Rumors of the death of the biopic have been greatly exaggerated.

The rumors go something like this: Twenty years ago, director James Mangold made Walk the Line about the life and times of Johnny Cash, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. It was a critical and box office hit—Witherspoon even won the Best Actress Oscar. The movie was as traditional as it gets, starting with Johnny’s abusive childhood on a farm, and going on to depict his musical ambitions, his chaotic love life, his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and his career setbacks and triumphs.

Indeed, the film was so by-the-numbers, it prompted a parody, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which was both an uncanny simulacrum and a brutal takedown. There’s nothing like a good parody to make you realize how cliched a particular genre really is and once Walk Hard lifted the curtain its tropes, it seemed that the traditional biopic was doomed.

Not so fast! Biopics have merely evolved: Recent ones have largely eschewed the Wikipedia-style retelling of a biography, instead homing in on a particularly illuminating period of the subject’s life. I think that’s a good development, as it forces the filmmaker to reflect on what they think is important about the subject and why this pivotal time frame matters.

It’s fair to say that A Complete Unknown, Mangold’s new biopic of Bob Dylan, exists in a post Walk Hard world. We don’t have hazy flashbacks to Dylan’s childhood in Minnesota; there’s no framing device of present day Dylan, old and craggy, reflecting on his life. Instead, the film focuses on the period when young Bobby Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with a guitar and a dream. It ends shortly after the infamous Newport Folk Festival where Dylan scandalized the assembled crowd and organizers by “going electric.” (Damn, America was cute back then.)

That said, there is nothing experimental or avant-garde in the storytelling here. It’s straightforward. Its pleasures come from seeing Timothée Chalamet channel Dylan, from its brilliant supporting cast (particularly Edward Norton as Pete Seeger—more on him in a bit), and from its painstaking recreation of the 1960s folk scene.

Let’s start with Chalamet, because that’s who you’re here to read about. Famously, he does all of his own singing and guitar/harmonica playing in the film—and most of the takes are live, because he wanted to capture Dylan’s rough and raw performance style. Only Dylan can really do justice to Dylan, but Chalamet comes close and his instinct to perform live was spot-on. He nails Dylan’s nasal, mumbly voice and he has his confident magnetism on stage as well as his hooded, cautious presence off of it. (Dylan is the rare celebrity who says he hates fame—and we believe him.) Chalamet seems every inch the brooding, tortured, formidable young talent. And the concert scenes rip.

Young Dylan gravitated to the folk scene, because he was a natural born singer-songwriter and because he idolized Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). But in many ways, he wasn’t a natural fit. He simply wasn’t earnest enough—everything he did was suffused with irony. And he believed that for something to be beautiful, it also had to be a little bit ugly. He derides his musical—and sometimes romantic—partner Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) for having a voice that’s “too pretty.” “Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist’s office,” he sneers. Baez correctly calls him an asshole.

The foil to Dylan was Pete Seeger (Edward Norton)—as earnest and irony-free as they come. Pete meets Dylan when the young musician shows up unexpectedly at Woody Guthrie’s hospital room. (This, like many scenes in the film is an amalgamation of actual events.) Guthrie, already deep in the throes of Huntington’s disease, can barely communicate, but he bangs his nightstand with appreciation as Dylan belts out the homage tune, “Song to Woody.” Seeger, too, recognizes that Dylan is a special talent and takes him home to crash at his house for a while.

Seeger is shown as having a wonderful life. His wife is a devoted partner, both personally and professionally. His children are adorable and loving. His home exudes an easy, familial warmth. But he is not the brilliant artist Dylan is. What’s more, he truly believes in the special power of folk music—a simple song, simply told, often with a humanitarian message. Dylan doesn’t outwardly scorn Seeger—he appreciates his talent. But he sees him as a bit of a relic and he finds the music corny. And Norton plays Seeger as sweet and sincere, humbled by Dylan’s talent and a little wounded by his artistic rejection. It’s a heartbreaking performance.

The film also focuses on Dylan’s love life. There are two central women in his life—Baez and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a beautiful peace activist who brought a measure of comfort and stability to Dylan’s life, but didn’t get much in return.

It’s funny that this is one of the few films Chalamet has done where he’s a true romantic lead—Call Me By Your Name was a love story, but he was the one doing most of the pining (and he was a literal cannibal in Bones and All so does that really count?). Here, he is the object of desire—withholding, mysterious, creative, and a bit of a dick. Who among us has not fallen for that guy? (Even with the help of a slight prosthetic nose, Chalamet is more handsome than Dylan ever was. But honestly, it was Dylan’s brilliance and elusiveness that made him so alluring. And Chalamet captures those qualities well.)

