Diljit Dosanjh in Chamkila to Tabu, Kareena and Kriti in Crew: Performances and top movie moments of 2024

Vijay Sethupathi in Sriram Raghavan’s Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas stars Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi.

It’s old-fashioned Bombay, not new-fangled Mumbai, it’s Christmas, and it’s Sethpathi’s return-of-the-native serial-bumping into Katrina Kaif’s mysterious woman-in-red. It’s a ‘hatke’ role (his protective father in one of 2024’s big earners ‘Maharaja’ is much more in his zone) and he aces it: a dance sequence in which he and Kaif jive, is amongst the most magical this year.

Sparsh Shrivastava in Laapata Ladies

Laapataa Ladies stars Sparsh Shrivastava in the lead role.

The title belongs to the ladies who are lost-and-found in Kiran Rao’s delightful yarn (which didn’t make it to Oscars short-list), but this gent won my heart. His anguish of ‘losing’ his delicate, flower-like Phool feels earned, and his face, when he sees her at that ‘found-on-the-railway-station’ scene, is a sight. His relief, and delight leaps off the screen. He was also the only good thing in the set-in-pre-Independence period piece, ‘Ae Watan Mere Watan’.

Diljit Dosanjh in Chamkila

Diljit Dosanjh in lead role in Chamkila.

Imtiaz Ali’s solid bio-pic unpacks the myth of Amar Singh Chamkila, the singer who parlayed his bawdy, tawdry beginnings into global popularity. Playing the dirt-poor Dalit boy who grows into one of the most provocative, popular folk singers in the Punjab of the 80s, Dosanjh’s parallels with the titular character — singer/Punjabi/son-of-the-soil/modest beginnings/rebel– hover just under the surface. In the way he gets so deep into Chamkila’s skin, we forget his own.

Rajkummar Rao in Tushar Hiranandani’s Srikanth

Rajkummar Rao shines as a visually impaired boy in Srikanth.

His ‘Stree 2’ may have turned into one of 2024’s top grossers, but it’s a part– the ‘chote-shehar-ka-bade-dilwala-ladka’ — that Rao can dial in with his eyes closed. It’s the one in ‘Srikanth’, in which he plays a blind character with conviction, never turning his disability into ‘bechargi’, never losing his desire for ‘barabari’. Yes, the white cane is there, but it’s not used as a sorry crutch: Srikanth’s occasional burst of temper and truculence makes him human, someone we can relate to as an equal, and not have to pity. Well played, Mr Rao.

Pratik Gandhi in Madgaon Express

Pratik Gandhi was one of the lead actors of Madgaon Express

The three-pals-carousing-in-Goa didn’t work for me, coming off stodgy and over-familiar in too many places, but of the trio–Divyenndu, Avinash Tiwary, Pratik Gandhi– the latter made it something I could sit through. Playing a goofball well is a gift, and Gandhi has it in spades, and it comes as a surprise because we’ve only seen him do intense dramas before.

Tabu-Kareena-Kriti as a merry threesome in Crew

Tabu, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Kriti Sanon in Crew.

now this is a caper that works almost all the way because of its emphasis on its trio, as well locations, situations, and lines. The ladies are air-hostesses, slaloming between demanding passengers, bad bosses, and domestic crises: once they get going, it is a riot, especially Tabu and Kareena, who throw in a delicious awareness of their late stage stardom (been there, done all of that, still here), cracking us up with that remark about age-defying make-up. ‘Bas kar Cleopatra, yeh foundation hai, time machine nahin’ is the best line of 2024, bar none.

Kareena Kapoor Khan in The Buckingham Murders:

A still from The Buckingham Murders.

As the plain-faced police detective, based in a small town in the UK, dealing with past trauma, working through it to investigate the murder of a local boy, Kapoor Khan shows, like she has been for a while, that star-power can be harnessed to good purpose. Many of these characteristics have led to tropes ( a small-town, conflicted female sleuth shall always be compared to Kate Winslett ), and not all of ‘The Buckingham Murders’ works smoothly, but it gives Kapoor Khan enough room to roam, just like 2023’s ‘Jaane Jaan’.

