Historical fiction is what’s happening at the movies this week, with a side serving of current events in two more features. The big, plush beach-read epic among them is The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’ adventure classic being given an extravagant new three-hour visualization by the French writing-directing team of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patelliere. Pierre Niney of Frantz and Yves Saint Laurent plays Edmond Dantes, a sailor of humble origin made good, until a jealous rival has him framed as an agent of the exiled Napoleon. Years later, he escapes an island prison and poses as a wealthy foreigner to insinuate himself into the worlds of the three men (Bastien Bouillon, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Mille) who’d orchestrated his fate—and have profited from more crimes since.
Even with its narrative somewhat altered and compacted from Dumas’ sprawling original (which was first published as a serial between 1844-46), this remains a flamboyantly old-fashioned tale of credulity-stretching intrigue and coincidence. We seldom see its like on the big screen anymore—or maybe we do, but these days it’s more likely to take the overtly fantastical form of a Batman movie or the like. This lavish production does not shy from going over-the-top in its ostentatious settings, flashy drone shots or bombastic orchestral score. Still, it all pretty much works, particularly once the elaborate revenge scheme kicks in around mid-point.
It’s period popcorn entertainment on a grand scale, no less enjoyable for being more than a bit theatrically shameless. The Count of Monte Cristo begins opening around the Bay Area on January 3; likely SF venues (not yet confirmed at presstime) were the AMC Kabuki and Metreon.
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As strikingly bleak in its handsome B&W austerity as The Count is eye-candy colorful, The Girl With the Needle from Danish director Magnus von Horn (whose prior Sweat we reviewed here) weaves fictional elements around a shocking criminal case from a century ago. In 1919 Copenhagen, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a clothing-factory seamstress whose husband hasn’t come back from WWI service, and may well be dead. She is seduced by her wealthy boss (Jorgen Fjelstrup), but any dreams of a wealthy, stable future with him get squelched by a first/last meeting with his imperious mother.
Now pregnant and desperate, with legal abortion not an option, Karoline finds herself aided by a stranger met by chance. Middle-aged Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) seems to be in the business of helping just such poor young women, and placing their unwanted children in “good homes.” But it is not until she’s become an integral part of Dagmar’s ongoing operation that Karoline realizes her benefactress is secretly a monster—a sort of matricidal equivalent to Sweeney Todd. It is that figure who’s based on a real-life one, her trial leading to major changes in child-protective laws; and the formidable Dyrholm is impressive as always in the role.
But primary focus here is on fictive Karoline, who is not very interesting or even terribly sympathetic. The facts on record are so much more powerful than what von Horn chooses to portray, his choices end up seeming rather inscrutable, despite the film’s compelling atmosphere and aesthetics. It’s an arresting exercise in many respects that nonetheless proves somewhat frustrating. Girl opens Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie, with other Bay Area venues to follow.
Taking place a few years earlier on the far opposite ends of Eurasia is Harbin from South Korean writer-director Woo Min-ho, of prior hit political thrillers Inside Men and The Man Standing Next. It’s set in 1909, four years after a multinational treaty forced Korea to basically become a colony of Japan following the latter’s winning the Russo-Japanese War. Abandoned by allies (including the US), nationalists formed resistance groups to combat the encroachment of further Japanese imperialism, among them the Korean Independence Army. Ahn (Hyun Bin) is fighting in their ranks when they score a combat victory over some surprised Nippon troops. But he insists on honoring international war-crimes rules by not executing some captured personnel, despite his own men’s objections. That turns out to be a bitterly regretted decision, because spared high-ranking officer Mori (Park Hoon) soon seizes an opportunity to massacre nearly all Ahn’s comrades.
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To redeem himself, Ahn decides he’ll make it his mission to assassinate Japan’s Prime Minister as he travels across China to meet with Russian diplomats, orchestrating deals that will secure Korea’s subjugation. This involves a labyrinth of undercover intrigue, arms acquisition, betrayal, shootouts, and so forth, with a mole conveying most of these planned guerrilla actions to the relentless Mori before they can occur.
