On demand: "The Harbinger"

A Covid-era Carnival of Souls, coming out of nowhere to conjure a very particular, disconcerting mood, the rapid-response indie horror The Harbinger uses the backdrop of lockdown's first days - masks everywhere, inside and out; wipes for groceries; widespread uncertainty as to what was going on, and going wrong - to tell a story about our reliance on one another, and how temporary and fragile life really is. Old college pals Monique (Gabby Beans) and Emily (Emily Davis) agree to form a bubble to help the latter through a pronounced spell of night terrors involving a figure in a medieval plague mask. Yet that's just one tension among many writer-director Andy Mitton sets out: there's a sick child (Cody Braverman) in the apartment upstairs, a snarling anti-vaxxer (Stephanie Roth Haberle) in the flat next door, and soon even the notionally well-balanced Monique finds herself succumbing to bad dreams themed around her late mother - the suggestion on Mitton's part being that nightmares, like viruses, can be sticky, suffocating and far easier to pass on than they are to shake off.

It's visibly been made on a shoestring, centred as it is on small groups of people in humdrum, underlit rooms, but what's crucial is that those people are very convincing as people: flawed, neurotic, unravelling as we all were to some degree in that sorry span between the first lockdown and the rollout of the vaccines. Mitton's quest for the most credible responses to incredible developments extends even to a Zoom call with a woman trying to juggle childcare with her day job as a demonologist; any extravagance on this director's part is reserved for his dreamscapes, which set us down somewhere between the expressive shadowplay of a Val Lewton B-picture and the split realities of David Lynch. Skilfully sustained over 87 minutes, it gets closer than most to redramatising a deeply unsettling period in human existence - doubtless because it doesn't have the budget to throw effects at the screen and overwrite itself - while allowing Mitton to vanquish one of his characters' biggest fears, namely departing this mortal coil without leaving a trace behind. If Blumhouse could still tell their arse from their elbow, they'd be signing this guy up as a potential new Mike Flanagan.

The Harbinger is currently streaming via NOW TV, and available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

In memoriam: Damien Thomas (Telegraph 28/04/25)

Damien Thomas, who has died aged 83, was a British actor who worked extensively across television, theatre and film; emerging in the late 1960s, his most prominent roles were the bloodthirsty Count Karnstein in Hammer’s Twins of Evil (1971), the cursed Prince Kassim in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) and the Jesuit priest Father Alvito in the small-screen hit Shōgun (1980), for which he learned Japanese.

Born April 11, 1942 in Ismailia, Egypt to an RAF officer father and a French mother, Thomas studied at art college in London before graduating from RADA in 1966. He made his stage debut that same year as Flamineo in a revival of Webster’s The White Devil, his TV debut opposite Felicity Kendal in Love with a Few Hairs (1967), and his film debut in a starry Julius Caesar (1970), playing Pindarus to John Gielgud's Caesar.

An appearance in the Hammer-produced ITV anthology series Journey to the Unknown (1968) paved the way for Twins of Evil, although Thomas later confessed he wasn’t wholly sure what he was getting into: “I thought I was just being given this screentest to act opposite the others who were taking screentests… I had no idea I was actually in the running for a principal role. It was quite nice to find out that, in fact, I was up for the role. And even nicer to find that I got it.”

Fashioned on Hammer’s usual shoestring budget – Thomas’s prop fangs snapped when the actor bit co-star (and former Playboy Playmate) Madeleine Collinson – the film hardly elevated the actor to Christopher Lee-level stardom: “I was about to face a couple of the worst years of my career. Now when I look back at the film, I don’t think I was as bad as I thought at the time.”

Yet his olive skin kept Thomas in the conversation for comparably exotic roles as the decade played out. Playing the Prophet Muhammad’s son Zaid in The Message (1976) earned the actor a lifelong Middle Eastern fanbase; Kassim in the Sinbad movie endeared him to matinee-goers, although again Thomas admitted some reservations: “I discovered that I was a prince for ten minutes [and then] a baboon for most of the rest of the movie… Well, it was fun, and work, so I did it.”

Doing for samurai what Roots (1977) had done for slaves, the James Clavell adaptation Shōgun became a runaway ratings hit, attracting audiences of 25 million in the US before winning three Golden Globes and two Emmys. In a 1982 interview, Thomas revealed the nine-month Japanese shoot left him pondering whether to adopt a more Zen lifestyle, “but it can’t be done where I live in Richmond”.

Buoyed by this success, Thomas became a TV fixture: he was the shadowy drifter Jake Haulter in Tenko (1984), Jose Camarena in the second series of Lynda LaPlante’s Widows (1985) and Michael Samuels, the liberal-leaning Environmental Secretary outwitted by Francis Urquhart in the original House of Cards (1990).

One professional setback – assuming the villain role in Roman Polanski’s maritime flop Pirates (1986) – was compounded by personal tragedy that October after a depressed former lover, the showgirl-turned-actress Suzie Jerome, died from hypothermia on a beach close to Thomas’s Dorset cottage: “I gather from her friends that she was very much in love with me, but she never told me so… I wasn’t ready to launch into another relationship after the pain of marriage and divorce.”

Thereafter, Thomas returned to the stage, directing several times for Theatre West and understudying Frank Langella in the original 2006 production of Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon at the Donmar Warehouse; he also landed late-career supporting roles in the Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation Never Let Me Go (2010), the Madonna-directed W.E. (2011) and period horror The Limehouse Golem (2016). His final role was in the miniseries Whatever After (2021).

“I seem destined to play the saturnine and tanned roles,” Thomas shrugged to the Daily Mail in 1984. “But I couldn’t care less – because they’re usually good meaty parts.”

He is survived by his wife Julia, three children and three stepchildren.

