Akshay Kumar's Ghis Ghis Ghis is not here to win critics; it's here to hijack weddings, reels and meme pages

There are songs that arrive with mood lighting, designer costumes, international locations, 400 background dancers, drone shots, neon frames and a marketing deck longer than the screenplay. And then there is Ghis Ghis Ghis from Welcome To The Jungle, which seems to have arrived with only one mission: Boss, speaker phaadna hai. In an industry that has become painfully obsessed with looking cool, sleek, premium, curated and Instagram-safe, Ghis Ghis Ghis feels like that one loud baraati who enters the wedding before the groom, dances with the band, argues with the dholwala, eats two plates of chaat and still becomes the most memorable person of the evening. The recently released song from Welcome To The Jungle features Akshay Kumar with Bhojpuri star Akshara Singh has clocked more than 6 million views in the past 24 hours. But the bigger story is not just the song. The bigger story is what the song represents. Bollywood has spent the last few years trying very hard to decode virality. T...

Presence review – Steven Soderbergh’s intriguing ghost story experiment

Sundance film festival: The director tells a haunted house tale from the perspective of the spirit in a visually interesting yet dramatically underwhelming gambit

For the majority of film-makers, the restrictions insisted by Covid became a stifling force and created a clear dividing line between those who could flourish in extremely prohibitive circumstances and those who could not. Steven Soderbergh, a director who has never allowed anything – from Oscar glory to blockbuster success – to kill his plucky spirit of invention, made one of the only essential pandemic movies with the maddeningly underseen thriller Kimi, a sleek and canny new-tech upgrade of a paranoid 70s thriller. He found a way, along with the screenwriter David Koepp, to maximise limitations and the two have smartly reunited for a project that carries on-paper similarities.

Presence, a project shrouded in trademark mystery, shot over last summer with a waiver and now unveiling at Sundance, is another one-location genre exercise, playfully riffing on age-old tropes and allowing Soderbergh, as both director and cinematographer, the opportunity to experiment. This time he’s playing with the conventions of haunted house horror, his film told from the perspective of the ghost situated in a recently renovated house, new inhabitants moving in – a family, led by Lucy Liu and the This is Us actor Chris Sullivan with the newcomers Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as their teenage children. Like families often do in this genre, they’re arriving with excess baggage, tensions they hope will dissipate in a new home, a fresh start after a period of unease.

Presence is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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