The destiny that seems to underline the lives of writer-director Atul Sabharwal's drama of family feuds is as flawed as it is rich in resonances. And why not! Perfection is as boring as it is unbelievable. Sabharwal spreads out a hectic hefty horizon of dark grey black and ominously immoral people who share a common genealogy but are not afraid to kill one another for personal gains.

Welcome to the world of unstoppable ambitions. Half-realized dreams thread their way through Sabharwal's intricate plot, much like those gigantic cement-mortar-glass skyscrapers that kiss the sky in half-constructed questionable glory in the film's excellently-composed frames. The cinematography by N. Karthik Gnaesh provides a panoramic view of Gurgaon's super-affluent landscape. It also provides us an insight into the anxious souls of half-finished lives trapped in the mirage of their absurd aspirations.

Each moment in "Aurangzeb" tells a heartbreaking story of betrayal and bloodshed, of men and women who have forsaken a life of peaceful sleep to pursue wakeful dreams that leave them famished and restless.

At first "Aurangzeb" seems plotted with too many twists and turns. And then as you watch the tale of twin bothers (Arjun Kapoor, very much in character) and a stepbrother, played by Prithiviraj, who turns out to be the moral foundation of this empire of compulsions, you fall into the rhythm patterns of Sabharwal's quiet volatile and implosive storytelling.

The film's grand design subsumes a scintillating galaxy of memorable moments. Nothing in the film is what it seems. There are illegitimate relationships and business interests jostling with their more constitutional counterparts. The twins-device serves as a vivid indication of the moral ambiguities that undercore the world of corporate deals.

Supreme power and supreme wealth are what the characters seek in this film. Funny, how they end up nullified or dead at the end. None more so that the all-powerful cop played by Rishi Kapoor. A closet-extortionist, this powerful policeman's family-mafia runs parallel to Jackie Shroff's vast empire of drugs and other criminal activities.

Arjun Kapoor crosses comfortably into both the nefarious kingdoms. Playing the traditional 'Ram Aur Shyam' game, he seems to nail the brotherly mirror-image into a slide show of shifting loyalties. It's a compelling double whammy from an actor who made a sizeable impact with his first film last year.

Prithviraj who made his Hindi debut with the disastrous "Aiyya" last year, springs a stunning surprise as Arjun's half-brother. He is the voice of this vast plot's nebulous conscience. It's finally Prithviraj who redeems the film's shifting moral values to recover a moral centre for a world that seems to spin out of control with its penchant for power and greed for wealth.

I've to make mention of the very talented Swara Bhaskara who plays Prithiviraj's wife. The super-talented girl has just two brief sequences. But she wrenches your heart. Tanve Azmi's motherly act has its moments. Amrita Singh as a scheming she-devil is the traditional home-breaker. It's a stereotypical bad-girl role, given a reined-check by the actress' ingrained grace. Sasheh Agha in a role clearly inspired by Parveen Babi in Yash Chopra's "Deewaar" is cast in a role that deserved a far better actress.

Atul Sabharwal's direction bears ruminative remnants of the mighty filmmaking legacy of Yash Chopra and Mani Ratnam. The script outwardly sounds like a potboiler about the shifting equation between the legitimate and the outcast. But the tone adapted to tell this potboiler tale is authentic, underplayed and constantly credible. It's as if Manmohan Desai suddenly decided go the way Shayam Benegal did in "Kalyug".

The film is a marvel of impeccable casting. Every actor gives his best, none more so than Rishi Kapoor who as the illimitably corrupt cop pulls off yet another masterly antagonist's part.

"Aurangzeb" springs many unexpected surprises. It is a work which doesn't shy away from screaming silences and penetrating whispers. The softspoken words delivered in a natural even pitch is often so far-reaching in their implications that we keep returning to the dialogues much after the characters have spoken them and moved on.

Yes, much in "Aurangzeb" is imperfect. The ambivalent tone of authenticity in a plot that seems inpired by the melodramatic blockbusters of the 1970s is really an exercize in self-indulgence. It's as if the director wants to prove his intellectual superiority over the material he has chosen to deconstruct. But the contradictory tone somehow works in a way we've never seen before.

Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi becomes a hotbed of intrigue and drama. But underneath the conspiracies and the killings is a tragic tale of blood unnecessarily spilt for advantages that finally mean zilch in the absence of loved ones to share the loot with.

"Aurangzeb" has an epic sweep to its storytelling. But it's also an intimate portrait of family values gone to waste. It is really the sound of stifled sobs that we carry home of characters who thought they knew it all only to realize at the end that they somewhere lost track of their inner self in pursuit of distant dreams.

