Category: Review
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Review: Ram Madhvani’s Neerja
One minute into Neerja, and Sonam Kapoor disappears. We meet, instead, Neerja Bhanot: a poised and cool Rajesh Khanna fangirl, a doted-on daughter, a neighbourhood favourite, a young girl who enjoyed smiling for the cameras. She loved her job, making it up the Pan Am ranks to become a Head Purser before she turned 23.…
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Review: Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight
Journalism rarely looks as good as it does in American movies. This, I assure you, is not because journalism isn’t essential or noble or brave. It is every bit those things and more. Yet the finest, truest bits of journalism — the bits that topple governments, the bits that win Pulitzers, the bits that inspire…
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Review: Tim Miller’s Deadpool
You’re wrong about Deadpool, you know. Yes, you. I can see it as you start reading this review, smiling as you think you know what you’re in for. Think again. There are many kinds of films you may expect — as did I — but Deadpool, true to character, confounds. This is not an immature…
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Review: Abhishek Kapoor’s Fitoor
People age oddly in Fitoor. A small Kashmiri boy with innocent eyes and a Saleem Sinai nose becomes a natural artist but, as if working with unreasonably heavy paintbrushes, emerges also a musclebound dimwit. A haughty young girl with a National Velvet self-confidence morphs into a red-haired waxwork unable to pronounce words that came so…
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Review: Milap Zaveri’s Mastizaade
Why is Mastizaade not in 3D? I’m stunned that the producers of this insanely exploitative flick missed out on a cheap trick that obvious. For this is a pointedly stupid film, a sloppily written paean to horndogs, a work of juvenile perversion. A hundred-minute excuse to stare at a woman while constantly eating bananas, Mastizaade…
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Review: Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift
Films about genuinely unsung heroes are a fine thing, and Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift is a sincere effort to celebrate an insanely daunting task. In 1990, during the Persian Gulf War, over 170,000 Indians were stranded in Kuwait when it was attacked by Iraq, and a few local businessmen and Indian diplomats took on the…
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Review: Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is his most unpleasant. The Hateful Eight contains everything we expect from the auteur — ultraviolence and memorable characters and shocks and profanity and long stretches of dialogue — and yet, while as indulgently Tarantinoey as it can be, this is a rough watch, a film meant to cause discomfort, to…
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Review: Bejoy Nambiar’s Wazir
Watching truly skilled chess players going at each other is an experience both lyrical and violent, as they bleed and behead across the sixty-four squares like duelling ninjas in slow-motion. Watching a game between people who only believe they’re good at chess, however, is plain infuriating. Bejoy Nambiar’s Wazir — based on a script by…
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Review: JJ Abrams’ Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens
If you placed a lightsaber in the hands of director JJ Abrams, it would glow blue. His new Star Wars film is a fine spacecraft, a blockbuster that knows its place. The hunt in this Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens might ostensibly be for the vanished Luke Skywalker, but — be not fooled…
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Review: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani
There is much to marvel at in Bajirao Mastani. There are the sets, lavish and excessive and opulent. There are the performances, lavish and excessive and opulent. There are the principal characters, lavish and excessive and opulent. There is the film’s running time, lavish and excessive and opulent. So packed with sheer scale is this…
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