Mangold is a an exceptionally competent director. You can sit back and know you’re in the hands of a true pro. But he does have a hard time avoiding cliché or facile mash-ups. The Civil Rights movement is merely a tiny backdrop to the film, although Mangold makes it very clear that Black artists approved of the young troubadour. (At least twice he has an established Black blues artist—Odetta, in the wings of the Newport Folk Festival, and the made-up bluesman Jesse Moffett, on the set of Pete Seeger’s public access television show, Rainbow Quest—nod approvingly as Dylan sings.) This strikes me as self-serving, a shorthand for really delving into Dylan’s relationship to Black music and the civil rights movement. And Mangold uses Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), clearly one of his heroes, as an avatar for artistic rebellion and integrity. (“Track some mud on the carpet,” he advises young Bob.) The pep talks he gives Dylan were likely fabricated.

The heart and soul of the film, though, is that relationship between Dylan and Seeger. And here’s where giving a film focus really does help. Because Norton’s open, searching face will break you. But it also reflects a larger cultural shift, away from a more decorous kind of counterculture, to one that was loud and rebellious and angry.

Do we understand Dylan better after watching A Complete Unknown? A bit. He’s a famously elusive figure (which Todd Hayne’s cleverly tackled in his experimental Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, by giving Dylan several different personas played by different actors). But the film’s biggest thrill is watching the formation of an uncompromising artist and getting a little taste of what it must’ve been like to wander into Gerde’s Folk City on a random night and see a young man in a snap cap who was about to change the world.

In the final moments of the movie Rifle Club, there are references to the Wild Wild West films that have Mexican stand-offs and stuff. The intention of Aashiq Abu and his writers is to create something of that texture against the backdrop of the hill stations of Kerala, where placing a similar wildness and lawlessness is very convincing. With a runtime of around 114 minutes, the movie is very much focused on what it wants to say, and a larger chunk of the screenplay is invested in building the club and its characters. While the pre-climax face-off between the two gangs is pretty slick and engaging, somewhere, I felt the finale needed a bit more refinement to have that wow factor.

As you can guess from the title, the film is about a rifle club in Wayanad. The story is set in 1991, and a Malayalam superstar named Shajahan, who predominantly works in romantic films, has come to the club in order to get some training in hunting. He has plans to do a hunting movie similar to Mrugaya. But the night he chose to spend there wasn’t really the best day as the club had uninvited visitors. Who are these visitors, and what they really want is what we see in Rifle Club.

The structuring of Rifle Club, to an extent even the location, has a similarity to Varathan on a script level. A major part of the movie is getting invested in showing us who these characters are, how they are to each other, and to what extent they can go. In the middle portions of the movie, you can see the script trying to draw parallels between the events happening in the Rifle Club and the actual hunting. The script neatly foreshadows many things that really elevate some portions of the final act of the movie. Just like Varathan, it is the counterattack that really sets the ball rolling. And the banter that happens between Dayanand and Avaran is hilarious, and in those patches, you get to see the Aashiq Abu we sort of missed post-COVID.

Dileesh Pothan, as Avaran, is pretty agile and confident. The body language and the dialogue delivery are on point, and you can sense the experience of that character in the way he has performed. Anurag Kashyap, as the antagonist, gets to be this crazy dad character. In most of his acting gigs, we have seen him do similar stuff, and this time, it was in better clothes. Vijayaraghavan, as the veteran of the club, was pretty good. Vishnu Agasthya plays a fairly extensive character in the movie, and he performed his part with ease. Sooraj, aka Hanumankind, as Bheera was fine in that eccentric character and it was actually a good casting choice. Vineeth Kumar plays the part of the film star, who transforms over the course of the incident. The rest of the cast has some big names like Suresh Krishna, Vani Vishwanath, Surabhi Lakshmi, Unnimaya Prasad, Darshana Rajendran, etc. Their screen times are relatively less, but they are all pretty memorable because of the character quirks.

Aashiq Abu, who has also done cinematography for this film, knows that surprise isn’t really the element that can make this movie work. World-building is really necessary for the final act to work, and for that, writers Syam Pushkaran, Dileesh Karunakaran, and Suhas use the first half. You get to see the rough dynamic between the members of the club. The things that Avaran tells Shajahan while he aims, which also come in the form of lyrics, are basically a description of the attitude of the club members. The cinematography opts for monochromatic sharp lights for a lot of sequences, which sort of sets a genre movie ambiance. Rex Vijayan’s tracks and background score really pump up some of the setpieces.

As I already said, Rifle Club is under two hours long, and it is not beating around the bush to get to the main deal. That aspect of the movie, along with a banter-filled set piece in the final act, really elevates the film. But in totality, I felt the ending should have been a better extension of the kind of action we saw till that point. On the bright side, for people who used to love Aashiq Abu films, this one gives reassurance that he still has it in him.