Meet Gippi then. She is free-spirited, unaffected, overweight and under-confident, though not willing to show it (her lack of confidence, that is). Gippi's story could well have become a trite pedestrian exercize in cliched sequences woven around the acne-ridden years of awkwardness and self-discovery. Instead , debutant director Sonam Nair gives us vibrant vignettes from a young defiant teenager's life in a posh school (beautifully shot by cinematographer Anshuman Mahaley) on the hills with her single mother (Divya Dutt, brilliant) and her kid-brother who seems to like all the girlie things more than Dippi does.

Fearless and without inhibitions, Nair's narration takes us through Gippi's life of unfettered self-discovery. The film is littered with reams of well-written scenes where we see Gippi going through situations that help her grow up. There's her mother's painful breakup with Gippi's father where Gippi must step in to defend her mother's descalating self-esteem. Then there is Gippi's own tryst with heartbreak when during her first serious crush with the campus' resident James Dean (Taha Shah, well cast in his vain though benign character) she discovers that being fat and unattractive is not such an appalling option after all.

The process of Gippi's self-exploration is lamentably not carried forward with the confidence and smoothness that one experiences in the first-half of the film when Gippi's life is shown to be a series of unplanned near-catastrophes that somehow stop short of reaching a point of no return.

In the second half, the entire chunk devoted to the school elections is comparatively tame and lacking the sparkle evident in the rest of the writing. Nonetheless there is so much to celebrate in this film, most of all the performances. 14-year old Riya Vij makes an unlikely yet thoroughly convincing heroine in a tale that requires her character to try everything, from a brassiere to heartbreak for the first time. To her credit the girl sails through all the tests put before her character. She is a prized find.

As for the ever-dependable Divya Dutta as Gippi's mother, when has she ever let down a film? As Dippi's mother she puts spunk and spirit into her well-written character. Casting in fact is the backbone of this film. Not just Riya in the main role, even her friends in school are played by girls and guys who don't seem to fake it. They wouldn't know how to!

The film also pays a homage to the songs of Shammi Kapoor in a rather gauche onrush of feelings. But then awkwardness is a predominant mood in this work . You can't escape clumsiness when you are groping around at the beginning of life's unique journey.

So a big yippee for Gippi. It's a coming-of-age saga told with a disarming lack of artifice. The film's joie de vivre envelopes you in a sunny embrace.

"Go Goa Gone" is a savagely funny take on the mythic cult of zombies. Since we are new to the genre, there are sly footnotes about them. Characters in the course of their casual and quite corny conversations tell us plenty about Zombie folklore.

That zombies enjoy eating human flesh, that they cannot run fast and most of all, zombies are actually dead people.

Working backwards on the premise of heroes shooting the dead, the director duo have fashioned a fiercely funny fable filled with loads of innocuous innuendos and rumbustious scare attacks that never quite reach the stage of stomach-churning gore-o-logy (to invent a term, and why not since this film is about inventive creation).

"Go Goa Gone" can be seen as a brutal burlesque of the horror genre. Scenes of ghouls/zombies chasing our puny heroes through the Goan foliage are more satirical than scary. This innovative ode to terror moves at a quirky yet measured pace, gamboling quickly from one well-written scene of mock-terror to another without losing track of the film's ultimate 'bro-mantic' purpose.

For starters, the three heroes - Kunal Khemu, Vir Das and the quietly effective Anand Tiwari - who travel to Goa for fun frolic and, ahem, the fraulein (if you'll excuse my German) look like cocky offshoots of the trio from Farhan Akhtar's "Dil Chahta Hai".

Interestingly, one of Farhan's protagonists Saif Ali Khan here transforms into a blonde Russian zombie slayer named Boris whose accent keeps slipping off. And that's fine because Boris is not really Russian.

Ha ha. And this is not a scary movie. Not really. Ha ha again. The principal actors are fully in-sync with the zany mood. Saif as a pseudo-Russian zombie hunter gives a performance to 'dye' for.

The laughs flow with energetic gusto melting into a tide of spooky gore without creating a genre-confounding mess. Kunal and Sita Menon's Hindi dialogues catch the fervour of the tongue-in-cheek words cheekily.

Here is one film that doesn't lose its way in translation. Though the characters 'think' in English (Hardik, indeed!) and although the whole concept of a zombie flick is very B-grade off-mainstream Hollywood, the hair-raising hijinks manage to stay relatively sleaze-free.

Peppery and with a pinch of 'assault', the performances are pitched at just the right flavour of fright. All the three main actors have fun with their parts. But it is Kunal who seems the most at ease playing a synthesis of the slimy and the slippery without falling out of character.

