Category: Review
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Review: Gangs Of Aise-Waisepur
Smriti Irani’s ridiculously bovine grin welcomes us to the Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhu Bahu Thi house, introducing us to the saccharine-soaked members of the smiley family, before the camera pulls out and the television is silenced by gunfire. And more gunfire. As Pankaj Tripathi’s Sultan leads a group of marauders through twisty side-streets, Anurag…
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Review: Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai
At first glance, the irony is staggering. A country pretending to be another, brighter country, being shown up by a film that itself borrows form and content from another country. Yet so strident is Dibakar Banerjee’s voice as a filmmaker that even this adaptation — of Vassilis Vassilikos’ Z, about a wholly different time and…
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The Prometheus Review: Scott (Ridley) Versus The World
33 years after Alien comes the grand but unfulfilling Prometheus. Otherworldly seas cascade outwards, terrific 3D suggesting they might wet the seat ahead of you. In a pristine spacecraft — with efficient yet showy design Stanley Kubrick would look favorably upon — a blonde robot with Lawrence Of Arabia’s hair walks about in flip-flops,…
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Book Review: Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis
Sentenced to death More Rushdie-lite than rushed delight, Narcopolis tries far too hard. Jeet Thayil begins his first novel with a very long sentence, one of those showboating literary devices that can make or mar the mood, and while the writing in that chapter-long opening salvo is more precious than authentically frantic, far too eager…
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Review: The Dirty Picture
Breasts make the world a better place. From lactation to leering to simply being the best pillows imaginable, breasts matter and, as the people behind The Dirty Picture are well aware, they mesmerise. And thus does leading lady Vidya Balan’s bosom go through a lot in the name of entertainment, entertainment and entertainment. For mere…
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Review: A Rockstar worth rooting for
When The Doors had their first ever professional photographs taken, to go with their incendiary 1967 debut, frontman James Douglas Morrison consciously chose to leave the smiling out of it. The others occasionally smirked affably enough but Morrison, yearning to showcase his searing intensity as a poet (“a word man, better than a bird man”)…
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Review: Mausam is several seasons too long.
Our hero, a bizarrely uptight young air force officer, sits across from the beautiful woman he loves, yet seems afraid to smile. Suddenly, in what may be perceived as a moment of weakness, humanity or merely kindness toward an exasperated audience, he lets his guard down and says, “Yeah, baby.” And then he grins. Bad,…
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Review: No sympathy for this Shaitan
Welcome to the Anurag Kashyap universe. Populated exclusively by the very coolest of character actors, backgrounded by a blaring retro-loving soundtrack, and shot dizzyingly in hypertechnicolor. It is a world where even chaiwallahs wear smartarsed FCUK tee shirts and brutal cops have a thing for Van Gogh. Hipness is the language of choice. Debutant director…
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Never Say Never Say Never Again
The Source Code review It’s one of those mornings when you just aren’t yourself. Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up on a train sitting across from a pretty girl who seems to know him well. A helicopter pilot on a tour of duty in Kandahar, this world – this “simulation?” – is alien to him, and as…
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Review: The Social Network is an absolute triumph
There is a sequence in David Fincher’s magnificent new film that, like the invention it talks about, changes everything. A savage quip-eat-quip script is suddenly, without warning, replaced by a shot of two teams rowing down the Thames. Made sublime by rocker-composer Trent Reznor riffing magically on Edvard Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain…
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