He does right by his influences with a sunbaked mystery rich in hard-bitten Peckinpah style, from the nail-spitting acting to the brisk runtime, which is especially surprising in Hindi-language cinema. Raj Singh Chaudhary’s epic of bullets and sand is an homage twice over, a nod to the genre extravaganzas that flooded Indian cinemas during the ’80s, which were themselves a tribute to Hollywood’s classic Westerns and noirs. Give the AC unit a good smack and beat the heat with Netflix’s lineup of original movies in the month of May: And viewers in search of something completely different should look into the noir-Western mashup mayhem of Thar, a Bollywood import arriving in a blaze of bullets. Period-piece enthusiasts get Operation Mincemeat, a WWII espionage thriller good for calm-keeping and on-carrying. Those sore for a bubbly rom-com have Senior Year, in which Rebel Wilson busts out of a coma and goes to finish high school. Though it’s more like an anti-summer-movie season while the big studios unload marquee titles, Netflix offers more humbly scaled alternatives in genres that have been largely left behind. As May brings climbing thermometers, Hollywood launches the grand return of a quasi-post-pandemic summer-movie season and Netflix transitions into its own equivalent.