A true gem of an actor, why is Khemu not given more interesting work to do?

Saif's star turn as the "Russian" sharpshooter is understandably self-mocking in tone. Saif's character is in keeping with the film. You really can't take the terror template seriously. And yet you get the uneasy feeling that the joke is on us.

A zombie fiesta that's savagely funny and surreptitiously scary, who but the co-directors of the genre-defying "Shor In The City" could convert the kookie content into an experience of a 'laugh'-time!

Oh yes, there's the mandatory glam-quotient in the figure of Puja Gupta. In her presence Hardik, giggles, gets really excited.

Go for "Go Goa Gone". It's a stressbuster with balls, nerves and chutzpah.

Oh yes, Goa as shot by Lukas Pruchnik and Dan MacArthur never looked more inviting. And less hospitable.

Babli is not the only one who's a badmaash here. The characters are all hardened players of the underworld from the 1970s. They all mean business in the business of being mean.

They sport the right clothes dialogues and attitude.

Yes, the detailing is deft.

Wordsmith Milap Zaveri, who is the real hero hero of this film about fascist solutions to the conundrum of urban chaos, pulls out all stops to spread out an orgy of rhetorics and rhetorics all across the narrative.

Everyone speaks as if they are reading out a copywriter's wisdom from billboards and hoardings. Everyone is a smart ass in this film.

Take a character with an unmentionable name, played with energetic fervour by debutant Siddhant Kapoor. At some point in the trigger-happy proceedings he explains why if he was Shah Jahan he would have built the Qutub Minar instead of the Taj Mahal.

"Because it's so old and yet it stands so erect!"

Ahem. Here's to the celebration of phallic freedom. The men in Sanjay Gupta's film are actually boys who never grew up. They fight, scream, throw tantrums and draw blood when all fails. These are attention-seekers whose moms should have delivered solid spankings during their childhood.

This is director Sanjay Gupta's return to direction after a longish hiatus. He is in a tearing hurry to sweep us into the vortex of his violent kingdom.

Mumbai as seen through Gupta's expertly sketched images, is a kingdom of the damned. Men pull put guns and knives as the background music (by Amar Mohile) settles scores. Tempers run high. The body-count matches the exacerbated emotions.

To his credit, Gupta knows this world of internecine wars as minutely as Coppola knew his Sicily. The mood in the cat-and-mouse game is forever defiant and belligerent.

There's no room for dull moments in Gupta's storytelling. The cat and-mouse game tends to get breathless but never wheezy even when characters such as the one played by Manoj Bajpai splutter to a gruesome end.

Gupta keeps a firm grip on the proceedings on his out-of-control characters, all played by actors who understand the close link between oppression and violence.

"Shootout At Wadala" reminded me of two recent films - Karan Malhotra's "Agneepath" and Anurag Kashyap's "Gangs Of Wasseypur" where the law of the lawless prevails.

Sameer Arya's camera and specially Sabu Cyril's art work (which blends bloody reds with nostalgic sepias) recreate an era of fathomless violence.

A great deal of thought has gone into creating a mood of anarchy. Every frame is saturated with colours and atmospherics. Almost every frame and dialogue is darkly underlined and emphatically italicized. There is no room for thought, let alone silence, in the narration. And why should there be, when the characters pull out their guns faster than John Wayne and Clint Eastwood did in the Wild West?

The performances reflect the absence of a moral equilibrium in the lives of the characters. While Anil Kapoor makes his 'encounter cop' a combination of the quirky and the kinetic, John Abraham in the author-backed central role tries very hard to remain in character. Going shirtless on a BEST bus in the bustle of Mumbai in the early 1970s is perhaps his idea of being in character. Wonder what the real Manya Surve would think of being in a body that unmistakably belongs to another millennium!

While Anil Kapoor and John Abraham in the central parts succeed in building an atmosphere of clenched crisis that threatens to blow apart their lives any minute, Sonu Sood, Manoj Bajpai and Ronit Roy shine in briefer roles.

As usual Gupta invests a lot of time and attention to the images of violence. Shootouts and flare-ups in various public spots of Mumbai are shot with the arresting impunity of a storyteller who is profoundly fascinated by the violence that underscores suburban life.

Except for Manya Surve's anxious and physical love interest (played by Kangna who looks annoyed throughout as though she wasn't happy being in her character's space), we hardly ever see the characters in their domestic space.

Do these killers and cops ever sleep? "Shootout At Wadala" is a bludgeoning saga of bloodshed, vendetta and ricocheting nemesis peppered with picturesque dialogues and episodes of frenetic aggression.

This is Gupta's big-ticket comeback. The sound and fury certainly signify something significant in the history of gangsterism in our cinema.

