History is seldom recorded by the vanquished and, as such, is frequently inaccurate. The film opens to a slew of disclaimers, no doubt prompted by the dictates of the censors to appease the ‘senas’ who had objected to the inaccuracies in the film, which is inspired by the Sufi poet, Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s 1540 epic poem, […]
It’s the impertinent versus the imperturbable – the cocky versus the cool as cucumber. The 100 minute film braces us for the tennis match of the century – the thrilling five-setter of the 1980 Wimbledon finals in which the upcoming superbrat had threatened to halt the champion’s march to a fifth consecutive title. Shia LaBeouf portrays […]
Who says that road trip movies are the exclusive domain of Hollywood? Prodded on by her friend to have a try at dating websites, Jaya (Malayalam actress Parvathy) pairs up with Yogi (Irrfan Khan) on a trip which takes them across Rishikesh, Rajasthan and Gangtok, culminating in a settled relationship between the two. Jaya is […]
Didn’t know moms could be so bad (wish I could have added an emoji)! Just 15 months after ‘Bad Moms’ released last year, comes this Christmas episodic film, with grandmas in tow. And what happens when they descend upon their daughters and grandchildren? Set within a span of a week, the film begins with the […]
Kalki Koechlin’s second film within a week has the talented actress playing a committed and dutiful parent as opposed to the carefree and ebullient Jia in the eponymous ‘Jia Aur Jia.’ The film opens with Sahana Mehra (Kalki) being given the ‘good news’ by her gynaecologist, much to the former’s discomfiture. A heated argument at […]
The only reason the director might offer for this film going haywire long before the end is that it was his debut feature. The premise, although a tried and tested one, promised much more. Two girls, unknown to each other and coincidentally sharing their first name, decide to go on a road trip to Sweden. […]
Take a few key ingredients, put on the gas, swirl them around in a frying pan, bring them to a boil, and serve hot. Something missing? Aha… it’s the condiments! That in a nutshell sums up the film ‘Chef’, sounding suspiciously like the first name of its protagonist Saif Ali Khan, who plays Roshan Kalra […]
Exponential, experimental and surreal are the three apt adjectives to describe a film of the unslottable genre – CRD. Set against the backdrop of the Purushottam inter-collegiate drama festival (a real-life event in Pune), CRD is a film one could watch again and again or simply wish it away, depending on your penchant for theatre. […]
Surely Sanjay Dutt could have chosen a more sensible (read: mature) vehicle to make his comeback. Even with the battle-scarred Dutt, the rape-revenge-retribution saga is turning out to wear thin. A blink-and-miss opening scene tells you that a woman is being sexually assaulted in a moving vehicle at night, with one of her shoes falling […]
In the dying moments of the film come the unintended guffaws from the audience — not the only time though — when the subject of the biopic makes a tongue-in-cheek (or should one say tongue-in-prosthetics) remark to the court that the presiding magistrate has no jurisdiction over the matter at hand. For the uninitiated, Haseena […]
Who says that art cinema in Hindi films is non-existent? In India, politics and politicians have always made strange bedfellows – as the inveterate R K Laxman would lampoon in his daily column and which second-time director Masurkar ( Sulemani Keeda,2014) would have done well to emulate. Both Masurkar and Mayank Tewari, without attempting to […]