Badrinath ki Dulhania is a tale with a twist

girl child a liability. And marriage is an occasion to levy a ‘one-time dahej price’.

Badri (Varun Dhawan) is born into a wealthy, orthodox zamindar family where the autocratic father’s word is final, and where an elder brother was forced into an arranged marriage for money. Dhawan makes for a convincing small-town lout. When he fancies a girl at a wedding (Alia Bhatt, as Vaidehi Trivedi), he goes into aggressive flirt mode. Vaidehi’s narrative is little more predictable. She’s educated, and wants to earn for herself. It’s all well-intentioned and earnest. But in parts it’s too earnest. The love-versus-respect dialogue gets preachy.

Badrinath... lacks the realism of hard-hitting indie cinema, but still takes a pertinent subject to a wide audience. In Badri’s goofy humour, and in Vaidehi’s courage, one hopes that people will see a bit of themselves.

He has held sway over filmgoers for 84 years. In the latest retelling of the King Kong legend, the gargantuan gorilla goes ape again.

Unfortunately director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, making the leap to a big-budget blockbuster after his indie debut The Kings of Summer (2013), can’t match the white-knuckle excitement of the iconic black-and-white original (1933) or even the retellings by John Guillermin (1976) and Peter Jackson (2005). Jettisoning the usual beauty-that-killed-the-