"Bombay Talkies" is that rarity, which makes us thankful for the gift of the movies.

Four stories directed by four contemporary Bollywood directors emerge and merge with seamless splendour into a pastiche of pain and pleasure. Like four scoops of ice cream, one yummier than the other, "Bombay Talkies" serves up a flavourful quartet of delights that leave us craving for more. It's like that song written by the immortal Sahir Ludhianvi - "Abhi na jao chhod kar ke dil abhi bhara nahin".

No, that song isn't part of the film. But there are songs of the melody queen Lataji which haunt your senses as the restless edgy protagonists, each in search of an emotional liberation that strikes them in unexpected ways at the end of every story, seek a slice of cloudburst to nourish their parched spirits.

So on to the first and my favourite story directed by Karan Johar where a sterile marriage between an urban working-couple played by Rani Mukerji and Randeep Hooda is shaken by the arrival of young ebullient homosexual who enters their frozen marriage in a most unexpected way.

This story more than any other, pushes Indian cinema to the edge to explore a theme and emotions that have so far been swept under the carpet. Karan, whose most brilliant film "My Name Is Khan", was also about a marginalised community, strips the urban relationship of all its shock value. He looks at the three characters' frightening spiritual emptiness with a dispassion that was denied to the characters in his earlier exploration of crumbling marital values in "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna".

Thanks to the unsparing editing by Deepa Bhatia, a gently arousing background score by Hitesh Sonik, deft but credible dialogues penned by Niranjan Iyenger and camerawork by Anil Mehta that sweeps gently across three wounded lives, Karan is able to nail the poignancy and the irony of his urban fable in just four-five key scenes. This is his best work to date. Rani delivers another power-packed performance. It's Saqib Saleem who steals this segment with his unmitigated spontaneity and reined-in ebullience.

The second story by Dibakar Bannerjee features that wonderful chameleon actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a man who would have been an actor if only life's drudgeries had not overtaken his life. Dibakar is a master-creator of vignettes from everyday life. Here his detailing of chawl life is unerring.

Nikos Andritsakis's cinematography doesn't miss a single nuance in Nawaz's sad yet hopeful, bleak yet bright existence. The sequence where Siddiqui washes clothes with the chawl's women is savagely funny and poignant, as is his life-changing moment when Nawaz gets to perform one shot with Ranbir Kapoor. No we don't see Ranbir, we just feel his presence, and we also hear filmmaker Reema Kagti giving orders from the directorial chair, but we don't see her either.

Nawaz in Dibakar's deft hands, takes his character through a journey of profoundly saddening self-discovery without any hint of self-pity. This segment is quirky funny and tragic. No one is allowed to feel sorry for Nawaz's character. Not even Nawaz.

Ebullient and enchanting are the descriptions that come to mind while watching Zoya Akhtar's film about a little boy (Naman Jain, brilliant) who would rather dance to Katrina Kaif's song than become a cricketer or a pilot, as per the wishes of his tyrant papa (Ranveer Shorey).

The household brims over with song, dance and giggles between the Katrina-enamoured boy and his sibling and confidante (a very confident Khushi Dubey). Charming warm humorous and vivacious Zoya's film serves up a very gentle moral lesson. Let a child grow the way it wants to. Zoya's film makes our hearts acquire wings. And yes, it immortalises Katrina Kaif.

Finally, Anurag Kashyap's homage to the unmatchable stardom of Amitabh Bachchan. A simple fable of a man journeying from Allahabad to meet Bachchan, this segment is more baggy and loose-limbed than the other three tightly-edited stories. This is not to take away from its power. As played by Vineet Kumar Singh, the Common Man's devotion to the Bachchan aura is manifested in the tongue-in-cheek spoken lines and the casual energy of Mumbai's street life.

Anurag captures the sometimes-funny often-sad bustle around the Bachchan bungalow with warmth and affection. The segment certainly doesn't lack in warmth. But it could have done with a tighter grip over the narrative.

"Bombay Talkies" is segmented and layered, yet cohesive and compelling from the first frame to the last. While unravelling the magic of cinema and its impact on the minds of audiences, "Bombay Talkies" also displays how much cinema has evolved over the generations.

This is a beguiling, beautiful and befitting homage to 100 years of Indian cinema. It's also proof that different stories in an episodic film could comfortably have directors with different sensitivities staring in the same line of vision.

If you watch only one film a year make sure it's this one.

Yup, thank god for the motion picture.

