Film Review: Padmavaat

Film Review: Padmavaat

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,…

Review: RIBBON
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Review: RIBBON

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…

Jia Aur Jia
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Jia Aur Jia

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….

Review: CHEF
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Review: CHEF

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…

Review: CRD

Review: CRD

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….

Review: BHOOMI
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Review: BHOOMI

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…

Review: Haseena Parkar

Review: Haseena Parkar

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…

Review: Newton
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Review: Newton

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…