Dense with background details and explication that may be somewhat daunting to non-Korean audiences, Harbin nonetheless maintains interest with a somber, tense mood spiked by occasional outbursts of violence. It’s handsomely produced on impressive locations, from spectacular mountain and desert landscapes to myriad interiors whose dark look amplifies the surreptitious nature of the characters’ activities. A history lesson framed as heroic action-suspense tale, Harbin may for Western viewers recall starry big-budget WW2 espionage epics of the 1960s like Where Eagles Dare and Von Ryan’s Express—though it’s a bit less heavy on the swaggering machismo. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.
Another fact-inspired new drama has gotten a divisive response, with raves and awards from some quarters, while others have found it curiously alienating. I’m sorry to say I landed on the debit side of that divide—sorrier still because the source material seemed such a natural for the screen. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys provided a succinctly powerful portrait of slavery long after the official end of slavery, via abuses visited on boys at a very long-running fictive Florida boys’ reform school (in real life the now-shuttered Dozier School). Its protagonist gets sent there unjustly as a juvenile in the early 1960s, and is lucky to survive the experience. Much later, he lives to see the institution investigated, uncovering decades of brutality including rape, beatings, and the unmarked graves of former wards who supposedly “ran away” or simply “disappeared.”
Nickel Boys (the “the” has been dropped) is a first narrative feature for RaMell Ross, who previously had turned his sojourn teaching photography in rural Alabama into a fine poetical documentary of life there. Hale County This Morning, This Evening was oblique but evocative, offering little in the way of concrete storytelling yet providing heady, lyrical insight into a place and culture.
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But Whitehead’s book is full of vivid incident, character dynamics, and historical context; it’s not the sort of thing that lends itself to flavorful abstraction. Whatever led Ross to make the decisions he makes, they didn’t work for me: He has shot this intensely dramatic story entirely in the first-person, initially limited to the perspective of teenaged Elmwood (Ethan Herisse), then also that of Turner (Brandon Wilson), who becomes his only real friend at the dreaded “Nickel Academy.”
Their travails rendered murky by a POV in which we see the abuser, but not the abused (Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ screenplay tends to leave those acts to our imagination anyway), this is a movie whose high-minded experimentalism ends up only muffling the impact of its material. The effect is rather like reading a novel entirely written in the second person: It’s a gimmick that can be pulled off, yes, but why would you want to? The performers (also including Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, and Jimmie Fails) are good, albeit handicapped by the alienating technique. Some, like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother, succumb to overstatement when repeatedly asked to play entire scenes directly to the camera, rather than a fellow actor.
The external threads Ross weaves in (often utilizing archival footage) involving the concurrent Civil Rights movement, “space race” etc. do ultimately pay off in making this long sit achieve a kind of complex, essayistic dimensionality. But those 15 minutes or so of Chris Marker-like montage succeed at the cost of The Nickel Boys, which will have to wait for a more straightforward future translation to realize the impact that fairly leapt off Whitehead’s pages, and which should have provided no obstacle to replication in this medium. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.
More direct depictions of grave present-tense injustices are on display in two more new films. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War centers on three Ukrainian artists living in the vicinity of devastated Kharkiv, very near the Russian border. Originally they’d all lived in Crimea, yet another “life stolen from us by Russia’s occupation.” Finding themselves in a new war zone, they maintain their disciplines as a form of protest: Cinematographer Andrey Stefanov keeps filming, including the mines and IUD’s now littering their countryside, while married couple Leontyev and Anya Stasenko continue creating ceramic miniatures that now offer commentary on this nation’s appalling day-to-day reality.
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Occasionally bringing those whimsical figures to “life” via animation, Porcelain Nation can seem a bit twee, particularly when compared to the many more bluntly powerful documentaries about Ukraine the last couple years. But in its second half, the film acquires some power of its own, as we watch Slava train as a weapons expert for the Ukrainian Special Forces, and Andrey must cope with sending his children into exile for their own safety. There’s even gritty you-are-there footage of combat missions. Ultimately, the film’s strength lies in showing how art can retain its relevance, and artists their artistry, under the most antagonistic circumstances.
Likewise, From Ground Zero: Stories From Gaza is not the most hard-hitting of recent features about Palestinians’ plight, but it benefits from a diversity of approach to a grim subject. Conceived by Rashid Masharawi, the project brings together 22 filmmakers for as many individual contributions to a nearly two-hour omnibus reflecting everyday life in Gaza. As amply demonstrated here, that life is to a large degree now spent in refugee camps, or combing through the debris of homes newly bombed to rubble—sometimes still hoping to find survivors buried beneath.
