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apparently barged in to feast on cakes. His parents are tense because his elder sister has not yet returned from school, though school was declared shut a while ago.

Chintu's world is simple - one of cakes, buddies and school. The world outside is in nitely more complex, for Chintu and his folks are Indian expatriates in Iraq, 2004. His father is a salesman of water puri ers in Baghdad at a time Saddam Hussain has been captured and is awaiting trial. The ‘Amreeka waale uncle' he sees on TV (refers to President George W. Bush) won't call his soldiers back.

Chintu Ka Birthday introduces its premise with this backgrounder in the opening portions, before a sudden spin in the tale gets the story

BAAZAAR

DIRECTOR: Gauravv K. Chawla

STARRING: Saif Ali Khan, Rohan Mehra, Radhika Apte, Chitrangda Singh HHHHH racing. In just 83 minutes, debutant writer-directors Devanshu Kumar and Satyanshu Singh narrate a story that is at once an account of harrowing wartime through an innocent's eyes, and a taut suspense drama that justi es every second written into its runtime.

Kumar and Singh have set up their lm entirely within a single apartment. It involves barely 10 characters. Camera and sound effects are impressively functional, devoid of technical gloss. The storytelling never wavers from a linear track.

I can’t recall a single notable (or even non-notable) Indian lm based on the plunging dips and giddying highs of the stock market. Do you remember Harshad Mehta? How could you forget the podgy stockbroker who made thousands of Indians rich overnight and then it all ended in a nancial mess in no time at all?

Saif Ali Khan’s Shakun Kothari’s destiny run on the same lines. Except that Saif as the wily ruthless

For those reasons, Chintu Ka Birthday is a writers' effort. Its triumph lies in the way the narrative is structured, the twists are introduced, and the characters are imagined.

This is the story of a family of

Machiavellian stockbroker is everything that Harshad Mehta would have wanted to be. This is Saif’s most gloriously written and performed part, meaty witty and wicked. He chews into it exposing a sacred hunger that I didn’t notice in his last over-hyped outing.

Saif as Shakun is a true-blue Gujju who won’t let neo-af uence corrupt his cultural integrity. He slips into Gujjucations with the unrehearsed cuteness of tycoon, who has long ceased to be cute to everyone, including his own wife and children.

When debutant Rohan Mehra enters the plot as Rizwan there is no Shakun Kothari around. We know Rizwan idolizes Shakun and wants to be like

The screenplay is incredible in the way it balances nuanced relationship subtexts with the larger socio-political context in such a short runtime. For Chintu's father Madan (Vinay Pathak), arranging a cake for his little boy is as much a matter of life and death as proving his innocence in the unwarranted jam he will subsequently land in. The mother (Tillotama Shome) has her own worries of putting up a semblance of normalcy for her kids. Each character is well etched-out, each role awlessly enacted. While the grown-up cast couldn't have done better, little Vedant Raj Chibber as Chintu is worth an applause for the way he uses silent gaze to convey a gamut of emotions. The junior cast is particularly impressive. Mehroos Ahmed Mir as Chintu's spunky Iraqi pal Waheed and Bisha Chaturvedi as his elder sister Lakshmi are a delight to watch. Imperfections? You could feel a bit let down by the lm's obvious insistence on nding a feel-good ending that might seem a tad unrealistic, given the reality of war. Considering this lm is, after all, about reasserting the little hopes of life, you can just gloss over that glitch. Vinayak Chakravorty him have. Rizwan’s a bristling her nale.

He down moment in of the come ‘When (Nikhil Arora)

Athe with. the the towns. in the and celebrated country: Year, Ramadan to name However, of the peoples reminder been reminds achieved The the put current 18C constrains speech. That unlawful public likely… humiliate another of people” is done race, ethnic person There that is important important the democracy. of

CH O K E D: PAISA B O LTA HAI

S TARRING: Saiyami Kher, Roshan Mathew, Amruta Subhash, Upendra

Limaye

DIRECTOR: Anurag Kashyap

HHH

In this oddly-titled Net ix lm, Anurag Kashyap tries building up suspense and drama by cocktailing the realism of demonetisation with a bizarre plot of wish ful lment. Choked: Paisa Bolta Hai is quite unlike anything he has attempted before - the trademark grim lmmaking is missing. Instead, he opts for the lighter idiom of satire.

Nihit Bhave's script is set in suburban

B E TAAL (Net ix series)

S TARRING: Viineet Kumar Singh, Aahana Kumra, Suchitra Pillai, Jitendra Joshi, Siddharth Menon, Manjiri Pupala

DIRECTOR: Patrick Graham

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The problem with Betaal is it tries being too many things. It tries to be a morality tale about modern-day urbanisation and greed, as well as a slice of ancient lore serving up every stereotype that has ever de ned ‘desi’ mumbo jumbo. There is also token mention woven in of superstitionloaded gender bias, Naxal politics, and the Indian Muslim identity.

In all this, the makers seem to have forgotten what we primarily signed up to watch – a scary show.

Sure, there are the hordes of zombies, lots of creepy dark scenes thriving on insuf cient lighting and ominous sound engineering, besides the standard gore quotient you would expect from a story of this particular horror sub-genre. But it is all too formulaic in presentation to create the right effect.

The lack of fear factor about Betaal