In spirit and in the way the two principal actors perform their parts of two soul-mates and singers torn asunder by their allegiance to the same competitive spirit of showmanship, "Aashiqui 2" is robustly reminiscent of the Kris Kristofferson-Barbra Streisand film where he discovers a co-singer who steals his heart and also his career.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee made his melodious "Abhimaan" on the same theme. It was easy for Hrishida to portray Jaya Bhaduri as a better artiste than Amitabh Bachchan quite simply because she sang in Lata Mangeshkar's voices. In "Aashiqui 2" the two protagonists are pretty much left to their own devices to create that unbearable frisson between two people whose love is trapped in the whirligig of showbiz. For their love to be liberated from the rituals of competitiveness, one of the lovers must make a huge sacrifice before the end.

For love to live the lover must die. It's a curious tradeoff and one carried off in this film with an exuberance of emotions.

The premise for the plot presumes love to be selfless all-giving and unconditional. Just to see Shradha Kapoor's eyes melt in mutating emotions of unflinching devotion to her alcoholic star-on-the-skids lover is a vision that makes us believe true love still exists. This petite beauty with eyes that never stay silent gives to her part so much heart, you want to just embrace her and protect her from her self-destructive mentor-turned-tormentor.

Aditya Roy Kapoor as a rock star who is rapidly slipping from the charts gives all of himself to the character. And then some more. In Aditya's persona, Rahul becomes a metaphor for all the success in showbiz that goes awry. In pursuit of pleasure derived from the bottle his character becomes a cross between Shah Rukh Khan's Devdas, Ranbir Kapoor's Rockstar and Kris Kirstofferson's John Norman Howard.

Like all the heroes of Mahesh Bhatt's cinema, Aditya has to portray a man who frequently creates a scene and embarrases the person he loves the most. This young actor is not afraid to look compromised on screen. A fearless actor, Aditya falters in the higher notes.

But then as I said, the singing here is not quite what we heard Lata Mamgeshkar, Mohammad Rafi and Kishore Kumar do in "Abhimaan". Having said that it must be admitted that the music by Jeet Ganguly, Mithoon and Ankit Tiwari stands by the characters and never lets them down even when the pitch gets really steep. The finely written poetry also helps to furnish the lovers' journey with a feverish and fecund pitch.

"Aashiqui 2" is a film with its heart in the right place. There are many moments of pure cliche between the lovers. And these moments, so deeply entrenched in the conventions of our cinema, blossom into fresh statements on modern love. It's a joy to see writer Shagufta Rafiqui and director Mohit Suri ferret out those feel-good places in the script where the protagonists plonk their emotions with a confidence and conviction that reaches out to the audience.

Is that really acting that we see each time Aditya into Shradha's eyese

If cinema is all about faking human emotions, then I must admit this film does a very competent job of making us believe that true love still exists in this world.

Man, woman, music,ambitions, dreams and despair... Director Mohit Suri traverses the angst-soaked territory with a sincere and deep understanding of the dynamics that destroy love and trust between couples in the glamorous and competitive profession. Yes, there are some clumsily-written episodes in the love story, for example the character of intrusive struggler who barges into the plot at the start during the opening music concert and again in the climax almost as if he was waiting impatiently in the margins of the screenplay.

What lifts the film beyond the realm of the routine are the jagged edges that the film constructs around the central relationship without wounding the film's fragile core. Full credit to the actors who fill up the screen with a measure of voluptuousness allowing the emotions to spill over without creating an excessive drama. Aditya Roy Kapoor is impressively implosive while Shradha Kapoor plays off against him with a steel willed vulnerability that echoes Jaya Bhaduri in "Abhimaan". Another fine performance comes from Shaad Randhawa as Aditya's friend and manager.

Watching this smoothly-oiled drama of disintegrating love I couldn't help remember Rahul Roy and Anu Aggarwal's wooden performance in "Aashiqui".

Our cinema has a come a long way, and not always in the right direction. "Aashiqui 2" makes us grateful for the movement of the love story away from the standard Romeo & Juliet format into the dark destructive domain of "A Star Is Born".

Sometimes love is just not enough.

So right away, a round of applause to producer Vishal Bhardwaj and first-time director Kannan Iyer for a scare fare that goes way beyond the mundane terror gimmicks of Indian cinema's much-abused horror genre to search out the very core of the human nature.

Why do we fear the unknown? And could it be what we consider to be the supernatural is actually a manifestation of our own deep insecurities?

"Ek Thi Daayan" enters the world of the supernatural with a finesse and delicacy rare to the horror genre.

The first hour of the storytelling when we are taken back to the magician-hero Bobo(Hashmi)'s seemingly well-ordered childhood, is splendid, warm, funny and, yes, ominous.

