Category: Review
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Review: Tony D’Souza’s Azhar
When news of the match-fixing scandal broke, my very first thought was for Mohammad Azharuddin’s wrists. The heartbreak was unbelievable, and echoes of that particular ache still remain. Believe the hyperbole. Cricket was tantamount to religion back in the untainted day, and the idea that some of our heroes were thieves was a crushing one,…
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Review: Vivek Agnihotri’s Buddha In A Traffic Jam
Dear Indian Right Wingers, You have my sincerest condolences. Propaganda films can be dangerous, influential, misleading — and that is what they intend to be. The one true requirement of a propaganda film is that it be effective. Emphatic instruments of (mis)information and awareness, instruments geared to trigger a change in mindset, to squelch a…
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Review: The Russo Brothers’ Captain America: Civil War
“War, what is it good for?” Despite the existential disgust expressed by Edwin Starr in that song all those years ago, there exist far too many affirmative answers to that question: it’s good for gunrunners, media outlets, separatists, posturing Presidential candidates and, clearly, for Marvel Studios — whose superheroes have never, ever looked better. Why,…
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Review: Maneesh Sharma’s Fan
Who could do this film but Shah Rukh Khan? Conceptually, the basic idea propelling the narrative of Maneesh Sharma’s Fan appears deceptively simple — that of an obsessive fan, a bit of a cross between Misery and The King Of Comedy — and, judged from the surface, this film works like a slickly efficient Darr…
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Review: Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book
This isn’t your daddy’s Jungle Book. That applies whether I’m your daddy’s age and grew up on an oft-looped VHS tape of Disney’s 1967 animated classic, or if you’re my dad’s age and cherished the leatherbound Rudyard Kipling book which promised darker truths – though I choose to believe that Bare Necessities may well be…
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Review: R Balki’s Ki & Ka
As a Bengali, I have traditionally struggled with the Hindi language, and particularly its ideas of gendered grammar, the stree-ling and pul-ling. Growing up, I was flummoxed by the fact that the word Police, in Hindi, is a feminine one, which doesn’t quite match up to the visuals of mustachioed constables demanding a little something…
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Review: Zack Snyder’s Batman Vs Superman
What makes a classic duel? Flair. Evenly-matched competitors aren’t as hard to find, but ones that spur each other on in varied ways are the ones that go down in history. There needs to be both Yin and Yang for a rivalry to be heralded as immortal, glimpsed in the way the precise Alain Prost…
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Review: Shakun Batra’s Kapoor And Sons
A plumber trying to fix a water-main, is harangued by the lady of the house who — with some justification — thinks he needs watching over. Her husband disagrees, and the two begin to bicker, a domestic squabble that snowballs into a mountain-toppling argument about fidelity and finances. It is at this inopportune time that…
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Review: George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road
Audacious, astonishing, staggeringly original. Here’s what makes Mad Max: Fury Road the greatest action film of all time.
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Review: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant
A true big-screen epic for the ages that doesn’t have all that much to say, but, by God, the way it says it.
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