Barry Jenkins signing on to direct a spin-off to “The Lion King” sounds like a joke you’d crack after “Moonlight” won the Oscar for best picture, less at the filmmaker’s expense than at an industry that’s gotten cagey about funding his kind of heart-driven talent. In the ’90s, Hollywood might have handed him its checkbook. This decade, though, just getting a big movie green-lit takes a cat fight. “Mufasa: The Lion King,” from a script by Jeff Nathanson, has taken up a substantial amount of Jenkins’ bandwidth — it was first announced in 2020. You stalk the film trying to find him in it, but there’s not much more than an ethereal interlude in which three lions flirt in the grass.

This is a guaranteed blockbuster that nobody needed except studio accountants and parents. I’ll accept it on those terms because it’s a good thing when any kid-pleaser gets children in the habit of going to the movie theater. Yes, it’s easy and necessary to mock Disney for squeezing every last drop out of a franchise. Heck, Disney’s even learned that it can be lucrative to make fun of itself, which happens here when one animal groans, “Please don’t mention the play again.” And now, the company’s zeal for prequels has resulted in a movie about two kittens who we’ve all seen meet a grisly death. To my morbid delight, “Mufasa” starts off by killing one of them again.

The framing device is that Simba and Nala (Donald Glover and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter) have handed their daughter cub, Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), to three familiar babysitters: Pumbaa the warthog (Seth Rogen), Timon the meerkat (Billy Eichner) and Rafiki the psychic mandrill (John Kani), who insists repeatedly that he is not a baboon. Rafiki recounts the origin story of Kiara’s grandfather while, at a cadence that ticks like a nervous executive’s pacemaker, Pumbaa and Timon interrupt for atonal comic relief: “Less childhood trauma, more meerkat!” Timon wails.

Mostly, we’re roaming Tanzania with an orphaned whelp named Mufasa (voiced in his youth by Braelyn and Brielle Rankins, and in his prime by Aaron Pierre) and his adopted brother Taka (Theo Somolu and later Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who hails from a royal lineage. My quibble with the original “Lion King” and its 2019 remake is that Simba is a one-note brat. Mufasa is even worse — he’s flat-out flawless — and the other characters can’t resist commenting on it. “You are the lion who can do everything,” purrs one female in heat (Tiffany Boone). That’s no exaggeration. Among his innate gifts, Mufasa proves to be an expert in elephant migration patterns and botany.

To further the hagiography, the script flubs its own plot points. Early on, there’s a fight where, apparently, Mufasa murders an unnamed lion. Except you wouldn’t know that happened from anything onscreen until a follow-up beat where the dead lion’s father, Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), learns that his child died of his injuries at some point between scenes. Kiros’ quest for vengeance is a through-line of the film, and the kill is Mufasa’s first blood (though it won’t be his last). Yet the moral impact doesn’t seem to occur to our noble hero at all.

The line readings are flat-footed. Mufasa and most of the other lions sound like theme-park animatronics with voices set to “Soothe.” Adding to the homogeneity, the core characters — and I’m referring to a half-dozen-plus beasts here — share the same backstory: They miss their families. The daddy/mommy/brother issues become so repetitive that it’s a relief when Zazu (Preston Nyman) the hornbill never mentions a long-lost egg.

Taka, the more cowardly lion, will eventually earn a name that isn’t going to surprise anybody. The bigger jaw-dropper is: Why wasn’t this movie pitched as “Scar”? This innately good-hearted princeling is the only compelling character. From his point of view, Taka can make a legitimate case that a golden god like Mufasa is exasperating to be around — this stray has literally destroyed his pride. Plus, Taka’s voice actors, Somolu and Harrison Jr., deliver dynamic performances with mercurial emotions and a delightful Cockney accent. During the song, “I Always Wanted a Brother,” the photorealistic lion croons about his “bruvaah” with the surreal gusto of Growltiger in “Cats.”

The subtlest animation looks the best, especially when sunlight dapples upon fur or felines flex their claws to assert power. (I write this while struggling to keep a 20-pound Maine Coon off my desk.) There are opportunities for dreamlike images: a flock of birds zooming like warplanes, a herd of antelope emerging from a horror-movie mist, and an unexpected amount of gorgeous and terrifying swimming sequences as these so-called kings of the jungle are continually bested by gravity and water. Occasionally, the look goes gonzo for viewers watching the movie in 3D. Think a slow-motion raindrop hurtling toward your face, or shots of the animals racing around like they’ve got a GoPro camera on their collar.

The ending feels similarly rushed, although there’s nothing in particular I’d rather spend more time with than the songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The cast belts them at a terrific, breathless, breakneck pace, scaling octaves as demanded. There are only a few numbers, but most of them are marvelous constructions with sinewy arrangements and overlapping harmonies that tangle around each other during duets. Good luck pulling them off at karaoke. But it’s hard to call any one song a showstopper. They aren’t built for bombast, and none are as in-the-moment ear-wormy as “Hakuna Matata,” although there’s a slithery villain’s ditty by Mads Mikkelson that became my favorite once I came around to the lyrics: “Cause I’m gonna be / the last thing you see / before you go / bye-bye.” I still think this prequel didn’t need to exist, but at least I left humming.