There are sequences that are straight documentary reportage, others more in the realm of personal essay, plus a fair number of dramatized vignettes. In lighter moments, we see a standup comedian provide some escapist relief for refugees; animation and marionettes are utilized elsewhere.
Not everything here is good, with a wince-worthy moment or two, as during a bit that’s like a tacky amateur music video on YouTube. But the immediacy of so many voices in front of and behind the cameras does generate considerable insight. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved when at one point various children are interviewed, and one notes that her baby brother hasn’t yet acquired the power of speech—his experience to date has only taught him to imitate the sound of an ambulance siren.
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Porcelain War and From Ground Zero both open Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie Theater, the former also at the Rafael Film Center in Marin.
The act of judging — of assigning value to someone or something based on performance — is probably as old as humanity itself. You can safely assume that even cavemen were sizing each other up: Who hunts better? Who builds the sturdier shelter? Who’s pulling their weight?
Formalized systems came much later. The Roman Empire famously popularized the thumbs up/thumbs down gesture during gladiatorial games — a blunt but effective metric. By the 18th century, academic institutions began standardizing numerical grading systems. The 19th century introduced letter grades. And by the early 20th century, film criticism had entered the chat, with newspapers like the New York Daily publishing some of the earliest recorded movie grades (at least according to a quick Google dive — so take that with a grain of salt).
Fast forward to the 1970s, and modern film criticism as we know it began to crystallize. Roger Ebert popularized the four-star system, while he and Gene Siskel turned the thumbs up/thumbs down into a cultural mainstay on their television show — perhaps subconsciously echoing those ancient Roman gestures.
Now, I could theoretically try to confirm whether the Roman inspiration was intentional. But seeing as both critics have passed on, the only way to do that would involve a séance — and if horror movies have taught us anything, that never ends well. Sure, some people claim they’ve used an Ouija board, and nothing happened. Good for them. With my luck, I’d end up summoning Pazuzu, Candyman, a Djinn, and Satan all at once. So that’s a hard pass.
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Jokes aside, in the past decade — arguably since the moment movie ratings were invented — people have increasingly questioned their value in entertainment and beyond. Albums, films, TV shows, books: every score feels like a potential battleground. (I don’t spend much time in Goodreads comment sections, but I can only imagine.)
But where did it all probably begin?
The Rotten Tomatoes Effect
I still remember the first time I heard about Rotten Tomatoes. It was on a radio show I used to catch after school called La Hora Señalada (the Spanish title for “High Noon”), where two veteran critics would break down new releases and revisit older classics. Before every discussion, they’d reference “the Rotten Tomatoes score,” like it was some cinematic barometer of truth.
I didn’t actually visit the site back then. Internet access at home was spotty — dial-up at best, nonexistent at worst — and not exactly a priority when my family had bigger concerns. But even without browsing it myself, I grew up watching cinephiles treat the Tomatometer like gospel. A high percentage meant “good.” A low one meant “bad.” Simple as that.
Over the past decade, that perception seems to have intensified. The site has been around since 1998, but the explosion of high-speed internet, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and the rise of online fandom culture amplified its influence. Suddenly, that big red or green number wasn’t just a reference point — it became ammunition in arguments.
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So, how much should we actually care about it?
The answer isn’t straightforward.
First, it’s important to understand what that percentage represents. The Tomatometer isn’t an average movie rating — it’s the percentage of critics who gave the film a “fresh” (positive) review. That means a movie sitting at 80% doesn’t necessarily have critics raving about it. Many of those positive reviews could be modest 7/10s or 3.5/5s. The more telling metric is the smaller average rating number listed beneath the percentage — but let’s be honest, most people fixate on the big, bold score.
Filmmakers have criticized the site for oversimplifying complex critical opinions into a binary fresh/rotten system. And that critique isn’t entirely unfair. When nuanced reviews get distilled into a single color-coded badge, context gets lost.
Then there’s the audience score — which, at least historically, has been vulnerable to manipulation. The most infamous example came during the release of “Captain Marvel,” when organized groups review-bombed the film largely due to backlash against Brie Larson. The score plummeted before most people had even seen the movie. To their credit, Rotten Tomatoes implemented changes afterward to curb that kind of coordinated sabotage. Of course, the opposite phenomenon exists too: fans artificially inflating scores for films they love.
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A still from One Battle After Another (2025) starring Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills.
