Category: Review
-
Review: David Ayer’s Suicide Squad
Remember how the iPod changed the way we shared music? We used to carry around a tape or a CD and play someone a track or two, but when we started easily (and indiscriminately) lugging around our entire vaults, the temptation to jump from one track to another got too intense. We’d play a slice…
-
Review: Rohit Dhawan’s Dishoom
There are some filmmakers who make feature-length trailers. They think they’re making an action movie, of course, but the fact is that everything — from an overabundance of slow-motion, to the way words like “one day ago” fly across the screen in the Dhoom font, and the way the film starts and ends with music…
-
Review: Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters
Hang on to your hats, ghosts. There’s a brand new gunlickin’ gunslinger in town and she ain’t in the mood for prisoners. One other thing she ain’t is alone. Dr Jillian Holtzmann has friends alongside her on screen in the new Ghostbusters — wearing proton packs of her own dangerous design — but, more importantly,…
-
Review: Pa Ranjith’s Kabali
The idea that Rajinikanth, 65, could kick each of our posteriors, is a relatively easy one to buy, and this film capitalises on the fact that we don’t quite question it.
-
Review: Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab
There’s an old joke about how two smack-heads score their fix in an unfamiliar new city. They stand on opposite sides of the road, and one tosses an imaginary length of rope while the other grabs and fastens it. The first person to duck under the rope as he walks by is the man to…
-
Review: Duncan Jones’ Warcraft
War? Check. Craft? Check. We, however, expect more from fascinating filmmakers like Duncan Jones than literally delivering what is promised on the label — and not even doing that memorably enough. Sure, this is a loud movie with giant battle sequences and much swordplay, and the production design is significantly trippy. Yet this is mostly…
-
Review: Ribhu Dasgupta’s TE3N
There are things TE3N gets charmingly right. It starts with a moment straight out of Gol Maal, set at a police station, an affectionate tribute to kick things off, serving also as a sobering reminder that Amitabh Bachchan, once the lanky lead (or lead’s closest friend) in sparkling Hrishikesh Mukherjee comedies, is now (much) older…
-
Review: Shane Black’s The Nice Guys
The Nice Guys reminded me of a terrific Playboy joke. I don’t mean a specific joke (not that I could quote it here) but I have a feeling you know what I’m talking about: one of those things that’d make us guffaw and pause while leafing through a faded, ‘vintage’ back-issue, which is to say…
-
Review: Ram Gopal Varma’s Veerappan
Ram Gopal Varma has never been one to let truth get in the way of a good story. His new film, Veerappan, for instance, opens with a quote that “a Society gets the criminal it deserves,” which is credited to Voltaire, who — to my knowledge — never said any such thing. The quote is…
-
Review: Omung Kumar’s Sarbjit
The film Sarbjit ends with a black screen, with many a line dangling in the air and many ellipses allowing them to do so. It tells us what the film’s makers declare happened to the real Sarabjit Singh and his crusading sister Dalbir Kaur, what continues to happen today, and then, with much solemnity, it…
sen city 