Dangal Review

Mahavir Singh Phogat gave up wrestling for a steady job and swore that a son would win the medal he never did. He has four daughters instead, until the day Geeta and Babita beat up boys who insulted them, and he starts training them before dawn: cropped hair, mattresses on the floor for a mat, and a village that thinks he has lost his mind. Nitesh Tiwari's script never pretends the girls chose this, and for most of its length that honesty is its strength.

Aamir Khan gained weight to play the older Mahavir and shed it for the younger scenes, but the transformation that matters is in his eyes, a man whose love comes out as orders. Zaira Wasim, Suhani Bhatnagar, Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra trained with a national team coach, and the bouts are filmed so clearly that the scoring, and the strategy, make sense to someone who has never watched wrestling. The Haryanvi banter, much of it from the cousin who narrates, is genuinely funny.

The final act turns the academy coach into a cartoon villain and leans on a late contrivance that critics found hard to swallow, and several noted that the film ends up celebrating the father more than the daughters. It grossed more than $200 million in China alone.