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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Marking the fourth year of Humaaramovie’s annual short filmmaking competition is a bouquet of seven short films — all with the theme ‘Shor’ (noise) — made by upcoming and talented directors and mentored by acclaimed directors such as Shyam Benegal, Mira Nair, Imtiaz Ali, Zoya Akhtar, Homi Adajania, Sriram Raghavan and Nagesh Kukunoor. . Hello-o-Hello […]
Those who entered the auditorium a few seconds late would be forgiven for presuming that they were watching a documentary on ‘The Art of Kissing’ — thank you, Mr. Pahlaj Nihalani! A half century after ‘An Evening in Paris’ (1967), and against the backdrop of the sights and sounds of Paris, comes a musical rom-com […]
Based on the article ‘Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours’ by David Rohde in the New York Times, Director Peter Berg infuses exactly the right elements to make Deepwater Horizon a formulaic disaster film. The film opens with merely the audio of the testimony which followed the largescale catastrophe on 20 April 2010, 41 miles off Louisiana […]
At first glance, DZ seems to be a light-hearted, frothy take on life and the lessons one may imbibe from it. At second glance though, the film comes across as the travails of a twenty-something PYT trying to cope with relationships — both at the familial and romantic levels. But then, one of the disclaimers […]
Director Abrar and first-time producer PS Chhatwal’s ‘Dongri Ka Raja’ has no pretensions as to which genre it belongs. Anyone familiar with the topography of Dongri would know its relevance, with its birthplace of gangsters and hoodlums, and its proximity to the docks. Beginning with a deafening background score, the film shows snapshots of the […]
Forget the much hyped and touted technology of (the faster) 120 frames per second in acclaimed director Ang Lee’s latest film. It’s not so much about the Iraqi War as it is about relationships — on and off the battlefield. It’s 2004. Private Billy Lynn (Debutant Joe Alwyn) seems unaffected by the adulation he’s received […]