Genre: Biography, Drama, Comedy Rating: 3.5/5 162 minutes Director: Rajkumar Hirani Clearly deviating from their forte — comedy (Munnabhai films, 3 Idiots), established writers Rajkumar Hirani and Abhijat Joshi have tried their best to incorporate elements of the genre in their biopic of Sanjay Dutt — ‘Sanju’. The film traces certain phases of Dutt’s chequered…
‘Collateral Damage’… “She wasn’t altogether there at the end,” says Annie Graham (Toni Collette) of her mother, Ellen, while delivering her eulogy. She also describes the departed woman, with whom Annie had a none-too-warm relationship, as ‘secretive’ and ‘private’. Among those attending the funeral are her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), teenaged son Peter (Alex Wolff)…
Genre: Thriller, Action Rating: 1/5 160 minutes Director: Remo D’souza ‘Not A Podium Finish’ Ten years ago, the immaculately white-suited-booted brothers Abbas and Mastan Burmawalla set the template for action-thrillers with their ‘Race’ (adapted from ‘Goodbye Lover’), followed by a sequel five years later. Sidelined from the third installment…
‘Bigfoot in the Park’ ‘‘These creatures don’t need our protection, they need our absence”. This would probably be true for all non-humans but in the film its referred to the extinct dinosaurs which inhabited the earth aeons ago and which were ‘revived’ a quarter century ago by the brilliant filmmaker Steven Spielberg. It’s the fifth in…
‘BLAST FROM THE PAST’ ‘Hero vardi se nahi, iraade se hote hain’, with effusive patriotism, is a dialogue early in the film to seemingly justify macho-man John Abraham to star in, and co-produce this film. The film begins with the 1995 botched attempt at India trying to gain nuclear status. Back then, India had sorely…
‘A Lead Tool Too’ Despite the ‘F’ word bandied about liberally in the film, the viewer is regularly reminded that it also stands for ‘family’, which our hero plans to start with his live-in girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). The opening credits set the tone for the next couple of hours. After a tragedy befalls Wade…
Genre: Drama Rating: 3/5 108 minutes Director : Harish Vyas In Any Other Language Sometime during the latter part of the film, when the middle-aged couple begin to have their irreconcilable differences, the till then subdued wife utters a cliched but telling remark “Our relationship is nominal, our togetherness even more so”. Set in…
Agreeing to disagree That Raazi is one of the most noncontroversial spy films to emerge, from this side of the border at least, can be validated by a statement Sehmat’s (Alia Bhatt) Pakistani army-officer husband Iqbal Syed (Vicky Kaushal) makes to his father Brigadier Syed (Shishir Sharma), “We would have done the same in her…
Genre: Biography, Crime, Thriller Rating: 3/5 98 minutes Director: Hanslal Mehta When I had first heard of the film last year, I had assumed it would be akin to a film on the Mafia, since Omerta is the Sicilian code of silence where the captured admit nothing, for fear of retribution on their families. The…
Baap Aur Punya The best known sequence, till now, of Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor is of ‘Naseeb’ (1981) where the two cavort to the evocatively sung Mohammad Rafi’s ‘Chal mere bhai’. Now, in ‘102 Not Out’, their sixth collaboration, AB and RK deliver an unbridled comedy, based on the eponymous Gujarati play, written by…
‘A Reverse Flick’ Even the most honourable of intentions at the planning stage will not always result in an acceptable finished product. Sudhir Mishra’s ‘Daas Dev’ comes to us on screen more than a decade aafter he had conceptualised a modern-day version of the 1917 Bengali classic Devdas by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay). The text…