Taapsee Pannu in Phir Aayi Haseen Dilruba

A still from Phir Aayi Haseen Dilruba

As the red-hot ‘haseena’ in a twisted pulpy romance which gets most of its beats right, she has everyone in the place she wants : Vikrant Massey as the husband-on-the-run, Sunny Kaushal as the needy-other-man, Aditya Srivastava as the cop-hot-on-their-heels, and Jimmy Sheirgill as the sleuth who will not back off. I also liked her as the very-desi-Punjabi-wife–deliciously named Happy– in ‘Khel Khel Mein’, a desi adaptation of Italian drama ‘Perfect Strangers’, blowing off secrets and lies in marriages. She’s the kind of woman who spills the tea, coffee and everything else, and is so very relatable.

Preeti Panigrahi in Girls Will Be Girls

Preeti Panigrahi in Girls Will Be Girls.

As Mira, the teenage girl who explores her sexuality with an honesty we rarely encounter in Indian cinema, Panigrahi is brilliant. This is an actor who knows the power of tiny gestures, her mobile face expressing the turmoil within. And what’s a teenager minus angst? Panigrahi gets fabulous support from Kani Kusruti who plays her mother, who subverts all our notions of self-sacrificing screen mums in her own flashes of repressed desire which bursts forth when Mira’s crush, cool classmate Sri, arrives in their midst.

Kani Kusruti in Payal Kapadia’s Cannes winner All We Imagine As Light and Shuchi Talati’s Sundance winner Girls Will Be Girls (and in two web-series Poacher and Killer Soup) owns 2024. As the Malayali nurse Prabha, one of the countless migrants in Mumbai who finds kinship with the younger, flightier nurse Anu, and co-worker Parvaty, Kusruti blows you away. Her stillness hints at the storm within, her worn body leaning against a pole in a late night local, missing her absentee husband, and yet not being able to submit to the gentle ministrations of a doctor who writes poetry to her. In a film filled with so many shadows, Prabha is the light.

Special mentions

Here are some performances and set-pieces I also enjoyed, even if the films they are embedded in didn’t come together as they should, or could, have.

Swantratrya Veer Savarkar

Randeep Hooda in and as Swantratrya Veer Savarkar, is as muscular and full-bodied a performance I’ve seen all year. The film.which he also wrote and directed, doesn’t hide its intentions of deifying its titular character while downsizing Gandhi, makes the film singularly one-sided; more balance would have done the film good. Hooda is terrific, though, as the man who originated the idea of Hindutva.

Jigra

The opening sequence of Vasan Bala’s revenge drama Jigra, which swirls around the tightly held-in, almost-too-composed figure of Alia Bhatt, with the camera sweeping around corners, swooping up and down steps, adding in details without any dialogues, is so skilfully done that I couldn’t wait to get into the meat of the film. Sadly, Bhatt’s diminutive frame, and the film, gets increasingly weighed under by the antics written for her : for once, I didn’t enjoy an Alia performance.

Sector 36

Vikrant Massey and Deepak Dobriyal in Aditya Nimbalkar’s Sector 36, as the hunter and the hunted, both sinking into their parts, the former’s much tougher, with felicity. To make us stay invested in the doings of a grisly serial killer is not easy : Massey is unctuous and slimy and scary by turns, and Dobriyal makes the chase engaging, even if the film itself peters off.

Sharvari in Munjya, Maharaj, and Vedaa

Sharvari had three films out this year, Munjya, Maharaj, and Vedaa. The former was a sleeper hit, and cemented the success of horror comedies, the only genre working in Bollywood currently. The second was the debut of Aamir Khan’s son Junaid, and the period piece was a worthy subject done in by dated execution. The third, a pot-boiler with a conscience, also didn’t do justice to its theme of social-and-gender upliftment. In all three, she shows she has it, a quality that catches the eye.

I Want To Talk

Abhishek Bachchan in Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk sheds vanity, and gives us a character which is literally a body undergoing the knife multiple times, and each time, returning to living, and what passes for normalcy, with an admiring lack of self-pity. I’ve always maintained that Bachchan does best when he is not being made to do the standard hero stuff, and here he’s the best he’s been in a long time.