All of this reinforces one simple idea: the site is a reference point, not a verdict.
It can be useful — a quick snapshot of critical consensus — but it shouldn’t live on a pedestal. It can mislead. It can misrepresent nuance. And it absolutely may not reflect your own taste. There are plenty of low-rated films I adore. “Max Keeble’s Big Move” sits at 27%, and I’ll defend that gem every, any, what, where, why, when, and however time.
Another factor people rarely consider: critics are individuals with specific tastes. If a horror skeptic reviews a slasher or a rom-com enthusiast tackles an austere arthouse drama, their reaction may not align with your own sensibilities. That doesn’t make them wrong — it just means taste is subjective.
I believe the healthiest approach is to treat Rotten Tomatoes as a starting point. Read individual reviews. Seek out critics whose tastes align with yours. Cross-reference with other aggregators like Metacritic, which uses a weighted average system rather than a binary model. (Full disclosure: I haven’t relied on it heavily myself, but many cinephiles prefer its methodology.)
In the end, no percentage can replace your own experience. The most reliable metric will always be the one you assign after the credits roll.
Also Related to Movie Rating Dilemma: The Death of the Opening Weekend: What Actually Defines Success in Film Now
The Value
In preparation for this article, I ran a small poll — and the results were both surprising and completely predictable. Much like politics (and, frankly, everything else these days), people are deeply divided on how much value they place on ratings. What caught me off guard, though, was that after hundreds of votes, the majority leaned toward the “don’t care” camp.
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That lines up with a noticeable trend on platforms like Letterboxd, where more and more users are ditching the traditional star system in favor of a simple “heart” — or nothing at all.
So why is that happening?
From the responses and patterns I observed, one recurring reason is fluidity. Many people say their film ratings change constantly in their heads. A movie that felt like a four yesterday might feel like a three-and-a-half next month. Updating scores repeatedly can become tedious, even exhausting. But the bigger issue seems to be perception. People worry — sometimes rightly so— that their ratings will be misinterpreted. For some, three stars is a solid, positive endorsement. For others, anything below four feels like a dismissal. That disconnect can spiral into unnecessary debates — or worse, online pile-ons.
Which brings me to what I like to call the comparison game.
This is where things get absurd. It’s when someone compares potatoes to lettuce. Sure, they both grow from the ground. They might share space on a burger plate. But beyond that? Completely different textures, flavors, and purposes.
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Recently, I rated “Dhurandhar” four stars — the same score I gave “One Battle After Another.” A follower asked how I could possibly see those films as equals. But that’s the assumption baked into the comparison game: that identical ratings equal identical value. They don’t. One film might be a potato, the other a lettuce — or an apple. What do they meaningfully have to do with each other?
The root issue seems simple: people take their favorite art personally. If I love X and give it four stars, you’d better love it just as much — or at least rate it the “correct” way. Otherwise, the pitchforks come out. Disagreement isn’t just disagreement; it becomes a perceived attack.
A still from Dhurandhar (2025) starring Ranveer Singh as Hamza Ali Mazari.
And that’s where ratings shift from being shorthand expressions of personal taste to symbols people defend as if they were moral positions. In theory, a rating is just a snapshot of how something worked for one individual at one moment in time. In practice, it can feel like a referendum on identity.
Which says less about the numbers themselves — and more about how much we’ve invested in them.
When you rate a movie, do you stop and cross-reference every prior rating to ensure consistency across unrelated genres? The only time that kind of comparative calibration makes sense to me is within a contained body of work — ranking a director’s filmography, an actor’s performances, or entries in a franchise.
There are even stranger edge cases. I’ve given “The Room” a perfect score — not because it’s “objectively” great in a traditional sense, but because, for what it is, and what it accidentally achieves, it feels like a specific kind of perfection. Meanwhile, others might rate it a two-star disaster and still love it just as passionately. The number doesn’t always tell the whole emotional truth.
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Now, for the positives.
As one commenter on the site put it, “rating forces us to confront the tough question: how much did this film really work for me?” A rating compels clarity. It forces you to distill your feelings into a decision.
In a way, this circles back to the heart-versus-stars debate. Clicking a heart on Letterboxd leaves a lot open to interpretation. Say you heart both “Dog Day Afternoon” and “12 Angry Men.” Great — but do you value them equally? Which one affected you more? Which one would you revisit first? Without a rating (or a detailed review), we’re left guessing.
