Bawaal

In Nitesh Tiwari's film, Ajju, played by Varun Dhawan, is a well-regarded teacher in his town whose standing is entirely false, and who keeps up his marriage to Nisha, played by Janhvi Kapoor, in order to protect that image. The couple travel through Europe visiting historical sites of the Second World War, and the film sets out to describe the trouble in their marriage through those places. That is precisely the problem. Nisha says that every relationship goes through its Auschwitz; Ajju compares his own selfishness to Hitler; the production obtained special permission to film at Auschwitz, and in one scene the characters suffocate in a gas chamber wearing striped clothing. The response was severe. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said the film trivialised the memory of six million murdered Jews and the millions of others killed by the regime, and asked Amazon to remove it; the Israeli embassy in India joined the criticism. It was released on Amazon Prime Video on 21 July 2023. Who it is for: viewers interested in the controversy itself. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the Holocaust used as a metaphor for a marriage unacceptable, which is where most of the criticism sits.