Sharan Sharma

(Netflix Streaming, December 2021) There’s something very familiar in The Kargil Girl’s premise and execution, as a young girl fascinated with flying becomes one of the first female pilots in the Indian Air Force, but not after a considerable amount of disappointment, discrimination and verbal abuse. It’s squarely in the same vein as many other inspiring ceiling-smashing films, no matter whether they’re from India or elsewhere. Writer-director Sharan Sharma’s execution is fluid, with some exemplary editing taking us across several years — although the film itself does remain slightly too long and repetitive at 112 minutes. The advantage of its subject matter is that it enables the filmmakers to talk about female empowerment while throwing it a climactic war sequence, combining into broad appeal. It’s reasonably entertaining even if the melodrama does get intense at times. Still — The Kargil Girl is better than many other recent Indian films, and not as annoying in its execution as many others.