Damien Thomas, born April 11, 1942, died April 18, 2025.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 18-20, 2025):

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

2 (new) Sinners (15) ****

3 (new) The Penguin Lessons (12A)

4 (2) The Amateur (12A)

5 (new) Warfare (15) **

6 (5) Disney's Snow White (PG)

7 (3) Six: the Musical (12A)

8 (6) Drop (15) **

9 (11) The King of Kings (PG)

10 (new) Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh (15) *

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Babe

2. Sinners

3. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

4. Pride & Prejudice [above]

5. One to One: John & Yoko

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (6) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

2 (new) Captain America: Brave New World (12)

3 (1) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

4 (3) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

5 (5) Gladiator II (15) ***

6 (32) A Complete Unknown (12) **

7 (28) Hop (U)

8 (2) Nosferatu (15) ***

9 (9) Twisters (12) ***

10 (4) Kraven the Hunter (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hard Truths

2. Dahomey

3. All We Imagine as Light

4. The Brutalist

5. A Real Pain

My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Saturday, ITV1, 6.30am)

2. Carlito's Way (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.20pm)

3. The Gift (Friday, BBC One, 11.30pm)

4. Crimes of the Future (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. West Side Story (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.50pm)

Drunk history: "Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh"

2019's Kesari, in which the finer points of colonial history fought a losing battle with the ego of leading man Akshay Kumar, got lucky: opening before the pandemic, when these flagwavers were still deemed to be worth leaving the house for, it proved a bigger hit closer to home than abroad, but a hit nevertheless. Now we have what Wikipedia euphemistically labels a "spiritual" sequel: a project that began life as an entirely unrelated screenplay, renamed as recently as February this year - after filming was completed - to yoke it to the Kesari Cinematic Universe. We advance a quarter-century in history, shaking off original director Anurag Singh (Karan Singh Tyagi takes over), to another pivotal moment in Indian self-determination: the aftermath of the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh - India's own Peterloo or Bloody Sunday - initiated when a British command opened fire on peaceful protestors, killing somewhere between 379 and 1500 people, depending on estimates. Returned to this stark, sobering moment, as we are in Kesari Chapter 2's opening minutes, one begins to hope the newly minted franchise has toned down the grandstanding of its first instalment. At which point it cuts to a full-screen close-up of Kumar, face painted Kermit green, while narrator Vicky Kaushal extols this new character's credentials and virtues, and an electric guitar score underlines his status as, you know, a total rockstar. The film's first, keening song juxtaposes the bodies of the fallen and Kumar's upright lawyer C. Sankaran Nair while a female singer cries out "where have you gone, my saviour?"; it will end with the star cast in a hazy saffron glow, as even his onscreen opponents bow to his brilliant legal mind. Thus does history repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as abject farce.

So we have a franchise: Akshay Stirs Shit Up While Setting The Past Right. Proven facts remain visible in KC2: the appalling brutality of the massacre itself, the case brought against the Crown by Nair. Yet more often than not, you sense these facts being co-opted - conscripted, even - by a dramatisation that plays as utterly flimsy when it's not ripely overcranked; so much piffle has been applied to the past that even the proven facts start to seem piffling. It begins during the massacre itself, and the clumsy inserts of British officers all but sticking their riflebutts up the nostrils of wide-eyed young children; it persists into this script, which smacks its lips with relish whenever one of the dastardly oppressors hones into view. There they go again, harassing old ladies, tearing up crucial documents, perjuring themselves, or pointing out with a smirk that Indian citizens enjoyed the same status in the gentlemen's clubs of the Raj as dogs. (Kumar's Nair briefly offers site-specific pushback in this respect, glancing across the urinals at a peeing British adversary and gravely noting "the Empire is shrinking".) It's far from inaccurate to portray the Brits at Jallianwala Bagh as baddies - this is one of the film's more truthful generalisations, all told - but these are never especially compelling baddies. Simon Paisley Day, as the loathsome General Dyer (memo to history: bit on the nose, that), speaks a commendable amount of his own Hindi rather than submitting to the indignity of a botchjob dub, but he has only one note to play throughout: the pinched constipation of a man who hasn't opened his bowels since the Second Boer War. These aren't characters, so no real drama flows from them; they're the straw men so many nationalist arguments rely on, nailed haphazardly to the screen so as to aggravate before being cut down.

They do, however, make a perfect match for a not terribly compelling hero. By most accounts, the real Sankaran Nair was a fascinating, conflicted Establishment figure; yet the movie instead gives us Saint Akshay, whose internal struggles are instantly rendered moot by the way KC2 has been conceived, pictorialised and scored. You don't need a sentient actor in this part (and I shall take the higher ground and resist the obvious joke); shot from the right angle, in the right light, and with the orchestra cranked up to eleven as it often is here, a mop would do the job just as effectively. Ananya Panday, the Dharma discovery whom you might think would appear somewhat out of place in a 1920s courtroom (like, where's the wifi?), has a strong opening scene in which she confronts Nair, those big eyes burning with injustice; she also plays her part in the one noteworthy movie image, her pristine white robes popping out of a crowd of establishment black silk. Yet increasingly this camera regards her as somewhere between an intern and a beneficiary of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. "We have to keep my involvement secret," Nair tells her early on, but within minutes, our guy is giving forth at the bench, and rarely thereafter stops. If he seems ill-briefed throughout, it's because the writing has little to no interest in legal strategy and the process of discovery: Nair pulls intel from the air like a conjuror does rabbits from a hat, and the sorry facts of this case matter far less than the stage the courtroom provides to make the kinds of speeches these films trade in. "How's that for a confession?," asks Kumar at one point, turning towards the camera as Axar Patel would the umpire. Alas, this just isn't cricket. The nonsense Kesari entered into the record was half-funny, in a big dumb movie way; here, it falls somewhere between exasperating and infuriating, because it reduces a meaningful story to the crassest movie slop. The star has taken the film's success on home soil to announce plans for a Kesari Chapter 3: I have an awful feeling I'm going to spend some part of the rest of my days watching Akshay Kumar Photoshopping himself into the most turbulent moments of India's history, like the world's worst Forrest Gump impersonator.

Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Kesari"

An early 2019 entry in the cycle of ideologically skewed Indian period dramas - featuring all the flagwaving and Muslim-bashing a certain audience and their governors could desire - Kesari attempts something Zulu-like with the 1897 Battle of Saragarhi. Announced at the deb ball of history by portentous voice-of-God narration (a trope in these things), Akshay Kumar is accessorised with a beard as wide as his turban as Havildar Ishar Singh, the good Sikh farmer-turned-soldier who led a heroic last stand against Afghans attacking a crucial fort in the North-West Frontier. Within minutes, we gather Anurag Singh's film will be trading in a decidedly simplified (not to mention weaponised) idea of history. Faced with British commanding officers who maintain the region's growing tensions are "not our problem", Kumar adjusts his turban (his hero move) before singlehandedly leaping into battle so as to rescue a woman from the invading hordes. Two scenes later, he can be observed leaping off the ramparts of his clifftop station clutching only to a rope, like Ethan Hunt in a Mission: Impossible. Given a dressing down for general insubordination by his superiors, he's eventually packed off to the remote Saragarhi base to train its wayward recruits, like Maverick from Top Gun: Maverick. What we're witnessing, then, is colonial history with the Bollywood equivalent of Tom Cruise choppered into it, a figure who will prove less than willing to serve as a historical footnote or a mere face in the crowd.

