Rob Reiner's Flipped (2010)

I have a soft spot for Rob Reiner movies. The moment I see that Castle Rock Entertainment logo, I settle in for two hours of human connection stories steeped in history and nostalgia.

Flipped is Reiner doing what he does best – taking us back to a version of America that feels like sunshine filtering through trees, where the worst thing that could happen is the girl next door not liking you back. Set in the early 60s, this coming of age romance follows Juli Baker and Bryce Loski through their middle school years as they navigate the messy business of first love, told from both their perspectives.

The dual narrative is the movie's secret weapon. We flip between Juli's and Bryce's viewpoints of the same events, and suddenly what seemed like typical teen awkwardness becomes this tender examination of how two people can live the same moments completely differently. Madeline Carroll and Callan McAuliffe play the leads with the kind of earnestness that could have been cringe but instead hits you right in the chest. What gets me about Reiner's period pieces, whether it's Stand By Me or this, is how he captures that specific ache of looking back. The sycamore tree Juli loves, her chickens, the carefully manicured lawns of suburban America – it's all shot with this warm nostagia. The production design nails that early 60s aesthetic without being showy about it. The supporting cast is stacked too – Aidan Quinn and Penelope Ann Miller as Juli's parents, Anthony Edwards as Bryce's dad. There's a dinner scene that escalates from uncomfortable to devastating that shows Reiner hasn't lost his touch for quiet, powerful moments.

Flipped won't punch you in the gut like some coming-of-age dramas. Instead, it reminds you that first love, family dysfunction, and learning to see people for who they really are - these things are awkward and messy and occasionally involve chickens and eggs.

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Bernie (2011) comes to Carthage

Small town Texas, a true crime story told like a languid Sunday afternoon conversation over sweet tea. Richard Linklater's Bernie has Jack Black slowly rolling into the town and finding a job as the assistant mortician at a funeral home in Carthage, TX.

The movie is the real-life story of Bernie Tiede, the beloved assistant funeral director of Carthage and his unlikely friendship with the town's most despised wealthy widow, Marjorie Nugent. Linklater treats this bizarre true story with his signature unhurried grace - life unfolds naturally, meandering like those East Texas back roads, revealing character through accumulation rather than exposition.

Jack Black disappears into Bernie with such completeness that you forget you're watching Jack Black. He embodies this paradox of a man - devoutly Christian, genuinely kind and impossibly generous. Then he has an unexpected glitch in his personality which makes this story a story. Shirley MacLaine captures Marjorie's brittle cruelty with precision, showing us exactly why an entire town could hate one lonely old woman. The genius move here is Linklater's use of actual Carthage residents as a Greek chorus, commenting on the events with the kind of unvarnished Texas frankness that no screenwriter could manufacture. These aren't actors playing small-town Texans, these *are* small-town Texans, and their authenticity grounds this strange tale in something achingly real. I thought there was a Somerset Maugham quality to it all, if Maugham had traded colonial Asia for the American South. That same keen eye for human contradiction, the understanding that people contain multitudes and morality exists in shades we'd rather not acknowledge. Bernie loved that town. The town loved Bernie. And then a thing happened...

What stays with you isn't the action itself but the uncomfortable questions about justice, loyalty, and whether goodness can be measured by a single terrible moment or by decades of genuine kindness. Linklater never judges, he simply observes, and trusts us to sit with the complexity.

Like the entire populace of Carthage, I too loved Bernie, didn't at all like the character Matthew McConaughey portrayed in this movie - Danny Buck as was intended by the director. Anyway who can hate Jack Black, right?

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Dhurandhar - The Long Game

There has not been a decent spy thriller made this well in Bollywood since forever. Dhurandhar, Aditya Dhar's ambitious action-espionage epic that dropped on Netflix last week, is what happens when a director decides to challenge the mediocrity that has plagued mainstream Bollywood cinema for years.

I, a detached viewer, on other side of the globe, tenuously tied to India by my Indian roots, didn't get the impression that it was your typical flag-waving, chest-thumping Bollywood fare. This is methodical, deliberate filmmaking that treats its audience like adults capable of sitting through a three-and-a-half-hour narrative without needing an item number or comic relief sidekick.

The film tells the story of Hamza, played by Ranveer Singh, a composite character based on real Indian intelligence operatives who spent lifetimes embedded in Pakistan's hostile territories. These are the invisible soldiers and spies who played the long game after devastating terrorist events on India like the Kandahar hijacking, the Indian Parliament attack and 26/11 Mumbai attacks. The movie follows India's intelligence apparatus methodically infiltrating and dismantling terror networks. If The Godfather had been a spy thriller, it might have looked something like this.

Ranveer Singh is excellent. This guy gives you a thousand dollars' worth of performance for every dollar you pay him. He's one of those rare actors in this era of fleeting stardom who consistently shows up and delivers, film after film. But the internet has lost its collective mind over Akshaye Khanna's Rehman Dacait, his style, his delivery, his entire presence has become the talk of social media. Sure, Khanna is magnetic, but this is still Ranveer's movie. I do agree there are some political undertones. R. Madhavan's character basically exists to deliver one-liners glorifying the current Indian administration. But here's the thing, I haven't been dialed into Indian politics for more than a quarter century, so I watched this like any other geopolitical thriller. The film portrays India positively but doesn't dehumanize Pakistanis. It shows Pakistan as a complex political landscape where gun-trafficking and terror training are unfortunate realities of their geopolitical business. What impressed me most is that Dhar made this as a mainstream commercial film, not as some niche arthouse project. He had the guts to demand more from audiences, to trust that they'd appreciate sophisticated storytelling over formulaic "for the masses" entertainment. The film's box-office returns, multiple-viewings of the movie by many cinephiles and the excitement and life it has brought back to Bollywood, tell us that Aditya Dhar's gamble has paid off. The climax action sequence alone, from the slow-burn tension building in a car to the relentless pursuit and brutal hand-to-hand combat is some of the finest action choreography Bollywood has produced.  

At 215 minutes, I wanted more when it ended. Part two arrives in March 2026. I'll be watching. 

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