Kitty find their orgasmic epicenters in life, heaving floors exploding lights and all.Dolly Aur Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is not a film without flaws. The quest for the female orgasm often makes the men in the film look like clumsy insensitive dickheads. While Aamir Bashir as Konkona’s husband still manages to bring a smudge of empathy to his character, Vikrant Massey makes Kitty’s love interest supremely uninteresting.

Rightfully the film belongs to Sen Sharma and Pednekar. Both fearless actors not afraid to strip their characters’ souls in front of the camera even at the risk of embarrassing themselves. The element of intrepidity courses through the veins of this vigorous and vital film about two sisters determined to find their mojo. Even if it means giving an all-new definition to the job of the delivery boy. Like the pizza boy who wants paanch sitare from Konkona’s Dolly for performance,this film too demands a high rating.

Halal Love Story(Malayalam, Amazon Prime):There is much to be admired in director Zakariya’s look at art during times of intense radicalism.Kerala, known both for its supremely sensitive cinema and religious radicalism is a state of cultural diversity and much of their cinema reflects that diversity. In director Zakariya’s directorial debut Sudani From Nigeria, a film that I both admired and loved, a black Nigerian footballer moves into a conservative Kerala Muslim family and converts them into tolerant inclusive citizens. In Halal Love Story no such transformation takes place. In fact the Muslim community is shown to be rigidly conservative(in one crowd scene a man ignores an arti thali that’s passed before him) but not in a toxic way. The film’s greatest achievement is that it drains all the toxicity out of religious conservatism and shows how the more liberal elements of a closely-knit community can work their way around the harsh tenets and ideologies.

The film cleverly follows a film crew’s journey in a small Kerala village where even a touch on screen between a couple is considered haraam. Halaal shows how haraam can be dodged, sublimated and fine-tuned when push comes to pull. If two actors of the opposite sexes cannot be shown getting intimate then sign a real-life husband and wife.

This is what the production team in the film does. They sign a real couple Shareef and Suhra, played feelingly,if a tad selfconsciously, by Indrajith Sukumaram and Grace Antony.As the the real-life couple faces the camera it also faces some home-truth(the film is being shot in Shareef and Suhra’s home).This is where I found the plot to be getting way too ambitious for its own good.The plot about constraints in a conservative community begins to stifle itself by over-burdening the narrative with elements of Brechtian drama, as the real and reel tensions of the husband and wife begin to converge in awkward ways.The most manipulative section of the drama involves an acting coach played by Parvathy Thiruvothu who is brought in(unnecessarily) to select actors for the film that’s being made within the film.The section revels in the irony of the husband being rejected for his bad acting while the wife(reluctant to face the camera) gets the thumbs up.The film-within-film format of Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane and Rituparno Ghosh’s Bariwali fails to provide Halal Love Story with the creative freedom that was afforded to The French Lieutenant’s Woman where we saw Meryl Street as an actress playing a woman from the Victorian era and from modern times coming together in a socio-cultural clasp.Halal Love Story strives for no merger between the reel and the real. It is happy to show the way art reflects on and affects real life , and moves on.For its doughty spirit and enterprising theme,the film deserves a huge applause. But finally the film is not half as interesting as it should and could have been.But yes, for opening up doors that most filmmakers fear unbolting, for showing the veil can be lifted without offence, this film deserves our unconditional attention.