In a few days, it will be 67 years since the Indian Constitution came into force and our country became a Sovereign Democratic Republic. Come 26th January, when the loudspeakers in our neighbourhood will blare the ubiquitous ‘Mere desh ki dharti’ (Film: Upkar), it’s a good time to retrospect on the films and the songs […]
Shaad Ali’s (Saathiya) tryst with the romance genre continues. This time he’s opted to remake Mani Ratnam’s Tamil version of ‘OK Kadhal Kanmani’. Adi (Aditya Roy Kapur), a video-game designer from Kanpur, meets Tara (Shraddha Kapoor), an architecture graduate at a friend’s church wedding. The two don’t have any compunctions about communicating and relaying phone […]
Released with barely an ado, Haraamkhor is the story of 15-year-old Sandhya (Shweta Tripathi), a small town schoolgirl infatuated with her school teacher Shyam (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), even as 12-year-old Kamal (Irfan Khan) secretly pines for Sandhya. Goading him on is his confidant Minto (Mohammed Samad). Writer-Director Shlok Sharma, in his debut feature film — one […]
Based on the 2011 novel by Patrick Ness — and centred around the original idea of Siobhan Dowd as she herself was dying of cancer — A Monster Calls is an unusual tale of 12-year-old Conor O’ Malley (Lewis MacDougall), who, as the voice-over informs us in the beginning, is ‘too old to be a […]
Apparently set in the distant future, the starship Avalon is on a 120-year journey to ‘Homestead 2’ – a distant colony planet of Earth. During the voyage, due to a systems failure, passenger Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up from his hibernation within 30 years, 90 years too early. The 5000 passengers and 258 crew […]
French Morocco, 1942. Casablanca to be precise. And that could only mean WWII. A Royal Canadian intelligence officer Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) finds himself paired as the husband of French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), with the German Ambassador Hobar (August Diehl) to Casablanca being their target. Mission assassination accomplished, their pretence at being […]
Regional films have rarely been acknowledged in mainstream cinema. Nor have they got their merited due. This year alone, Marathi films such as Ekk Albela, Natsamrat and Ventilator have done reasonably well, with Sairat earning rave reviews. The first Marathi film of 2017 has Dilip Prabhavalkar (Mahatma Gandhi of Lage Raho Munabhai) as Appa, R.K. […]
With the awards season barely a couple of months away, studios are in the race to release their best films. Sing is one of the few, intended for the entire family, and with its title, there leaves little ambiguity regarding its genre. The film revolves around a koala Buster Moon (voice of Mathew Mc. Conaughey), […]
Dr. Seth Ember (Aaron Eckhart) is an ‘exorcist’ of a different kind – he is a scientist who expels demons from people who are ‘possessed’, terming the entire process ‘evictions’. Wheelchair-bound due to a car accident in which his wife and son perished, Dr. Ember shows traces of his tragic past by sporting a shabby […]
Loosely fashioned on the popular video-game series and based historically on the crusading Assassins v/s Templars, it stars Michael Fassbender as Callum Lynch, who’s bound for execution on account of capital murder. He’s saved from certain death by Abstergo Industries — father Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) is the CEO and daughter Dr. Sophia Rikkin (Marion […]
Think wrestling, and the late Dara Singh comes willy-nilly to mind. Aamir Khan was born in the year India’s most famous wrestler made the eponymous Rustom-e-Hind (1965), a title he was bestowed with 11 years earlier. No wonder then that the punctilious and given-to-precise-details actor was fated to make, and star in, a film on […]