The resulting movie is a lot of things: widescreen, overlong, partially entertaining, partially nonsense, partially entertaining nonsense, but increasingly less energised as it goes along, as if it were gradually boring itself to sleep. The one thing is isn't is especially reliable or credible history. It's been conceived first and foremost as another slightly different Akshay Kumar vehicle, that slightly being a consequence of the fact Kumar works so insistently nowadays it's getting harder to discern any real or meaningful deviation from what's gone before. Yes, this is one of Akshay's historicals: "First the Mughals ruled us, then the British," sighs our hero, caught in the grip of nationalist self-pity. "When will we ever rule ourselves?" (Saragarhi can thus be repositioned as a fleeting experiment in self-determination.) But as he sets about drilling the fort's 21 shirtless wastrels and part-time cockfighters into a semi-effective fighting unit, Kesari becomes only vaguely distinguishable from the previous year's Gold, where Akshay drilled the national hockey team to Olympic glory of a sort; swords and guns have been swapped in for sticks, that's all. One might suggest the alternative title Khaki - the prevailing hue of these frames, taking a visual cue from the soldiers' uniforms - were the Hindi title not already translatable as Saffron.

Producers Dharma at least ensure it's attractively packaged: it's one of those flagwavers where you can sort of see why the home crowd turned out for it, even if you don't share its set of beliefs. Singh fills these frames with striking desert formations, and earns bonus points for favouring boots-on-the-ground action, involving hundreds of extras, over cheap, weightless CGI. He's also not quite as swivel-eyed about the ideology as others working within this field have been, although when photographed from a certain angle, the chakkars (steel bands) the Sikh heroes use to keep their headgear in place catch the sun and remind one of angelic halos; the invaders, for their part, are portrayed as distinct tribes with strategies of their own, but are mostly defined by their tendency to brutalise their women, as no Indian has ever done of course. Its biggest problem, ultimately, is that it also has to be an Akshay Kumar vehicle, and thus continually find ways for the star to distinguish himself and justify his doubtless elevated fee. These include: rescuing a small child from a collapsing building, conversations with (inevitably younger) mirage-wife Parineeti Chopra, mansplaining history and philosophy to a desperately unlucky waterboy, bellowing this cycle's watchwords "I will bleed saffron!" to the heavens, and taking to the ramparts before battle to bash a very loud drum at earsplitting volume. Guess who's also the last man standing, flaming cutlass in hand? At some point during Kesari, you may even wonder whether there wasn't some behind-the-scenes negotiation to ensure the star's beard and turban were measurably the biggest on screen.

Kesari is currently streaming via Prime Video; a sequel, Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh, is now showing in selected cinemas, and is reviewed here.

A fistful of Skittles: "Good Bad Ugly"

Good Bad Ugly is a prominent example of those fan-service star vehicles that have become specific to the Indian cinema over recent years. If you catch it in a multiplex, it'll likely be preceded by the trailer for the next/last Mission: Impossible, which isn't quite the same thing: people go to see those films for Tom Cruise, yes, but they also go for the stunts, the supporting cast and/or the entire package, and Cruise is playing Ethan Hunt rather than some amalgamation of every role he's played. Here, the star is the entire package: Tamil audiences go to see Ajith Kumar - the foursquare, salt-and-pepper-haired action hero who resembles Ray Winstone playing John Virgo - performing the most Ajith Kumar feats imaginable in the most maximalist of Ajith Kumar films. (To put it another way: if Cruise were to make one of these, he'd have to end one setpiece with a "respect the cock" gag, have minor characters repeatedly cast aspersions on his sexuality, and at some point make a winking reference to David Miscavige's wife.) I'm late to the cult of AK, but as far as I can discern, he's not undeserving of such treatment: I enjoyed his post-pandemic Marxist heist movie Thunivu, it was a smart idea to remake the Kurt Russell thriller Breakdown (as this year's Vidaamuyarchi) and more generally Kumar has combined flair and heft with a broadly upstanding public persona. His latest is nothing if not straightahead in its hero worship. From an opening section headed 'Good', we gather Kumar's ex-gangster AK has walked himself into a prison framed like a Marvel comic strip and choreographed as if by Bob Fosse, where he's so renounced his old ways he's even taken night shift work as a guard. In 'Bad', his return to civvy street is complicated after his moptopped teenage son (Karthikeya Dev) is snatched by ne'er-do-wells and nogoodniks. As AK goes full Liam Neeson, investigating the flow of dark money through the Spain of Money Heist and paella Western shootouts, things turn - you guessed it - 'Ugly'.

They get funny and entertaining, too, at least for some while. Let's make no bones about this: Good Bad Ugly is nonsense on toast - naansense, if you wanted to be culturally specific - but in no other form of contemporary cinema has the phrase "what if" been seen to hold such sway. What if a 53-year-old man could be observed kicking seven bells out of men thirty years his junior? What if the latter group were dressed like characters rejected from Scarface for being a bit much? What if we disguised AK in leather-bar garb for a meeting with money launderers? What if those money launderers did their bidding in a What'sApp groupchat headed "DARK WORLD"? What if their casino hangout had a microwave in the middle of it, which our hero could then toss a bomb inside? What if that hero had a gun disguised as a Box Brownie camera? It's like a story an eight-year-old would make up about themselves and their friends - which may explain the comic-book panels that sporadically pop up, and the action figures on AK's table, and the Korean heavy with the Hello Kitty phone. (It may also explain the cuts the film's UK distributor made at the end of Week One, softening a 15 certificate movie to a family-oriented 12A.) That's the source of GBU's appeal: the possibilities are endless. (One scene ends with Kumar casually chatting to the camera crew.) It also struck me as GBU's limitation: like a kid hopped up on Skittles, it eventually tires itself out, and exhausts those of us who aren't hardcore fans with it. Director Adhik Ravichandran and his six-strong team (I'm tempted to say creche) of writers have their strongest ideas in the first half; in the absence of anything like a coherent, thought-through plot, the supply of Super-Cool Things for Our Hero To Do runs thin after the intermission. The second half really does suggest the star and his entourage took a nice European break, during which some killjoy occasionally pulled out a camera and some prop guns and insisted AK film something for the fanclub. The prevailing air of daftness remains rather charming, though: it's the first Indian film I've seen to remind me of both John Wick and the Status Quo lark Bula Quo!.

Good Bad Ugly is now playing in selected cinemas.