The child actor Vishesh Tiwari who plays the young Hashmi and the little girl who plays his baby-sister are delightfully unaffected. The bubble-waiting-to-be-burst world of the two children is steeped in a distant sorrow and a vague terror, as though to say, we who believe Good triumphs would have to suffer a whole lot of evil before we arrive at that state of moral liberation.

More than the somewhat scattered second-half, it's in the early sections of the storytelling where director Kannan creates a feeling of fabulous foreboding through hints and whispers rather than red-herrings and shrieks.

The creaky lift descending into "hell" with the two children clinging on for dear life, the creepy lizard on the wall which might be much more that what it seems, the hints and signs of diabolism are strewn across the length and breadth of the breathtaking frames.

But then again, the "witch" could just be a scared little boy's terror of a stepmother. Who knows why we fear what we do?

For crying out loud, this is such a normal seductive world! To see it shatter with supernatural aberration is a heart-shattering experience.

The nimbly-knitted script builds evil into the world of normalcy and innocence. The narrative's gaze never falters as it sweeps across the characters' lives making inroads into the anatomy of evil without charting a course that has been green lighted by the cinematic horror conventions.

"Ek Thi Daayan" is far more delicately delineated, much more "caste"-effective than other films of the horror genre. The actors act terrified but they don't run around screaming blue murder. They are too shaken to act suitably scared.

Emraan Hashmi as the magician who finds his world torn apart by events his wand cannot pretend to control, brings an anguished tension into the plot without stumbling over the dark edges of the plot.

But the film clearly belongs to the three luscious ladies. While Huma Qureshi and Kalki are seductive and impish, it's Konkona who clearly takes possession of her part and of the film with authority.

The fact that her father Mukul Sharma has written the original story could have played a part in establishing Konkona's comfort level with the eerie environment. But you suspect it's more inherent. Talent finds its level.

Saurabh Goswami's cinematography takes care of the rest. This is one helluva good-looking film that lights up not just the characters and their surroundings but also sheds luminous light on the darkness within the characters that reveals itself fits and starts, to cast a splendid spell over the audience.

"Ek Thi Daayan" re-defines the spook genre. It's at once eerie and enchanting, soft, subtle, dark and yet powerful and persuasive.

Tonally rich, vibrant and sensuous, the performances including Pavan Malhotra as Hashmi's bewitched dad and Rajtava Dutta as his bewildered shrink, boost the beauty of the witches' tale .

More treat than trick no matter "witch" way you look at it, "Ek Thi Daayan" is in one word, "daayan-mic!"

Thankfully, no one dies during "Nautanki Saala!" -- not even the audience laughing. This one is just not funny enough to qualify as a LOL (Laugh Out Loud) spree. At the same time, the bum-chum camaraderie between Ayushmann Khurrana and Kunal Roy Kapoor is so pronouncedly pungent that we cannot but chuckle at the gambolling antics that take this desi French Friday special to the level of bearable humour.

Oh, didn't I tell you? "Nautanki Saala!" is a remake of a 10-year-old French film "Apres Vous", which I had the good fortune of seeing.

While the French film, directed by Pierre Salvadori, is far more nimble-footed in the telling of a quirky 'One Fine Evening...' plot, the "official" remake (unofficial ones went out of vogue with stringent copyright laws) scores for the sheer joie de vivre (don't miss my French appreciation!) that Ayushmann brings to the table.

Kunal -- as all of us who have seen that homage to horniness called "Delhi Belly" know -- is an actor with notable comic acumen. Here as the spaced-out suicidal stranger, who blows into Ayushmann's theatrical existence, Kunal confers a sense of hectic audacity to his intruder's part.

Ayushmann bequeaths a clenched vitality to his character. Here's an actor who knows how to milk a situation or a line and exactly where to stop before it goes over the top. As the reluctant exceedingly altruistic host to a suicidal guest, Ayushmann goes beyond his "Vicky Donor" debut to show some hefty mettle.

Unfortunately, the writing just doesn't give Ayushmann, Kunal or the three pretty female actors a chance to breathe easy and let their characters acquire their own volition. Not that the screenplay is in a hurry to get anywhere. Rather, it takes its time to get somewhere that we don't really reach in spite of the film team's best intentions.

It remains a mystery why Sippy -- whose earlier films, for whatever they were worth, were originals -- would now want to remake a mediocre French film. This is not as inexplicable as a remake of "Himmatwala". But then again it does make you question the scarcity of original screenplay writers in our cinema.

On the plus side, the original French film's restaurateur's realm is relocated into the bustling theatre world. And that is a cue for some eye-catching visuals and in-house humour.

Sippy's eye for theatrical detail can't match what R. Balki did to the restaurant business in "Cheeni Kum". But then, who's comparing?

