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Freedom is a major driving force behind Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema. Like it or not, Mahesh’s tortured vision colours and complements every frame that his protégées from Anurag Basu to Mohit Suri have created.

In this hauntingly delineated portrait of a woman’s right to self-fulfilment, Mohit Suri steps forward with a tale that tilts its hat to the very best of world cinema.

European in feel, Indian in texture and supremely secular in its view of love, loyalty and other passionate eruptions, “Awarapan” is one of those tightly-wound thriller-dramas where the outflow of emotions is so controlled that you forget the implausibility of the plot.

Emraan Hashmi gets one more author-backed chance to prove his worth. He does a commendable job of creating a young emotional gypsy whose loyalty to his employee (Ashutosh Rana, fiercely clenched in his evilness) is challenged by his conscience. Every member of the vast cast is in character.

Between the two leading ladies who form a before-and-after axis in the taut plot, Shreya Saran’s freshness and expressiveness are infectious. Mrinalini Sharma could’ve done better if she wasn’t dressed wrongly for the part of a brutal man’s mistress.

The scenes between Hashmi and his master’s mistress will remind you of Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit in “Koyla” and also Abhishek Bachchan and Kareena Kapoor in “Refugee”.

Hashmi’s character and the narration are driven by demons that do not render themselves into any comfortable configuration. Two vital sequences, one where he desperately tries to dig his beloved out of her grave and another when the lacerated hero confronts the villain at the end with tears quietly streaming down his face, showcase Emraan’s coming-of-rage proclivities.

“Awarapan” could have been a messy combo of melodrama and mayhem. There are a lot of both in the narrative but the film succeeds in going beyond the routine romantic rituals associated with films about forbidden love.

The locales lend a mesmerising rocky ruggedness to the raga of tormented emotions. The volatile music score (by Pritam Chakbraborty) and the skilful interweaving of deftly cut scenes, which lend lucidity to the script, make the film a cut-above-the-notch viewing.

I’ve always thought of Emraan Hashmi as an actor who conceals more than he reveals on screen. There is an inherent pain in his personality that this film taps better than anything he has done earlier. This film marks the emergence of a major talent.

Director Mohit Suri harnesses the concealed side of Emran Hashmi’s personality with an all-encompassing view into hearts that have known no home.

Freedom could be a song or it could be a poem. In “Awarapan” it’s a thought that gets smothered in a stifled scream.

Suri has specialised in manifesting the fears and anxieties of tortured souls in flight. After trying it out with lukewarm success in “Kalyug” and “Woh Lamhe”, he gets it right this time

Everybody in “Jhoom Baraabar Jhoom” (JBJ), including the director, is an impossible imposter.

Abhishek Bachchan poses as a small-town guy in love with a very poised and sexy Pakistani-French mademoiselle from Paris. Preity Zinta poses as a modern-day Cinderella with a very posh British-Indian fiancée. Bobby Deol, a nerd-optician poses as a cyber-Superman.

Lara Dutta, god bless her luscious presence, is a tart masquerading as a prima donna.

Director Shaad Ali poses as an auteur with the wickedly audacious sense of humour of a comic-book aficionado. While the audience, not to be left behind, is supposed to pretend that they find the bizarre goings-on hilarious.

But sorry, this is Bunty without bubbly. The joke, if any, is on the creator of this musical travesty where the four main characters behave as though they are so impressed with themselves and their humorous circumstances that they would rather not have the audience along for the joyride, thank you.

Nasir Hussain-meets-Baz Luhrmann in Shaad Ali’s weird-and-wacky fun-and-frolic homage to the spirit of backslapping bonhomie. As in “Bunty Aur Babli”, (we won’t count “Saathiya” part of Ali’s oeuvre since it was more Mani Ratnam than Ali), Shaad shows a distinct affinity to old-fashioned masquerades … You know those potboilers from the 1960s where the hero pasted on a beard and pretended to be the heroine’s professor?

JBJ sticks the beard on to its characters and lets them run wild in Europe. Alas, what we see is what we regret.

This is “Moulin Rouge” with too little meat and too much rouge…The love-versus-flirtation masquerade gets lost in too much masti, masquerade and mascara, so that at the end of the chic charade you’re left looking at a film that is epic in design (big extravagant song sequences) and cartoon-strip in characterisation and content.

What was Shaad Ali thinking of when he designed this celluloid confectionary?