His house: "Sinners"

Sinners is to Ryan Coogler what 2022's Nope was to Jordan Peele: the kind of wild swing a filmmaker only gets to take nowadays once they've made a lot of money for their studio employers. It's notionally horror, thus notionally as saleable as anything else currently showing at your local multiplex, yet for much of its duration it operates as horror-plus, throwing open its arms to embrace elements of the musical, an alternative history of the American South, and something more personal yet about creation and the deals we make so as to produce art. There's even a degree to which it resembles this director's Black Panther, albeit afforded the liberties that follow from an R certificate. Again, the sprawling ensemble cast, again the busy worldbuilding - but this time Coogler gets to relax into his task, throw rather than pull his punches, worry not about the burdens of representation, and even burn it all down if he wants, rather than fret unduly about connecting it to some wider universe. Sinners stands alone, operating in relative isolation, and therein resides both its biggest risks and its most enjoyable rewards. In many ways, it's not unlike its own primary location: a juke joint on the outskirts of a Depression-hit Mississippi community, set up by twin brothers (played by two Michael B. Jordans) who've reportedly returned to this, their hometurf, after spending much of the previous decade running with the Capone mob in Chicago. To provide the musical entertainment, the pair recruit artisans young and old: young Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton), a gifted guitarist who presents as this story's Robert Johnson figure, and grizzled blues musician Delta Slim (the great Delroy Lindo), tempted out this way not by money but liquor. Yet as the project gets bigger, it begins to attract others - palefaces, for starters (Hailee Steinfeld as one Jordan's ex Mary, a banjo-strumming Jack O'Connell) - and then trouble besides.

Part of the risk with Sinners is that it conforms to no existing horror structure. The conventional approach would be to open with the juke joint fully operational, corral the characters inside, and then raise bloody hell for ninety minutes before spitting everybody, hopefully sated, out into the night. Instead, Coogler builds the film his way, finding a structure of his own, as distinct from the rigid superstructure of the MCU, and then filling it as he wants. Yes, there will be more or less conventional genre thrills, but before the film gets there, it has unusually meaty character business to work through (again: horror-plus), establishing these folks' relationships to one another, to money, and to an America that is more broadly as white as the cotton picked in the surrounding fields. Here, Sinners starts to shape up as not just merely timely - landing, as it does, in a moment when the whitest White House in recent memory is doing all it can to erase any trace of Black history (and any sense that Black lives matter) from the books - but acutely personal, for just as Peele used the shadow selves of 2019's Us to reflect upon his own upward mobility, Coogler appears to deploy his two gangsters and the naive guitarist Sammie to ruminate on the tradeoffs he's had to make to get where he now is, on top of the box office. Eyebrows have been raised in some quarters at the tone of the trade papers' coverage of Sinners - the stress reports have placed on how much the film cost to make and market, and whether it's a hit or a hit with a sizeable asterisk attached to it. (What's being insinuated is whether a film by a white filmmaker and featuring a largely white cast would attract similar scrutiny.) Yet it strikes me as an extension of the haggling that goes on within Sinners itself. One reason Coogler got this leftfield project over the line with the executives: it is largely about business, its internal tensions those of negotiation and gatekeeping. It's just that it's been directed by someone who knows this business is often cutthroat and draining, who's seen at least one fellow creative waste away in the process, and is thus more engaged than most with the costs - financial and spiritual - of putting on a show.

The miracle of Sinners is that it emerges not as jaded or wearied but supremely entertaining, as a studio film that for once has a lot going on under its roof, very little of it tiresome. As opposed to the crashing obviousness of modern superhero movies or the time-honoured rituals of the Creed franchise Coogler similarly launched, every gesture and character here retains some element of mystery: we're never entirely sure where these people have come from, nor exactly where they're headed - the Robert Johnson stand-in isn't the only one at a crossroads - so we never get bored of them. And Coogler, for his part, keeps making interesting, idiosyncratic choices: merging the imagery of the crossroads with that of the crucifix, making the villains folkies yet still honouring their music, the insane amount of cunnilingus references. Elsewhere, he empowers others to make interesting choices in their turn. Jordan and Steinfeld get to play greatly more amoral than their pristine screen personas would usually allow; editor Michael P. Shawver cuts key sequences as if they were boundary-crossing music videos, suggesting some hybrid of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" or "Bad" with Donald Glover's "This is America". Here is this turbulent season's most forceful argument in favour of DEI: it's not just that Sinners is a different story, but that it's a story that moves differently, to a different rhythm or set of rhythms. (It's direction as remixing: the beats don't fall where you'd expect them to fall.) Does it bite off more than it can fully chew? There are an awful lot of strands to tie up heading into its climax: here, Sinners takes a turn for the Marvel, flailing around between disparate avengers, and not affording us the time to mourn the loss of the fallen, as a Carpenter or Romero would. Maybe that's why Coogler has felt the need to tack on three alternative endings: some Tarantinoid wish fulfilment, as if the director were remaking From Dusk Till Dawn, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds simultaneously; a note of sentiment visible nowhere else in the picture; and a terrific little vignette, buried at the very end of the closing credits like an artist's signature, which lands on the simple truth of why people enter into showbusiness in the first place. We get our money's worth, at any rate: surprising, densely packed (scrub out the asterisk: here is the kind of movie movie that stokes repeat business and grows a devilishly long tail) and self-evidently the film Ryan Coogler wanted to make, Sinners is a fine advert for affording our creatives a free hand to spend the cash whichever damn way they choose.

Sinners is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "The Horse Thief"

A pre-title sequence, all pageant and ritual, leads us to believe Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief will chiefly be operating on a symbolic-poetic level; it does, but then just one scene later, a roguish-looking fellow literally steals away with a horse and gallops off across the Tibetan plains, the inciting incident of a film Martin Scorsese, no less, has described as one of the greatest he's ever seen. (And he's seen a lot.) For fullest appreciation here, you will need to reconcile yourself with the fact narrative matters less than the evocation of a remote time and place, a striking quality of light and the extraordinary blazes of colour Tian puts on screen, only fleetingly matched by Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou in their films of this period and rarely equalled since. That a forty-year-old film uploaded to YouTube, of all places, looks better than most movies funnelled into multiplexes nowadays would indicate something has gone badly wrong with the cinema's way of seeing; but however and wherever you see The Horse Thief, the immediate response will be to insist we urgently replace all projector bulbs and send every last working director and DoP for a compulsory sight test.

