5 films to watch in April

The Drama (April 3)

PVR INOX is bringing this to Indian cinemas on April 3rd, same weekend as the US — which is increasingly rare and always welcome. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, a couple a week away from their wedding who make the very bad decision of playing a drunken confession game with their closest friends. Whatever Emma admits sends the rest of the week into a spiral of exquisite awkwardness.

Director Kristoffer Borgli has asked people not to read reviews before going. The studio has kept the secret sealed. Both of those things, in this age of algorithmic spoilers, feel almost radical.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (April 3)

Universal Pictures India is bringing this to theatres on April 3rd, accompanied by the kind of city-wide spectacle — murals in Sion, activations at Comic Con Pune, that suggests the marketing team is having as much fun as the animators did. The sequel sends Mario, Luigi, and friends into outer space to rescue Princess Rosalina from Bowser Jr., with Brie Larson joining as Rosalina, Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr., and Donald Glover voicing Yoshi. The first film made over a billion dollars. This one is tracking bigger.

Bhooth Bangla (April 17)

Fourteen years is a long time to wait for a reunion, but then again, Akshay Kumar and Priyadarshan haven’t shared a set since Khatta Meetha in 2010, and in the interim, the films they made together have only grown in stature. Hera Pheri. Bhool Bhulaiyaa. This time, they’ve built their horror comedy around Indian mythology and black magic, drawing from the Vedas and the Mahabharata, which gives the whole enterprise a weight most films in this genre don’t bother reaching for. Tabu, Paresh Rawal, Rajpal Yadav, and Wamiqa Gabbi are along for the ride.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (US release April 17 — India date unconfirmed)

There is a story going around — undenied, as far as anyone can tell — that this film caused James Wan, director of Saw and The Conjuring and a man who has spent his career professionally acquainted with the outer limits of what horror can do to an audience, to get up and leave a test screening before it was finished, which is either a very good sign or a very bad one depending entirely on what you’re looking for from the experience.

Lee Cronin, following up Evil Dead Rise, has made a film about a journalist whose young daughter disappears without trace in the desert and returns eight years later — physically present, but different in ways that the family begins, slowly and horribly, to understand. James Wan and Jason Blum produce, through Atomic Monster and Blumhouse respectively, two production companies that between them have redefined what commercial horror can look like over the past decade.

An India release date has not yet been confirmed, so check local listings as the date approaches.

Michael (US release April 24 — India date unconfirmed)

The strange thing about Michael Jackson is that the closer you look, the more the man disappears — behind the moonwalk, the masks, the mythology, the allegations. What a biopic needs to do, more than anything, is find him in there somewhere. Fuqua directs, with Jackson’s own nephew Jaafar in the lead, tracing his life from the Jackson 5 through to early solo stardom. Whether it flinches at the crucial moment is the only question that matters. India date unconfirmed.