Did he want to show us how far he could go with his sense of the outlandish? The screenplay and dialogues (Habib Faizal) are terribly un-smart. Each character embraces cockiness like a ‘laugh’ boat in the simmering but shallow sea of silliness.

“If you don’t come back, I’ll be screwed,” says Lara in her funniest Pak-French accent. “I won’t let anyone screw you,” retorts Abhishek.

Abhishek gets to smooch both his heroines, one of them under the Eiffel Tower. Sorry, the adolescent kiss under the Eiffel Tower in “Mera Pehla Pehla Pyar” last week seemed much more heart-warming.

JBJ is like a long stand-up joke that goes from bad to worse as the narrative gets longer and longer. Shadows fall on the frisky flamboyance with ominous opulence. Not that there are no genuinely funny and bright moments. But they get drowned in self-congratulation.

Everyone is busy listening to his or her own words flow out in an incessant downpour of absurdity. The characters neither connect with one another nor with the audience even when they talk or sing directly to us.

A large part of the overall design of this in-house joke is occupied by songs and dances. All four protagonists dance the dance of the dunce spiritedly.

Bobby surprisingly steals the frame quite often specially in the “Kiss of love” sequence. Here’s one actor who is finally getting out of his lazy career.

Abhishek and Preity do “Bunty Aur Babli” 2, replete with a saat phere in front of the Taj Mahal. It was funny between Abhishek and Rani the first time. This time the whole post-interval chunk where Abhishek and Preity imagine themselves transposed from London to Agra is clear evidence of the leisurely lather running out of froth.

Abhishek and Preity, though given the thankless task of making the lines appear funny when they are often not, lend an illusory energy and effervescence to the proceedings.

But it’s Bobby, with his twin-shaded stud-and-nerd look and Lara with her luscious tart-to-diva makeover who come as the surprise element. Really, what’s keeping Lara from superstardom? Maybe wrong choice of films?

In the quest for comedy, Shaad Ali pays homage to old film songs and films as disparate as “Sholay” and ahem ahem “Bunty Aur Babli”. But “Namaste London” did it with far more with grace and affection

Tagline for this week’s thriller - “Some lines should never be crossed”. Sounds familiar. Wasn’t that the tagline for the 2005 cheesy downmarket Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen starrer “Derailed”?

Co-directors Mistry and Hyderabadwala, to whom goes the dubious distinction of being the only directorial duo of Bollywood after Abbas-Mustan, don’t just rip off the fast-paced loco-motivated thriller about the price an adulterous man must pay for biting into the forbidden fruit.

They turn it into a mushy-mushy rush-rush job where the film editor seems as much in a hurry as the commuters in the Thai subway that houses this thriller’s non-existent thrills.

Trust me, Geeta Basra playing Aniston’s role is quite a forbidden apple. She pouts, preens and poses as though Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” has suddenly got too close for comfort.

And Emraan Hashmi as Michael Douglas from “Fatal Attraction” is a fatal aberration. Emraan’s titillating transgressions are the stuff that Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema are made of. And yet here lies the deception - the very idea of placing Emraan at the vortex of a lustful infidelity is not temptation enough to sit through this stilted rip-off of a passably puerile thriller.

It’s one thing for Shekhar Kapur to sublimate “Man Woman & Child” by making it into the resplendently emotional “Masoom”.

Mistry and Hydrabadwala heat up the cold warmth of the Hollywood film into a mockery of all definitions of life, love marriage and lust in cinema.

The Thai setting hardly helps to pump up the anaemic adrenaline. It only heightens the queasy feeling of watching a bad Hollywood thriller vandalised by people who don’t seem to have one original, let alone inspiring, bone in their creative body.

In the absence of an inner conviction, the narrative creates scenes from a broken marriage whose splinters pierce the plot with agonising self-consciousness.

K. Raj Kumar wields the camera as though Bangkok was an overgrown shopping mall. The film wears an over-ripened decadent look suggesting forbidden pleasures.

Yes, Mithoon’s tunes are interesting in bits. Why not watch them at home?

If you really want to know why modern marriages are falling apart, don’t look for answers in this unfaithful adaptation of a foreign film on unfaithfulness. Watch Anurag Basu’s “Metro” instead. But if you really want to know what’s wrong with Hollywood rip-off-ed Hindi films, go see “The Train”.

A more bogus ride on celluloid would be difficult to obtain