The spectacle Tian sets before us is that of both documentary and dream, and what's most fascinating about The Horse Thief is that it never fully tips its hand as to which of these it most wants to be. Instead, we bear awed witness to a film that maps out and then inhabits entirely its own space: it's not just that we're afforded scant clue as to how one sequence relates to another, it's that we have no idea how something this immersively Tibetan, whether fiction, non-fiction or rare alchemy of the two, relates to the Chinese film industry - and, indeed, the Chinese domestic politics - of 1986. What's crucial is that it is immersive, and that the scenes this immersion generates are most often than not remarkable, jawdropping, eyepopping: a papery sacrifice to some mountain god, vultures congregating en masse, a tight-knit circle of bare-chested men burying live sheep in a pit as the winds blow in. No less dazzling are those reds, oranges and greens Tian, co-director Pan Peicheng and cinematographers Hou Yong and Zhao Fei arrive at, which really are as if these colours were being filmed for the first time. (While required viewing for aspirant cinematographers and graders, the film sets a formidably high bar, and also the puzzle of how they got these frames to look like this.) Even as The Horse Thief retreated from wider circulation, many films tried to recreate some aspect of it: Bertolucci's The Last Emperor and Little Buddha, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet, Scorsese's own Kundun, those 21st century ethnographic surveys with titles like The Story of the Weeping Camel. It remains among the foremost examples of the cinema's enduring ability to transport us, to offer the best damn guided tour you've ever been on: certain sequences make Paradjanov look ordinary, and many of these sights will stay with you forever.

The Horse Thief is currently streaming on YouTube.

Dead ends: "Warfare"

Like a general plotting dominion, Alex Garland advanced his fledgling directorial career several steps with last year's A24 hit Civil War: grabby, discourse-priming subject matter (the sudden collapse of liberal American democracy) wedded to some technical facility, released in that quiet moment between awards season's end and the arrival of the summer blockbusters. This year, Garland brings us Warfare, which seeks to repeat that trick, albeit while operating within greatly more specific territory. In this case, inspiration has been provided by the vivid combat memories of former Navy SEAL (and Warfare's credited co-director) Ray Mendoza, whom Garland hired as an action co-ordinator on his previous film. Once more, a Garland title tempts in wavering cinemagoers with the promise they'll see action; once more, the aim is to immerse those viewers in a fraught environment where the threat is multidirectional. (The gamer in Garland continues to sit close to the surface of his films, for better or worse.) In this case, however, the landscape isn't that of a crumbling empire, rather a single block around one Iraqi family's home, seized and briefly occupied by US forces during the second Gulf War. Those forces are represented here by yahoo kids, introduced hooting and hollering to the aerobics-porn of Eric Prydz's era-establishing "Call on Me" promo, and recognisable as a grab bag of familiar faces from the UK and US film industries (Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, with the young Canadian star of Hulu's Reservation Dogs, D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, cast as Mendoza himself). They emerge an hour and a half later as our bloodied and in some cases fallen heroes, their mission having gone first slightly and then hellishly awry.

For Garland and Mendoza, there are only two states in war: either the combatant is bored out of their mind (in retrospect, the good times) or shit-scared and being shot at. Warfare first lays out the banal point detail of this squadron's latest surveillance task, inviting soldier and cinemagoer alike to bide their time and keep their eyes open; around the half-hour, however, they and we fall subject to the one threat nobody successfully saw coming. And that's effectively it: the rest is grisly fallout, a kickbollock scramble to drag yourself and anybody else in your immediate vicinity away from this soot-blackened and shellshocked milieu, under near-constant gunfire, with whatever remains of your life. It's Thursday afternoon CCF practice in Dolby surround sound; it's Black Hawk Down from a distributor with a sideline in tote bags. Someone as pop-culturally savvy as Garland might well have pitched it as the movie equivalent of a three-minute, quiet-quiet-loud rock song. The quiet is unnerving; the loud - be that from grenades, gunfire in confined spaces, desperate radio comms, bullets bouncing off the outside of a Bradley tank or merely the agonised screaming that soundtracks the entire second half - is little short of deafening. Garland kept a close finger and thumb on the volume of the discourse Civil War was constructed to generate; here, he's promoted himself to twiddling the actual volume knobs and dials, the better to generate the precise effects he wants. He's not especially gung ho or gleeful about this; only a complete dunderhead would be, given the scenes coming out of Ukraine and Gaza on a daily basis. For much of its duration, Warfare proves as muted as its soundtrack after a fateful IED detonates. Stunned, scared and scarred faces pass disbelievingly before our gaze; a severed leg sits permanently outside the family home, becoming as familiar in its lifelessness as any welcome mat. Good luck to any cinemas playing those swish Army and Navy recruitment ads before the feature presentation.

The big question, to paraphrase Edwin Starr, is what all this heavy-calibre, high-precision, ultra-choreographed carnage leaves us with. Chiefly, I think, it's an understanding of how powerful those bootcamps training our actors in military verisimilitude have become - how they've now become an arms industry in themselves, lobbying for greater screentime. That's what's really being advertised here, and that's why Garland makes the otherwise utterly nullifying choice to show his actors palling around with their offscreen analogues under Warfare's closing credits. (You can almost hear the voiceover: "Have you been injured in a wildly unpopular, electorally disastrous overseas incursion? Are you looking to recreate a wildly unpopular, electorally disastrous overseas incursion? Then come on down to Mendoza's World of Pain.") If there's anything we can cling to and console ourselves with, it's the sight of these men working together, watching one another's backs and going the extra mile for the team; it's a demonstration of that camaraderie and fellow feeling you may well need to get out of tight spots like this, and which military veterans recall with vastly more fondness than that time Chad got his extremities blown off. We again get a sense Garland really, truly wants to be considered one of those muscular directors like Michael Mann or Oliver Stone - men's men who've weaponised their cameras in the service of fomenting tension, action or some other state of agitation - but that his own weak material keeps letting him down. Civil War was a statement without politics, or at best offering only the most mealy-mouthed of politics; Warfare is a visibly well-drilled and much-rehearsed yet oddly self-contained anecdote, a Desert Storm in a teacup that has to make a succession of loud noises to try and jolt us past its almost entirely localised impact. If we emerge with low-level tinnitus and nausea all the same, that's because something of the Iraq conflict's myriad traumas has been passed on, first from Mendoza to Garland, then by Garland to us. You can argue that trauma was communicated briskly, effectively and most of all accurately here; you'll emerge knowing exactly what it is to hold in a brother's guts while preventing yourself from throwing up. You could also argue the movies really owe us more than this, now more than ever, and you'd take no return fire whatsoever from these quarters.