The cinematography is a refreshing synthesis of gritty realism and flights of colourful fantasy, quite like two worlds off and on stage that Ayushmann's character grapples to come to terms with.

All said and dumb, the comic timing of the two lead actors does keep the narrative on track most of the way. Ayushmann and Kunal dig happily into their derivative roles of the saviour and the loser from the French film. The duo whips up a wicked humour in this comedy of errors filled with a reined-in blizzard of boyish bacchanalia and banter.

While you are mildly amused by their antics, you don't come away overwhelmed by this comic outing on the downside of spontaneous hospitality.

Oh, Sippy had desecrated the R.D. Burman classic "Dum Maro Dum" in his last film. Here he goes at the Anand-Milind track "Dhak dhak karne laga".

Frankly, it doesn't make a difference.

Te be sure, a star is born in "Commando". We saw Vidyut completely upstage John Abraham in the hand-to-hand heart-in-mouth fight scenes in "Force". Now, Vidyut proves himself a maestro of unequalled sinewy skills, gliding rather than fighting, pre-empting the adversary's moves almost like a chess game.

With tongue firmly in shriek mode, Vidyut in one of the early stunts scenes of the film rips open a poster of "Force" and attacks the baddies. The action never stops. And the song breaks, especially an item song in the second-half by Nathalia Kaur, are unwelcome speed breakers.

We really don't want to see Vidyut romance the pretty Punjabi damsel in distress played by Pooja Chopra who seems a tad too well-groomed for the rigours of the jungle.

Not that we care. We just want to see Vidyut take on the bad guys, full-force. And boy, does Vidyut deliver!

Admaker-turned-feature film director Dilip Ghosh keeps the plot wisely simple ramrod-straight and to the point.

Apart from those utterly annoying song breaks, there are no digressions from the dynamics of instant score-settling. It's a straight one-to-one fight-to-finish between the silently simmering Commando and a satanic goon from a small-town in Punjab with no eyeballs and apparently no balls either, who believes the power of the gun and the strength of Santa-Banta SMS jokes can be co-ordinated in one range of activity.

Jaideep Ahlawat, last seen giving a riveting performance in Kamal Haasan's "Vishawaroop", gives to the goon's part a wacky spin. The man is half-devil half-imbecile. The goon makes Simrit (Pooja) an offer - either a suhaag-raat with him after the wedding, or a 'suhaag raat' with him and all his battle-stained cronies right away? Hmmm?

Is it any wonder that the pretty spunky Punjabi lass makes a run for the jungles rather than accept the goon's marriage proposal. Predictably, Simrit runs into the banished army-man, our commando-hero, who seems to have seen the collected Rambo series back-to-back at least eight-10 times.

The first time Vidyut plays the saviour at a bus stand, we know he means business. He is not just a one-man army, he is also the Indian army's favourite bete noire. Despite the heavy burden of playing protector to country and the leading lady, Vidyut's fights manage to bring in a lot of warmth and some humour in their execution.

The narration is an unabashed homage to Sylvester Stallone's jungle-survival saga. And yet, thanks to Vidyut's powerful screen presence the combat between the commando-hero and the goons never slackens in pace. The physical combats, which are undoubtedly the crux of the theme, propel the plot forward in leaps of inspired action.

Happily for Vidyut, his opponents are not shown to be ineffectual jokers. The back-and-forth of fists and rhetoric are uniformly engaging. Though we know exactly where the protagonist's one-man battle against his enemies is heading, we never lose interest in the plot.

The film is shot on some interesting locations. The backwaters of Punjab and the thick jungles serve as just the right ambience for the rugged actioner.

Vidyut takes care of the rest. His action definitely speaks louder than his words.

Sejal Shah's cinematography and Ritesh Shah's dialogues constantly add to Vidyut's fist-power, imbuing his combat to the finish with some unexpected flourishes of serious socio-political comment towards the end when we are told we need to clean up our act if we want to protect the country from external threats.

It's a one-man-show off all the way. Pooja shows flashes of talent when she isn't busy brazenly aping Kareena Kapoor's voluble-Punjabi act from "Jab We Met".

Not her fault. If the hero is a silent seething ball of implosive fire, and the heroine is a talkative Punjabi girl who runs away from home to escape an unwanted marriage, 'phir toh boss "Jab We Met" banta hai'.

To its credit "Commando" creates a climate of clenched conflict for the hero to vent his voluminous talent as a martial artiste.

Indeed, a star is born.

Exclamation marks are the only punctuations in this seamless comedy of courtship played at an impossibly high octave, without getting shrill.

