Directed by Anurag Kashyap, Gangs of Wasseypur—released in two parts, each nearly three hours in length—attempts to chronicle the violence and corruption in the criminal underworld of this impoverished region of India. Both parts of the film are narrated by Nasir Ahmed (Piyush Mishra), an assistant to Shahid Khan, who continues to stay with the Khan family through their conflict with Ramadhir Singh. The majority of Gangs of Wasseypur Part One tells the story of Shahid Khan whilst the Gangs of Wasseypur Part Two focuses on the Khan families continued war with Singh.

Gangs of Wasseypur, begins with Shahid Khan who, after being thrown out of his village, finds himself working as a hired muscle for Ramadhir Singh, an industrialist who has made a fortune out of mining coal. However, fearing that one day his ‘lapdog’ may replace him at the top of the food chain Ramadhir Singh has Shahid Khan killed. This death has disastrous consequences for Singh, leading to a bloody conflict with Khan’s son Sardar, the feud between the two spanning across generations.

Given the length of Gangs of Wasseypur, it would be fair to say Kashyap is not a filmmaker who attempts to tell a story concisely. As is the case with any story of this length, keeping the audience engaged is something of a challenge and sadly throughout its running time Gangs of Wasseypur feels saddled by exhaustive levels of exposition. The reason for this is that Kashyap is very keen to establish context, with every crime explained in forensic detail, and placed in the context of the changing political and social landscape of the region. At times this offers an interesting insight into the history of India. However, it is detrimental to the narrative, causing it to lack pace, and leads to the film feeling overburdened by the scale of the story it is trying to tell.

However, Kashyap is clearly not a filmmaker without talent. Throughout both films he cleverly inverts the utopian themes of Bollywood, by juxtaposing classic Bollywood songs with images of violence and corruption on the streets of Wasseypur. This idea of the contrast between Bollywood and reality is further reinforced later in the film by Ramadhir Singh who decries all those who are ‘fooled’ by Bollywood film, exclaiming ‘every fucker trying to become the hero, in his own imaginary film.’ Despite the film’s claims towards realism the excessive violence in Gangs of Wasseypur borders on surrealism. Reminiscent of the work of Nicolas Winding Refn, this provocative portrayal of violence gives the film a similar visceral appeal, yet it also lessens the impact of the film as piece of political commentary. It is another example of Kashyap trying to appeal on too many fronts. The film shifts in tone with conflicting messages, becoming confusing and disorienting.

Despite a commendable performance from its cast, in both parts, Gangs of Wasseypur also suffers from a lack of charm or relatable characters to identify with. In Gangs of Wasseypur Part One, in particular, the desire to see Sardar Khan avenge his father loses its impact when interest in his character is hard to maintain. The female characters, when they do come to the surface, are empathetic but too often reduced to the sidelines of the story.

In the end, both parts of Gangs of Wasseypur disappoint. Kashyap is a director who clearly has a keen-eye for conveying violence, and the clever soundtrack hints at a real talent. However, Gangs of Wasseypur is laborious and overly long, its convoluted plot and lack of empathetic characters makes it a challenge to sit through.

At its debut at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Ashim Ahluwalia’s chameleonic Miss Lovely was declared a new type of anti-Bollywood cinema aimed squarely at providing an antidote to the mass-produced, broadly-appealing entertainment that is such a lucrative and successful business in Indian popular culture. That Ahluwalia chose to do so by directly addressing the debased, cheaply produced “C-grade” subgenre of Hindi cinema – mired as it is with its unique cocktail of schlocky horror and soft porn of questionable taste – only served to raise the public estimation of artistic ambition for the project, and Cannes’ Un Certain Regard audiences responded in suit at an intellectual level on which few expected the film would be registering. Two years down the track, Miss Lovely has picked up a excitable distributor (very excitable, if this Twitter account is anything to go by) and wide-release audiences can finally decide for themselves where they land on this bold, intriguing feature.

Shot in a pseudo-damaged, vintage film print style best compared to Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse aesthetic, Miss Lovely opens on one such picture produced by brothers Vicky (Anil George) and Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) in late ‘80s Bombay. Splicing together low-fi horror stories with sloppily-directed sexual interstices, director Ahluwalia confronts his audience immediately with a disquieting contrast in the way the huge, predominantly-male audiences respond to the material in juxtaposition to how his present audience, watching Miss Lovely, might. As sleazy as the films are on an objective level, Vicky and Sonu represent opportunists giving the people what they want, with often hypnotic, frenzied reactions from the masses they are pleasing. With this simple demonstration of the base economic forces of supply and demand, Ahluwalia begins to tap into a kind of widely saturated, openly felt sexual repression within his culture whose darker pyschological impacts and impetuses prove his most exciting moral and intellectual area to plumb.

Things turn sour between the brothers and their distributors – higher ups within organised crime circles – when they try their hand at going direct to the multiplexes with their work. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the exploitative nature of his business, Sonu, the more reserved brother, begins to imagine a life where his work has a bit more artistic merit. Miss Lovely, to be his own, personal project, will be a ‘truly romantic’ love story, and his designs include for the shy, inexperienced, incorrupt beauty Pinky (Niharika Singh) to star. Sonu’s intrigue turns expectantly and quickly to love for his muse, and Ahluwalia follows his protagonist right down the rabbit hole of repressed desire, then total lust, then a more dangerous obsession and unwavering resolve to redeem and salvage her from the plight of his brother’s leering grip. Ahluwalia’s formal presentation follows a similar trajectory, the tone changing constantly with Sonu’s circumstances: it’s at times C-grade sleaze, at others a dreamily lensed love story, then later still an absorbing thriller replete with pounding music and bodies and suspects and chases.

It’s Miss Lovely’s final turn and leap forward in time that is likely the cause of both the film’s rapturous praise on the one hand, and criticism of a rather bleak, defeatist outlook on the part of its director on the other. Reuniting the brothers after a personal ordeal has enforced a schism between them, Ahluwalia truncates the story with a revelation about Pinky that necessitates a chaos at once abrupt, final, and hugely challenging for audiences to reconcile. It’s a clear statement of amibition for his cinema to align with what I might loosely coin the ‘pop-art’ works of the best Hitchcock, Scorsese and P.T. Anderson: American entertainments that prove themselves, on repeated viewings, underlain with deeply serious social-cultural concerns. Whatever it is that Ahluwalia is trying to say – and Miss Lovely is certainly one to invite many interpretations – it is unequivocally no Bollywood song-and-dance. I daresay he might equate such a gloriously upbeat thing with saying nothing at all.