Warfare is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Touch"

Another change of pace and scenery for the well-travelled Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur, probably still best known outside his homeland for his very solid Mark Wahlberg actioner Contraband. Touch is Kormákur's lockdown movie, but it's also that rarest of beasts: an intelligent weepie, hinging on a character - widowed chorister Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson), a greybeard cross between the protagonists of 2019's A White, White Day and 2001's fondly recalled doc Cool & Crazy - who uses the pandemic to settle unfinished business and finds his small world opening right back up again. Shortly before international borders closed, and shortly after receiving a less than positive medical prognosis, Kristófer hops on a plane to London to revisit his halcyon days as an LSE student at the turn of the 1970s; cue flashbacks in which we see his younger self (played by the director's strapping son Pálmi Kormákur) escaping the era's turbulent politics by dropping out and taking a dishwashing gig in a Japanese restaurant. Here, this peaceable John meets his Yoko in the owner's daughter Miko (Kōki), a fellow traveller to London, this time from her hometown of Hiroshima. (Rather cutely, Kormákur hands Pálmi round spectacles and sticks "Give Peace a Chance" on the soundtrack when the pair have their first real conversation: a bit on the nose, but in much the same way a kiss can be on the nose.) The question is what the wearied elder Kristófer means to do with these recollections in the present, given the precarity of his situation: his London hotel, for one, is in the process of shutting down along with everything else, while his time on this Earth would appear more finite still.

The situation involves, maybe even demands, a certain contrivance: a concierge with scant regard for the niceties of data protection, a nursing home where the admissions policy will seem more or less credible depending on how familiar you are with the early 2020s work of Matt Hancock. That I remained more than onside was down to the grounding lived experience Kormákur, co-writer Ólaf Ólafsson and these actors knead into almost every scene. Employer and employee bond over Iceland and Japan's shared fishing heritage; their older selves over a no less shared drinking culture. The flashbacks expand to describe the various ages of this man, showing Kristófer as not just a lover but a father, too, and Kormákur steers his young leads - who do make a cute couple - every bit as affectingly as he does those veterans who presumably require far less guidance. (Mike Leigh regular Ruth Sheen is on fine form as the casually racist owner of Kristófer's boarding house.) Touch is good on work, on the sharing of experience that surely goes on in the backrooms of our restaurants: Kristófer picks up not just a loved one, but a language, haiku, some basic Japanese dishes. It's even better on borders, which even since the lifting of lockdown restrictions have been tightly guarded and surveilled for various reasons; the coda, by contrast, hinges on a crack in a door, a glimmer of a possibility of a passage into a new and happier phase of life. By that point, Kormákur and Ólafsson have given us a sense of an entire existence, highs, lows, regrets, achievements. You can quibble with some of the detail, but not the river-like sweep, nor the emotional resonance: on some profound level that you possibly wouldn't expect from the director of the Mark Wahlberg actioner Contraband, Touch understands what keeps us apart, isolated, unhappy, and the significance of those connections that - whether temporary or for keeps - continue to keep us all going.

Touch is now streaming via NOW TV, and available to rent via Prime Video.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 11-13, 2025):

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

2 (new) The Amateur (12A)

3 (2) Six: the Musical (12A)

4 (new) André Rieu's 75th Birthday Celebration: The Dream Continues (PG)

5 (3) Disney's Snow White (PG)

6 (new) Drop (15) **

7 (new) The Chosen: Last Supper (12A)

8 (new) Good Bad Ugly (15 and 12A) **

9 (4) Death of a Unicorn (15)

10 (5) A Working Man (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Babe

2. Sinners

3. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

4. One to One: John & Yoko

5. Four Mothers

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

2 (15) Nosferatu (15) ***

3 (2) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

4 (3) Kraven the Hunter (15)

5 (7) Gladiator II (15) ***

6 (14) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

7 (new) Mickey 17 (15) **

8 (27) Better Man (15) **

9 (30) Twisters (12) ***

10 (4) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hard Truths

2. Dahomey

3. All We Imagine as Light

4. A Real Pain

5. Nosferatu

My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory [above] (Easter Sunday, ITV1, 3.40pm)

2. The Secret Garden (Saturday, five, 1pm)

3. Senna (Saturday, Channel 4, 11pm)

4. Nine to Five (Easter Monday, BBC Two, 10pm)

5. Mr. Popper's Penguins (Easter Monday, Channel 4, 10.35am)

Unpalatable: "Drop"

Director Christopher Landon's previous projects for Blumhouse - the two Happy Death Days and 2020's bodyswap slasher Freaky - were obvious files under horror-comedy. The weirdest thing about Landon's latest, the thoroughly Internet-brained Drop, is that it initially shows signs of intent to push into far more serious horror-thriller territory. As indicated by a prologue that puts a mangled woman at the mercy of a gun-toting spouse and then an early scene that establishes heroine Violet (Meghann Fahy) as a counsellor for survivors of domestic abuse, Drop means to chime with the number one trending topic among all the lonely people on social media: the supposedly parlous state of play between the sexes. It does this by weaponising the already high tension of a first date that goes wildly awry. Single mum Violet's return to in-person dating, sitting down at Chicago fine dining establishment Palate with hunky photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar, a discount-brand Chris Evans), keeps being interrupted by the ping of her phone, signalling first the arrival of anonymously airdropped memes (annoying, as anyone who's ever been added to a group chat will attest), and then security-cam footage of masked intruders in her own kitchen, which is understandably more troubling when you're trying to have a nice night out.

There are reasons Landon has been so in demand over recent years: he works cheaply and efficiently (often profitably), and he's demonstrated a keen eye for a solid movie hook. This script, by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, briskly loads its larder with suspects and red herrings: the brooding mystery man Violet literally bumps into upon entering the restaurant (Travis Nelson), the genial fellow midlifer seeking a similar second shot at love (Reed Diamond), the cheesy pianist (Ed Weeks, from The Mindy Project) who uses Henry's delayed arrival to make a move on our gal. Issues, flaws and outright liabilities only manifest once we get into the mechanics of the plot, which at most junctures requires these characters to behave in ways that stretch and defy all credibility. Fahy is caught frantically trying to make sense of the desperate measures these drops oblige Violet to take; appetisers are ordered but never brought to table; and, indeed, so little food is consumed in this restaurant you wonder whether everyone on screen is simply sloshed on the house red. These aren't people acting like they're in a movie, occasioning the kind of allowances we've all made from time to time in the interests of a fun Friday or Saturday night; they're people acting like they're in a punishingly stupid movie, a bridge too far for even basic multiplex enjoyment. By the final-reel delivery of a killer panna cotta, the film's pièce de dumb-assed résistance, Drop has travelled all the way round the back of stupid to become partly entertaining again, but between last year's spooky pool fiasco Night Swim, last month's incoherent The Woman in the Yard and now this - an unholy trinity of scripts no serious reader ought to have let pass - you are forced to consider what's gone wrong at Blumhouse of late. Everywhere else you look, horror is raising its game - but these guys have apparently sacked their shrewdest creatives and replaced them with chimps.

