For those of the Manmohan Desai generation, the novelty — if one can call it that — soon turns to deja vu. The premise is decades old and time-tested: twins (of course both with contrasting personalities) getting separated at childbirth, their girlfriends getting into a quandary, and in the second half catching up with each […]
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 […]
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 […]
If ever there was a female-centric film, Kangana brings it to life in ‘Simran’. A collaboration between a National award-winning director and a National award-winning actress is bound to create more than just a flutter. Well, it does – till you realise that the writing could have had more credibility than it does. A 30-year-old […]
The last time a film was made on vasectomy was four decades ago. The maverick comedian I. S. Johar had made one of his famed spoofs on the male sterilisation programme, only to see its release delayed till the Emergency ended. Now, on the heels of ‘Shubh Mangal Saavdhan’ (based on erectile dysfunction) comes this […]
Kids have always held a fascination for clowns. In celebrated author Stephen King’s 1986 novel, serialised in 1990 and now adapted for the big screen by Argentinian director Andy Muschietti; Pennywise, the Dancing Clown is a macabre supernatural who awakens every 27 years to prey on children. It’s October 1983 and seven-year-old Georgie (Jackson Scott) is […]
The title card at the beginning declares the film to be based on a true story. With the Gandhi cap, the prosthetically altered nose, the manner of speech and the intense look, there was going to be little doubt that it wouldn’t be a biopic. But the moot point is – how much of the […]
It seems the action directors (too many to enumerate) and John Stewart Eduri, who conducted the background music score, had a deal in place : whenever one of them was off duty, the other would take his place. So we have fistcuffs by the dozen and/or a ear-splitting background score, lest you fall asleep. And […]
‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ resembles the buddy films of the late 80s and early 90s — apart form the fact that the word ‘mother—–r’ is overused. The VFX too belongs to that era and to a large extent so does the script. The film starts with an AAA-rated bodyguard Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) failing to protect […]
To begin with, the title as well as the subject matter of the film is risqué, at best. In tackling this bold and gritty subject, Akshay Kumar seems to have temporarily forsaken his superstar aura and dauntlessly dived into a subject the current PM holds dear to his heart — Swachh Bharat campaign. Keshav (Akshay), […]