Bandish Bandits Season 2, Carry-On: Reviews This Week

Bandish Bandits Season 2 Is Engaging, If Not Exquisitely Memorable

For all the strain it puts into its vocal cords, a visual finesse seems to be missing from the world Bandish Bandits inhabits. Almost as if it knows how it must be heard, but not how it must be seen, Manik Sharma reviews.

Dir: Anand Tiwari

Cast: Ritwik Bhowmik, Shreya Chaudhry, Atul Kulkarni, Sheeba Chaddha

Stream on: Prime Video India

IN A SCENE from the second season of Prime Video’s Bandish Bandits a singing coach asks her students to sing blindfolded. The performance starts at a peak but as soon as the folds come off, and an undeclared audience comes into view the song tapers off into something else. “As soon as you felt you were being watched, you started showing off,” the teacher tells her dumbfounded students, explaining that the moment an artist acknowledges his or her audience, they stop creating and start entertaining, stop expressing and instead start trying to impress. The scene highlights the reason why this show about family legacies told in the meter of musical heritage has endured and entrenched itself in the world of streaming. In its second season, Bandits continues to trace the battle of tradition vs modernism, told through stellar ballads, decent performances and a story that transcends eras, generations and genres.

Season 2 starts off in the aftermath of Pandit Radhe’s (Naseeruddin Shah) – the patriarch of the Rathod gharana of music – demise. After panditji’s death, secrets about his dark past, his manipulation of the gharanas, and his dire attempts to preserve his progeny begin to tumble out of the closet. The world previously at the family’s feet now reaches for the throat. With the patriarch’s legacy on cold ice (ie, cancelled) his divided family faces the dogs of war. For a disjointed yet dogged bloodline that has only known tradition, what shape will redemption take, the show seeks to answer. There are, obviously, two roads. Radhe (Ritwik Bhowmik), the youngest prodigy of the family sees the one less taken as the only choice – evolution. Join a band, modernise your language and enter reality from the realm of precious fixations. A leap that requires more of letting go than holding on.

Read The Review

Carry-On Is The Trashy-Fun Netflix Actioner Done Right

Carry-On is Jaume Collet-Serra’s return to form — his first truly entertaining and wholesome B-thriller since 2016. Imagine a Netflix-coded baby of Phone Booth and Red Eye. It’s the Christmas movie we need, writes Rahul Desai.

Dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Taron Egerton, Sofia Carson, Jason Bateman, Danielle Deadwyler

Stream on: Netflix

IT'S BEEN A WHILE since director Jaume Collet-Serra made a ‘good bad film’. He represents a very specific B-movie oeuvre — corny but well-made, perversely enjoyable thrillers. He’s a modern-day Tony Scott, if you may. Cue Liam Neeson’s trashy-action face in Non-Stop and Run All Night. Cue Paris Hilton’s horror face in House of Wax. Or Blake Lively’s shark-survivor face in The Shallows. But his two collaborations with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Jungle Cruise, Black Adam) were good bad movies without the good. The streak ends now. Carry-On is Collet-Serra’s return to form — his first truly entertaining and wholesome B-thriller since 2016. Imagine a Netflix-coded baby of Phone Booth (2002) and Red Eye (2005). It’s the Christmas movie we need. The budget ingredients: a packed American airport, holiday season, a smooth villain, a plane and nerve gas situation, a lot of sprinting, and a jaded hero.

Taron Egerton stars as Ethan Kopek, a mediocre and low-level TSA officer at LAX airport. His gorgeous and unnaturally understanding girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) — who’s an airline manager — is pregnant, so Ethan feels like he needs to step it up and stop being a loser. He asks his boss for a promotion that morning, and as luck would have it, he’s put on the security detail at the luggage belt. The ‘machine’ is a step up from the frisking and scanning he usually does. All is well, until he receives a ear piece and a phone call from a mysterious man (Jason Bateman in the most Jason Bateman role possible) — who identifies as a “freelance facilitator” — that changes his life. The man blackmails Ethan into waving through a lethal chemical weapon in a suitcase. Obviously, the bag will go to one of the flights with a politician on it. Parallely, an LAPD officer named Elena (Danielle Deadwyler) discovers a couple of Russian bodies and races against time to decode this deadly plot. Their paths are destined to cross.

Read The Review

OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

The one newsletter you need to decide what to watch on any given day. Our editors pick a show, movie, or theme for you from everything that’s streaming on OTT.

Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think is worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over.

In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an hour on this.