Drop is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Two lovers: "One to One: John & Yoko"

Having tackled (Bob) Marley and Whitney (Houston), the industrious Kevin Macdonald here leaps aboard the ever-rolling Beatles bandwagon with a film that picks up more or less where 2021's Get Back left off. One to One, for which Macdonald extends a co-director credit to editor Sam Rice-Edwards, hones in on one (ex-)Beatle at a very specific moment in Beatles history: that spell either side of the 1972 charity concert of the title, which came about after John (Lennon) and Yoko (Ono) left London for New York, settling into a new life and routine that would span the next decade until the singer's murder in 1980. This transatlantic move is framed, in the film's opening movement, as an escape from an England where John had become so closely tied in the popular imagination to his now-defunct band, and where Yoko had been calumnied in the press as that terrible foreign woman who broke the Beatles up. Yet the relocation was hardly a new beginning in receptive climes, more a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire - a state of affairs Macdonald and Rice-Edwards illustrate via a rapid-fire assembly of clips from the TV their subjects watched as they inched their feet beneath the table of the New World. On one set of channels: The Waltons, The Sonny & Cher Show and The Price is Right, programming engineered to affirm that everything was awesome in the land of the free. On other, newsier platforms, however: Attica, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam and the protests that provoked, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Richard Nixon back again, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace. If John and Yoko were looking for peace and quiet in the wake of the Beatles' fallout, then early 1970s America was just about the last place the pair might have found it.

Two Americas, then, two directors, and for much of its running time, One to One often feels like two films in one. One half is a conventional concert movie, boasting the obvious hook of remastered, Dolby-boosted footage you'll likely never have seen before of an event you may never have heard about. This half plays the hits, as indeed Lennon himself did on the night - "Come Together", "Instant Karma", "Mother" and (yes, I'm sorry) "Imagine" - with a little help from Yoko and Stevie Wonder among others. Yet this footage has been intercut with a rather more probing documentary, one that asks what exactly was on John and Yoko's mind(s) in the early 1970s, and eventually comes up with the answer "a fair bit". (Everything, it transpires, from the future of mankind to the flies Yoko was attempting to source for one of her installations; here, alas, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards reduce the latter's more conceptual art to a recurring comic bit.) What One to One is trying to do is yoke together two different types of performance - that of a mere pop star reconnecting with his rocky roots (a route his old mate and writing partner Paul assiduously followed in his first few years outside the Beatles), and that of the public figures who turned up, night after night, to benefits, rallies and the taping of primetime talkshows, and had more to say at this moment than ob-la-di-ob-la-da. The film lays out John and Yoko's victories in the field of activism - springing the poet John Sinclair from a jail cell, raising over a million dollars with the titular concert for a self-evidently worthy and necessary cause - but also some sense of how their openness to ideas and suggestions forever risked tipping over into celebrity guilelessness. (For one thing, Lennon appears to take the National Association for Irish Freedom far more seriously than we can, given the acronym.)

For John, at least, it all connected up; as he's heard to insist in one of the phonecalls he and Yoko taped for posterity (with odd, underexplored echoes of Nixon in the White House), "I'm still an artist, but a revolutionary artist". The "but" there is as the tape Macdonald and Rice-Edwards use to splice their two films together: haphazardly applied, but it holds for the most part, so long as no-one examines it too closely. Much as this John found himself at a crossroads, so does the film cast around. There's plenty of period colour, lots of Mad Seventies Shit, including a hostage negotiation where the ransom payment was taken up by a man clad in swim shorts; we often appear to be zapping not just between different channels but adjacent realities. It's some feat of cutting, and one that absolutely immerses us in the tumult of this era, but you may find yourself - as I did - wanting a little less editing and a little more direction in its place: the construction of some central thrust or argument, far greater provision of context and commentary. Instead, One to One turns a vast lump of hitherto hidden archive material over to us - power to the people! - and waits to see what we can make or infer from it all; in documentary terms, this is very much the equivalent of those 50th anniversary boxsets that package up every extant version of any given song on the album, indifferent to any notion that true artistry might be a matter of selection, of paring down to the singular and essential. Much of this pick-and-mix footage is lively and interesting, and some of it is truly fascinating and revealing, but the whole is recognisably Get Back-coded: another one chiefly for the completists among us.

One to One: John & Yoko is now playing in selected cinemas.

Easter bunnies: "Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit" at 20

It was perhaps inevitable that Wallace & Gromit would appear on the big screen sooner or later. Long before 2005, their collected breakthrough shorts had become a crowdpleasing staple of Saturday morning matinee slots, and the deal Aardman struck with emerging animation giants DreamWorks in 2000 meant the company found themselves obliged to think bigger than before. Two decades on from The Curse of the Were-Rabbit's successful first run, a debate has opened up in animation circles: on one side, the poptimists who claim more W&G, in any form, can only ever be a good thing; on the other, the purists, who maintain short films remain the perfect delivery system for this pair, and bristle at any attempt to turn them into bankable content providers along the lines of the Minions or Croods. Though the deal lasted only one year and one movie more (2006's mildly maligned digimation Flushed Away), DreamWorks enabled Aardman to expand in discernible directions, both within the marketplace and within individual films: here, to supplement Peter Sallis (afforded top billing in the credits, for the first and last time in his career) and his silent sidekick with a best-of-British voicecast (Bonham Carter, Kay, Fiennes); to punch up the action with a thunderous Hans Zimmer score; and to play with plasticine enough to generate the hundreds of bunnies that overrun our heroes' hometown and gardens. (As Wallace, ever-astute, puts it: "they must be breeding like, well, rabbits.")

