Make no mistake, Talaash is a Vikram Bhatt film. Which isn’t to say Bhatt actually made it (though he or Mohit Suri or Pooja Bhatt may well have at some point, who dare keep count) but that it has a story built on the exact same pulpy foundations. Just yank out the invariably catchy Pritam…

In a perfect world, this film would have been called (Unending) Days Of Samar. A bomb defusal expert who embraces fatality on a daily basis hoping he’ll be blown to smithereens, Major Samar Anand is a stubbled Aviator-clad army-man who seems to like nothing better than tight black tee-shirts and singing folksy Punjabi songs in…

In India, our post-Colonial hangover includes a peculiar English-language elitism, where those even halfway in control of the language thumb their nose at those unable to speak it. Where folk routinely, and with unforgivable curtness, cut folk off mid-sentence to snappily correct pronunciation. Which is why a scene in Gauri Shinde’s new film — where…

It isn’t hard to picture just how Madhur Bhandarkar pitched this film to Kareena Kapoor, India’s highest paid actress. (I naturally assume a script wasn’t involved.) ‘Kareena-ji,’ I speculate the director would have said, ‘this film will make you Meryl Strip.’ ‘You mean Streep?’ Kareena perhaps interjects. ‘Yes, same only, just with more skin show.…

Romance is never easy. Neither is bringing it to the big screen, though Anurag Basu — a filmmaker inherently gifted when it comes to visual imagery and metaphor — is a fine man for the job, one who can roll up his sleeves and whip out one peachy moment after another, keeping things wonderfully endearing…

  The film plunges straight into action, rendering the first part nearly redundant. A man dies, and revenge is sought. That is strictly all we need to know, the rest falling into place as it goes along. Backstories and complicated genealogies are frankly rather extraneous in this bloody, bullet-riddled Anurag Kashyap world, where we choose…