And that ties into another undeniable reality: we’re living in a low-attention-span era. You can write a thoughtful, beautifully argued review — and many people simply won’t read it. On fast-scrolling platforms, especially, the rating becomes a kind of headline. A shorthand signal. It tells followers, at a glance, whether you found something worthwhile.
Conclusion
Personally, I’ll always champion ratings.
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Yes, they’re a double-edged sword. They can flatten nuance, spark unnecessary outrage, or reduce complex feelings to a tidy number. But they can also serve a practical purpose — if we’re willing to understand how to read them. There’s probably an argument to be made that audiences need a bit more education on interpreting ratings as shorthand rather than gospel.
Some critics have come up with creative systems that embrace that shorthand in interesting ways. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel boiled it down to the now-iconic thumbs metric — elegantly simple, instantly readable. Dan Murrell leans into a more textual breakdown, while Cody Leach blends a numbered score with contextual explanation. Different approaches, same goal: distilling a reaction into something digestible without (ideally) stripping it of meaning.
It’s not easy. The more you think about cinema as art — deeply personal, highly subjective — the more assigning it a number can start to feel reductive. For some critics, the very act of rating becomes a burden, as if they’re forced to quantify something that resists quantification.
Are ratings imperfect? Absolutely. Are they reductive? Sometimes. But they’re also efficient, clarifying, and — when used thoughtfully — a meaningful extension of the conversation rather than its replacement. In a media landscape built on quick takes and endless content, ratings function as a kind of necessary evil. They’re a snapshot, not the whole portrait. When used responsibly — and interpreted thoughtfully — they don’t have to replace the conversation. They can simply be the entry point to it.
Similar Read Around Movie Rating Dilemma: 9 Biggest Hollywood Box Office Bombs of 2025: Movies That Lost Millions Despite Huge Budgets
The Snapshot: Pixar comes out swinging with an energetic and cuddly comedy that pairs big laughs with an earnest message about living alongside nature.
Hoppers
9 out of 10
G, 1hr 44mins. Animated Sci-Fi Family Comedy.
Directed by Daniel Chong.
Starring Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Kathy Najimy, Jon Hamm, Dave Franco and Meryl Streep.
Now Playing at Galaxy Cinemas Sault Ste. Marie.
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True all ages fun is increasingly hard to find, and hoping for great, original works out of Hollywood is only getting rarer from the major studios. Thankfully, Disney and Pixar’s Hoppers is making the search a little easier.
Director Daniel Chong (best known for the TV series We Bare Bears) has masterfully directed a frantic masterpiece that is worthy to stand among iconic greats in Pixar’s esteemed catalogue. Filled with bustling action, a brave moral standing, and an endless parade of cuddly animal heroes, Hoppers is a dam great time.
A beaver dam great time, that is.
The story is a bit unusual, set in the northwestern town of Beaverton, Oregon, where a local University student and nature activist named Mabel (Piper Curda) is in a constant fight with the town’s development-driven mayor (Jon Hamm) over a highway expansion over a local glade and nature preserve.
Things gets wild, however, when Mabel’s consciousness gets sucked into a beaver robot through a process called “hoppers” – and suddenly becomes a literal friend of the forest, setting off a chain of events I dare not spoil.
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One of the strongest elements in Hoppers is Jesse Andrews’ terrific screenplay, built on a story structure that has made Pixar’s work stand out among family entertainment for the last 40 years. (Part of this film’s release, co-incidentally, marks the studio’s 40th anniversary this year.)
Not only has Andrews filled the plot with multiple organic surprises that repeatedly heighten the stakes of Mabel’s quest to save the glade, but the script also balances the peacefulness of nature to – anchor the story – with the frazzled panic of modern human life to develop the humour.
Getting these juxtaposing elements to work is done swiftly by Chong, Andrews and the talented voice ensemble bringing it altogether. The actors above are all commendable, but the scene stealer is Bobby Moynihan (of SNL fame) as beaver leader King George.
Moynihan’s George is smart, sincere, and socially aware that teaches Mabel some core lessons without making it overly obvious to the audience. Still, the film as a whole effectively gets its messages across about what a realistic plan for living in harmony across species actually looks like – and how to go about trying to do the right thing.