Yet the crucial spadework was done in the writers' room. First, arriving at the kind of set-up that used to serve those old Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello spinoffs perfectly well: Wallace & Gromit go into pest control. (Fine; let the chuckles begin.) Second, realising that the expanded scope allows extended time and space for more of those gags that get all the funnier for knowing how funny any five- or six-year-olds in your orbit are going to find them: Fiennes' Victor mistakenly sticking a bunny on his head rather than his toupee, or the "lovely lady rabbit" Wallace strings up to tempt his foe ("very cheeky"). This is one of those Aardmans that got the balance right, pitched as it was both at the child in us all and the adult who might fully appreciate the horror nods and winks: the gradual reveal of Wallace's bunnitude remains inspired, and even those who would dismiss "24 carrots" as a dad joke will surely admire the audacity of stopping the climactic dogfight so that everyone can fumble around for the loose change that will keep the mechanisms going, or the last-reel deployment of cheese as a smelling salt. For this viewer, revisiting Curse pointed up the extent to which last Christmas's Vengeance Most Fowl played like Aardman stock, but all these features have assumed an unexpected new pertinence amid the rise of the tech bros, whose newfangled contraptions have been comparably well-intentioned, barely less tested, and more destructive yet. Oliver Hardy implored us to acknowledge the idiocy only he had to put up with; but Gromit now appears to look some distance beyond camera and audience, towards faltering AI-generated summaries, malfunctioning Cybertrucks and naff-looking Ghibli derivatives. A canine Cassandra, that dog sees, and he knows.

Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit returns to cinemas nationwide from Friday.

In memoriam: Manoj Kumar (Telegraph 11/04/25)

Manoj Kumar, who has died aged 87, was a suavely sincere star of Bollywood’s post-War golden age who branched out in the late 1960s as a writer-director of considerable note. Even at his most prolific, he rarely lost his eye for a worthy script or project, and the lived-in patriotism he evoked in his directorial debut Upkar (Favour, 1967) ensured he was often fondly referred to thereafter by his protagonist’s name “Bharat” – a poetic term for India itself.

Yet Kumar’s appeal expanded far beyond his homeland. The London-set Purab Aur Pachhim (East and West, 1970) – which he directed, starred in and co-wrote with his wife Shashi Goswami – proved a runaway success with diaspora audiences, playing in British cinemas for 50 weeks. Its total take of £285,000 set a record for an Indian film at the UK box office, one that would not be overtaken until the Salman Khan blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994).

After a bizarre debut, playing an elderly beggar in Fashion (1957), Kumar proved a willing foil to established actresses, courting Sayeeda Khan in Honeymoon (1960) and Kanch Ki Gudiya (Glass Doll, 1961), Asha Parekh in Apna Banake Dekho (Try Making Your Own, 1962) and Mala Sinha in Hariyali Aur Rasta (The Greenery and the Road, 1962). Much admired for his professionalism, his reputation grew so rapidly among producers that he was signed for six more films while Kanch Ki Gudiya was still shooting. 

Yet most of these titles fizzled out commercially, and Kumar insisted he had divine intervention to thank for making him a star. At the urging of the actor Om Prakash, Kumar offered a prayer for success at the Haji Malang shrine. On the walk home he encountered a white-clad stranger with a long flowing beard who told him “You will taste success from the 31st”. This was the date of Hariyali Aur Rasta’s premiere; the film became Kumar’s first major hit.

Throughout the Sixties, Kumar worked at a ferocious rate. Further romances followed, such as Himalay Ki God Mein (In the Lap of the Himalayas, 1965, a reunion with Sinha) and Do Badan (Two Bodies, 1966, with Parekh), but he alternated these with the socially minded Grahasti (Family Life, 1963), the ghost story Woh Kaun Thi? (Who Was She?, 1964) and the wild murder-mystery Gumnaam (Anonymous, 1965), loosely based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

Emerging as a polymathic talent, he not only rewrote Woh Kaun Thi? but designed its poster; he also claimed to have directed part of Shaheed (Martyr, 1965), where he played the anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh. Its enthusiastic reception was pivotal to his flourishing as a writer and director. The film drew backing from Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, who pledged to watch 10 minutes at an early screening but became so engrossed he sat through the film entire. A frantic Kumar instructed the projectionist not to honour the intermission lest the PM walk out.

Manoj Kumar was born Harikrishan Giri Goswami in Abbottabad on July 24, 1937 to H.L. Goswami and wife Krishna Kumari. It was a tumultuous childhood: Kumar’s younger brother died in hospital after Partition riots caused doctors to abandon their post, and the family relocated to Delhi. After graduating from Delhi University, Kumar moved to Bombay, where he took his pseudonym from his idol Dilip Kumar’s character in Shabnam (1949) and supported his acting career by writing for Ranjit Studios, earning ten rupees per scene.

That apprenticeship served him well in his directorial career, officially launched with Upkar, a film inspired by PM Shastri’s slogan jai jawan, jai kisan (“hail the soldier, hail the farmer”) and centred on a hardy farmer who enlists to fight in the 1965 Indo-Pakistan conflict. Another notable box-office success, it won the Filmfare Awards for Best Dialogue, Best Director and Best Film in 1968.

 

Despite dynamic use of sound, Shor (Noise, 1972) proved less successful, but Roti Kapada Aur Makaan (Food, Clothes and Shelter, 1974) went some way towards integrating the social themes of the independent “parallel” cinema into the crowdpleasing mass movie and afforded an early role to future megastar Amitabh Bachchan. Kranti (Revolution, 1981), a three-hour epic on the struggle for Independence, became India’s biggest hit of the entire 1980s.

After struggles with depression following his father’s death in 1983, Kumar never quite regained his previous sure touch. Clerk (1989) was a flop; Jai Hind (Long Live India, 1999), Kumar’s attempt to launch his son Kunal to stardom, proved a miserable experience, taking seven years to complete. During that time, Kumar quit acting, making his final appearance in Maidan-E-Jung (Battlefield, 1995); he planned a comeback in his eighties with Ik Onkaar (One God, 2018), but the film was shelved.

He received the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999 and two of India’s highest arts honours, the Padma Shri (in 1992) and the Dadasaheb Phalke (in 2016). In 2013, he sued latter-day megastar Shah Rukh Khan, who’d recreated Kumar’s signature move of extending his fingers over his face in Om Shanti Om (2007); this homage had been deleted from the Indian cut at Kumar’s behest but was left in for a Japanese rerelease. (The case was eventually withdrawn.)

For many, though, Kumar’s abiding image was that of Bharat, the hearty country boy willing to put his life on the line for India: “The public in our country is so kind-hearted that when they find something genuine and good, they shower it with immense love and respect... I was just a simple boy, but you all made me Bharat. You obliged me and also placed a huge responsibility on me to live up to that image.”

He is survived by his wife Shashi and two sons, Kunal and Vishal.

Manoj Kumar, born July 24, 1937, died April 4, 2025.