Bollywood’s ‘King Khan’ Steals Show at Indian Film Awards

Shah Rukh Khan at the International Indian Film Academy Awards 2024. (IIFA/Instagram)
Shah Rukh Khan at the International Indian Film Academy Awards 2024. (IIFA/Instagram)
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Bollywood’s ‘King Khan’ Steals Show at Indian Film Awards

Shah Rukh Khan at the International Indian Film Academy Awards 2024. (IIFA/Instagram)
Shah Rukh Khan at the International Indian Film Academy Awards 2024. (IIFA/Instagram)

Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan declared "it's good to be back" as he won best actor at the International Indian Film Academy Awards on Saturday after a long absence from the limelight.

The 58-year-old stole the show as event co-host before walking off with the coveted prize for his role in the action thriller "Jawan", capping a five-hour show in Abu Dhabi.

"I just want to tell you it's good to be back," he told a packed crowd in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, which has a large Indian population.

"I love awards, I'm greedy about awards... I think I have a little happiness from the audience this year because I worked (again) after a long time," he added.

Sandeep Reddy Vanga's "Animal" won best picture among six awards including best supporting actor for Anil Kapoor, another stalwart of the Hindi film industry.

Rani Mukerji was named best actress for the child-custody drama "Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway" and Vidhu Vinod Chopra won best director for "12th Fail".

In a rambling event that finished at 2:30 am, Khan's comedy skits with fellow actor Vicky Kaushal were interspersed with hip-thrusting dance numbers and frequent commercial endorsements.

Shahid Kapoor rode up to the stage on a motorbike and after "King Khan" appeared, to blasts of fireworks and with a huge crown superimposed above his head, there were constant ad-lib tributes to the star.

Before releasing "Jawan" and "Pathaan" last year, Khan had not played any starring roles for five years.

His return comes as Mumbai-based Bollywood, for decades India's dominant film business and a major cultural export, faces challenges including competition from elsewhere in the vast, culturally diverse country.

As non-Hindi productions grow in popularity, Bollywood has also been outshone by independent films such as director Payal Kapadia's "All We Imagine as Light", which won the coveted Grand Prix award at Cannes in May.

Bollywood's cinema-based business model is also grappling with the rise in streaming services such as Netflix, whose Indian content includes eight films and 14 series.

Elara Capital, an Indian investment and advisory firm, estimates that box office takings were down up to 35 percent in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period last year.

However, 2023 was particularly strong as Bollywood bounced back after Covid with a strong slate of films, compared to a much weaker content pipeline this year.

Abu Dhabi was playing host for the third straight edition of the globe-trotting event, which started in 2000 and has only taken place once in India.



Movie Review: The Villains Steal the Show in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

 From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
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Movie Review: The Villains Steal the Show in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

 From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
From left, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn arrive at the premiere of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" on Monday, July 21, 2025, at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

More than six decades after Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a superhero team to rival the Justice League, the Fantastic Four finally get a worthy big-screen adaption in a spiffy ’60s-era romp, bathed in retrofuturism and bygone American optimism.

Though the Fantastic Four go to the very origins of Marvel Comics, their movie forays have been marked by missteps and disappointments. The first try was a Roger Corman-produced, low-budget 1994 film that was never even released.

But, after some failed reboots and a little rights maneuvering, Matt Shakman’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is the first Fantastic Four movie released by Marvel Studios. And a sense of returning to Marvel roots permeates this one, an endearingly earnest superhero drama about family and heroism, filled with modernist “Jetsons” designs that hark back to a time when the future held only promise.

“First Steps,” with a title that nods to Neil Armstrong, quickly reminds that before the Fantastic Four were superheroes, they were astronauts. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (a soulful Ebon Moss-Bachrach) flew into space but return altered by cosmic rays. “We came back with anomalies,” explains Reed, sounding like me after a family road trip.

They are now, respectively, the bendy Mister Fantastic, the fast-disappearing Invisible Woman, the fiery Human Torch and the Thing, a craggy CGI boulder of a man. In the glimpses of them as astronauts, the images are styled after NASA footage of Apollo 11, like those seen in the great documentaries “For All Mankind” and “Apollo 11.”

But part of the fun of the Fantastic Four has always been that while the foursome might have the right stuff, they also bicker and joke and argue like any other family. The chemistry here never feels intimate enough in “First Steps” to quite capture that interplay, but the cast is good, particularly Kirby.

In the first moments of “First Steps,” Sue sets down a positive pregnancy test before a surprised Reed. That night at dinner — Moss-Bachrach, now an uncle rather than a cousin, is again at work in the kitchen — Ben and Johnny immediately guess what’s up. The rest of the world is also eager to find out what, if any, powers the baby will have.

We aren’t quite in our world, but a very similar parallel one called Earth-828. New York looks about the same, and world leaders gather in a version of the United Nations named the Future Foundation. The Thing wears a Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Someone sounding a lot like Walter Cronkite reads the news.

And there’s a lot to read when the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) suddenly hovers over the city, announcing: “I herald your end. I herald Galactus.” The TV blares, as it could on so many days: “Earth in Peril. Developing Story.”

Yes, the Earth (or some Earth) might be in danger, but did you get a look at that Silver Surfer? That’s Johnny Storm’s response, and perhaps ours, too. She's all chrome, like a smelted Chrysler Building, with slicked-back hair and melancholy eyes. He’s immediately taken by her, but she shoots off into space. In a rousing, NASA-like launch (the original Kirby and Lee comic came eight years before the moon landing), the Fantastic Four blast off into the unknown to meet this Galactus.

But if the Silver Surfer made an impression, Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) does even more so. Fantastic Four movies have always before gone straight for Doctor Doom as a villain, but his entrance, this time, is being held up for “Avengers: Doomsday.” Still, Galactus, a planet-eating tyrant, is no slouch. A mechanical colossus and evident fan of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” he sits on an enormous throne in space. Sensing enormous power in Sue’s unborn child, he offers to spare Earth for the baby.

What follows casts motherhood — its empowerments and sacrifices — onto a cosmic plane. There’s a nifty chase sequence in space that plays out during contractions. The two “Incredibles” movies covered some similar ground, in both retro design and stretchy parent and superhuman baby, with notably more zip and comic verve than “The Fantastic Four.” That's part of the trouble of not getting a proper movie for so long: Better films have already come along inspired by the '60s comic.

But as good as Vanessa Kirby is in “First Steps,” the movie is never better than when the Silver Surfer or Galactus are around. Shakman, a former child actor who’s directed mostly in television (most relevantly, “WandaVision”), proves especially adept at capturing the enormous scale of Galactus. “First Steps” may be, at heart, a kaiju movie.

What it certainly is, though, is a very solid comic book movie. It’s a little surface over substance, and the time capsule feeling is pervasive. This is an earnest-enough superhero movie where even the angry mob protesting the superheroes turns quiet and pensive. I was more likely to be moved by a really handsome chalkboard than I was by its vision of motherhood.

But, especially for a superhero team that’s never before quite taken flight on screen, “First Steps” is a sturdy beginning, with impeccable production design by Kasra Farahani and a rousing score by Michael Giacchino. Even if the unifying space-age spirit of Kirby and Lee's comic feels very long ago, indeed.