'Farce' things first. Barring the core theme of two friends maliciously nipping the third friend's romance in the bud, and some mischievous sequences and characters from the original, which have been entirely re-interpreted as 'swines of the times', Dhawan's "Chashme Baddoor" is far(ce) removed from Paranjpye's original.

Those were days of relative innocence. Whistling at girls at bus stops, chasing unwilling girls to their homes, and landing up at their doorstep under assumed identities were all considered innocuous bachelor bacchanalia. In Paranjpye's "Chashme Buddoor", it was a big deal that Rakesh Bedi managed to get into Deepti Naval's bathroom pretending to be a plumber.

In Dhawan's film, the very gifted Divyendu Sharma, who plays Bedi's part, just can't pretend to know the perky girl next-door intimately by her bathroom decor. He manages to take a picture of a tattoo on her waist to convince his love-smitten pal Sid (Ali Zafar) that the girl is... well, not chaste but quite a 'chalu cheez'.

While the writing gets 'chalu', it miraculously steers clear of being cheesy by a wide margin. Under the veneer of vicious courtship games played by two desperately single guys, Dhawan's "Chashme Baddoor" retains a core of innocence. A tongue-in-cheek virtuosity remains the film's greatest triumph. Sajid-Farhad's writing is wild, naughty and witty, but never vulgar. The whimsical word-play flows from a tap-dance of prankish internet-styled banter which is border-line silly but nonetheless very engaging in an off-handedly smart way.

If anything, the repartees flow much too furiously. From Anupam Kher's slap-happy mother Bharati Achrekar (effortly replacing Leela Mishra from the original) to Goan cafe owner Rishi Kapoor's unidentifiable assistant - everyone is a certifiable quipster in the new film.

Among the three protagonists, Divyendu, playing an awful self-styled shaayar, gets the most tawdry lines of bumper-sticker wisdom, which the actor delivers with such punctuated panache, we can't help guffawing out our implicit 'irshaad'.

Comic timing is of vital importance to this film. And every actor gets it right, dead-on sometime dead-pan. To me, the film's most natural-born scenestealer is the southern star Siddharth. Seen lately in Deepa Mehta's "Midnight's Children", Siddharth nails his character's filmy flamboyance. Many would say Siddharth has gone over the top. But to sustain that high-pitched level of crazy energy throughout the film is no laughing matter.

Or, on second thoughts, this talented actor's performance is indeed a laughing matter.

Ali Zafar is far more sober and controlled than his co-stars. It takes some doing to remain steadfast in your stipulated sobriety while all your co-stars pull out all stops.

The laughs, so refreshingly liberated of lewdness flow almost non-stop. Adding a dollop of spice to the original script is an entirely unscheduled love angle between Rishi Kapoor and Lilette Dubey. Lallan Miya (Saeed Jaffrey), who played Rishi's character in Paranjpye's film would have loved that. Outstanding both, Kapoor and Dubey make their onscreen romance look warm, cuddlesome and credible.

Audaciously, Dhawan and his writer Sajid-Farhad have transferred the celebrated 'chamko' detergent demonstration-sequence between Farooque Sheikh and Deepti Naval in Sai Paranjpye's film to the Rishi-Lilette characters. Maybe the writers saw this pair's chemistry to be more frothy and foamy than the central romance?

Ali Zafar's courtship of the vivacious Taapsee Pannu is relatively 'thanda'. One reason for their frosty compatibility is Ali Zafar's reined-in performance. He deliberately plays his part a few octaves lower than his loud co-stars who are so hyper-strung that you sometimes wonder which drugs they are on.

This "Chashme Baddoor" moves wickedly at its own volition creating a crazy pattern of comic chaos that stops short of being anarchic due to the finely-tuned situational satire simulated in the writing out of a material that was created 30 years ago when there were no mobile phones and the height of male voyeurism was the Playboy magazine.

Dhawan's film doesn't take the characters' contemporary courtship games into areas that would offend the moralists. He knows where to stop.

Just when my faith in remakes had been shaken by "Himmatwala" last week, David Dhawan had me shaking with laughter this week.

Carry on, Mr. Dhawan. David Dhawan's new-age interpretation of the 1981 film moves far away from the original creating for itself a new pathway of laughter and hilarity without showing any disrespect to the source material.

Ali, Divyendu and Siddharth's audacious antics, with Rishi Kapoor and Lilette Dubey's age-defying romance thrown in for added measure, make the trio of girl-crazy heroes in Paranjpye's film look like angels. This is David Dhawan's wickedest comedy of one-upmanship since "Mujhse Shaadi Karogi". You can't miss it. The attention-grabbing chest-thumping gibberish-spewing rowdy boyz won't let you.

Dum hai, Boss!