<p>Dining with the Kapoors wants to be this oh-so-candid glimpse into Bollywood’s self-anointed first family, but it mostly feels like you’ve wandered into someone’s home at lunchtime: they’re awkward, you’re embarrassed, and everyone is painfully aware of the cameras. There’s laughter, mild ribbing, stilted teasing and the occasional flicker of genuine tenderness. There’s warmth, yes, but it’s constantly undercut by a performative self-consciousness the film never quite shakes off.</p>.<p>For a family that insists it has shaped the very architecture of Hindi cinema, the superficiality is startling. The documentary is all tell and no show — something their mercurial patriarch, the original Showman Raj Kapoor, would have rolled his eyes at. The clan has ostensibly gathered to celebrate his centenary, and you keep waiting for those undiscovered nuggets, the half-forgotten stories, the creative tensions. Instead, you get relentless chatter and very little insight, and the trim, one-hour runtime only makes it worse. The fabled Kapoor genealogy doesn’t help either; it’s so head-spinning that midway through you stop bothering to decode who is whose aunt, cousin or grandson. And the endless paeans to ghee, tadka and “Kapoor khaana” start to grate long before the credits roll.</p>.'120 Bahadur' movie review: A poignant depiction of war.<p>Yet the film isn’t without glimmers of what it could have been. The flashbacks to Raj Kapoor’s legendary Deonar Cottage parties show us what a different era looked like. An era of ambition, elusive stars and big-screen magic. In those rare, evocative moments, you sense the richer, more layered portrait this documentary could have been but never musters the will to be.</p>
<p>Dining with the Kapoors wants to be this oh-so-candid glimpse into Bollywood’s self-anointed first family, but it mostly feels like you’ve wandered into someone’s home at lunchtime: they’re awkward, you’re embarrassed, and everyone is painfully aware of the cameras. There’s laughter, mild ribbing, stilted teasing and the occasional flicker of genuine tenderness. There’s warmth, yes, but it’s constantly undercut by a performative self-consciousness the film never quite shakes off.</p>.<p>For a family that insists it has shaped the very architecture of Hindi cinema, the superficiality is startling. The documentary is all tell and no show — something their mercurial patriarch, the original Showman Raj Kapoor, would have rolled his eyes at. The clan has ostensibly gathered to celebrate his centenary, and you keep waiting for those undiscovered nuggets, the half-forgotten stories, the creative tensions. Instead, you get relentless chatter and very little insight, and the trim, one-hour runtime only makes it worse. The fabled Kapoor genealogy doesn’t help either; it’s so head-spinning that midway through you stop bothering to decode who is whose aunt, cousin or grandson. And the endless paeans to ghee, tadka and “Kapoor khaana” start to grate long before the credits roll.</p>.'120 Bahadur' movie review: A poignant depiction of war.<p>Yet the film isn’t without glimmers of what it could have been. The flashbacks to Raj Kapoor’s legendary Deonar Cottage parties show us what a different era looked like. An era of ambition, elusive stars and big-screen magic. In those rare, evocative moments, you sense the richer, more layered portrait this documentary could have been but never musters the will to be.</p>