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Pixar’s original works have struggled for several years, mainly upended by the COVID pandemic ruining the box office prospects of multiple great movies, including Soul, Turning Red and Onward.
Get ready now for Hoppers to take the spotlight both commercially and among repeat viewings for kids – the film is laugh out loud funny and filled with heart. This is the best original film from Pixar since Coco almost a decade ago.
Read more here: You can’t miss Pixar’s Coco (2017 review)
The only small critiques, in fact, is that the main conflict doesn’t fully emerge or develop until halfway through the film, and the pacing is a bit slow until we get to the actual animal “hopping” that comes at the end of the first act. What’s also missing is the ethereal discovery of poignancy that made Pixar’s earliest filmography seem truly special.
Still, don’t let these small quips deter you. Hoppers is the first great film of 2026 and an absolute blast watching at the cinema.
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Children, parents, grandparents, neighbours, your mailman – everyone should see it this weekend. And seeing it sooner is a great way to encourage the development of more original, thoughtful and fun movies like this to be made.
Pankaj Kapur in ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’
| Photo Credit: ZEE5
Cracks in conjugality constitute a common conflict device in Hindi cinema. Usually, the male commits the bhool and expects forgiveness. Most fissures appear early, but what if a grandmother reveals a long-buried truth? Can the man accept it as easily as he expects forgiveness? Seasoned actor and theatre practitioner Saurabh Shukla gives new meaning to a prescribed book, making us both chuckle and reflect.
Being a cinematic adaptation of his play, the constraints of the medium are not completely erased, but it shines as a heartfelt exploration of love’s endurance.
The film’s core premise revolves around a decades-old secret — Anusuya’s (Dimple Kapadia) confession of an indiscretion early in their marriage — that surfaces after she awakens from a coma. This revelation forces Gopal (Pankaj Kapur) to re-examine 50 years of trust through the lens of this buried truth as a forgotten ad hoc presence in his life threatens to become a permanent peeve. Enter Negi (Aparshakti Khurana), a young client-chasing lawyer who becomes an unlikely facilitator of tough conversations, legal proceedings, and emotional confrontations.
Synopsis: Gopal and Anusuya’s decades-long marriage is shaken by a revelation.
Though the transgression is a distant memory, its emergence shatters Gopal’s sense of shared space with Anusuya. He questions whether the life he built was an illusion. The woman he cared for seems suddenly unfamiliar. The film asks questions that may seem flimsy but persist in memory. For instance, Anusuya’s love for poetry that Gopal never really discovers, or the concept of marzi (inclination) in relationships.
Meanwhile, the revelation shakes the family unit. The parents initially try to shield the children from the truth, but the tension inevitably seeps in. Initially, it seems the son and son-in-law are bitten by the Baghban bug, but as the film progresses, the writing provides space for a dialogue on how companionship extends beyond the couple.
The film quietly reflects on the role of memory in a marriage, treating it as a central force that both sustains and disrupts long-term bonds. Gopal’s growing dementia suddenly seems like a cure for his marital problem. Without underlining, Shukla also explores the impact of the revelation on Gopal’s social psyche. Suddenly, a seemingly progressive man starts behaving like a parochial uncle, as we find dozens of them around us these days. Is it always the personal that shapes the political socialisation? Another uncle reminds us that laughing too much leads to days of sorrow, as if the Almighty has assigned us a quota of happiness.
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A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
ZEE5
Kapur’s masterful control shines through in Gopal’s progression from bewilderment and stubborn pride to vulnerability and, eventually, the rediscovery of love. Over the years, Kapur has shone in the estuary of comedy that holds a tragedy in its fold. He lives the script’s shifting tones. From the tender caregiving scenes in the beginning to the profound internal shift in demeanour and body language toward the film’s resolution— the transformation feels earned and believable.
It is hard to believe Dimple as a wilting wife, but soon we realise it’s the gravitas in her voice and personality that makes Anusuya a believable picture of regret and resilience.
We know the coma is more like a metaphor, but the medical aspect is treated with a heavy hand. The plot unfolds in a somewhat linear and foreseeable way, with the revelation and its consequences following expected beats. The contrivances, the dot-to-dot mechanics of storytelling, surface in the second half as if the director is keen on arriving at the crux without peeling the layers properly. But it is the chemistry between Shukla and Kapur that prevents this bittersweet dramedy from becoming schmaltzy.
