The Sky Is Pink
The sincerity of the 149-minute film is never in doubt, but to have been effective, it needed stronger actors and less clutter and over-plotting.
Oct 2019
War
The male leads, separated by a couple of generations and united by their ability to land punches and execute pirouettes without breaking a sweat, set the screen on fire. Fortunately for War, there is barely a scene without either of them.
Oct 2019
The Zoya Factor
...a movie that both suffers from miscasting and benefits from perfect casting. Abhishek Sharma’s shambolic romantic comedy, based on the bestselling 2008 novel by Anuja Chauhan, gives top billing to Sonam Kapoor, but all the attention is hogged by the name that follows hers in the credits. Malayalam star Dulquer Salmaan...
Sep 2019
Dream Girl
The movie’s aims include supplying a joke every minute, which it often does, and delivering a comic take on urban loneliness, which it doesn’t quite do.
Sep 2019
Section 375
In the interests of free expression, then, it is necessary to hear the support for patriarchy laid out by Section 375 – just as it is possible, in a democracy, to decide for yourself whether the movie is an effective legal drama or a bilious defence of deeply entrenched sexism in Bollywood.
Sep 2019
Chhichhore
The movie begins as a rambunctious college campus comedy, quickly moves into the sentimental family drama zone, returns for the fun and games, shifts back into tear-jerking territory, and finally runs out of breath with only some of its ambitions realised.
Sep 2019
Batla House
...claims to explore the role played by doubt in a police investigation, but it is loaded with biases.
Aug 2019
Mission Mangal
In between the gimmicky jugaad philosophising and meaningless sub-plots, Mission Mangal manages to devote some time to space technology.
Aug 2019
Pranaam
The amateurish staging and tacky melodrama ensure that Pranaam ends up without anything resembling a high score, let alone grace marks.
Aug 2019
Jabariya Jodi
The humour is as forced as the romance, and the biggest question goes unanswered: what is the movie really trying to say?
Aug 2019
Khandaani Shafakhana
There isn’t enough humour of the gentle or wicked variety across the sluggishly-paced film to communicate its larger themes.
Aug 2019
Arjun Patiala
In trying to send up Bollywood cliches, Arjun Patiala becomes yet another Bollywood cliche itself.
Jul 2019
Judgemental Hai Kya
Neither whodunit or even whydunit, Judgementall Hai Kya is never quite able to match its ambitions. Buried somewhere in the rubble is the ghost of a movie about why madness is sometimes the only sane response to violence.
Jul 2019
Family Of Thakurganj
The plot kicks in very late, and a bit too late to rescue the movie from utter predictability and sameness.
Jul 2019
Jhootha Kahin Ka
The whole commotion would have been resolved if the characters had sat across from each other and explained their positions, but then we wouldn’t have had a movie to plod through.
Jul 2019
Super 30
...suggests that with talent and commitment, it is possible to cross over from the other side of the tracks. Leap high towards your goals, Anand tells his students. The formula is as pat as the solution, but many parts of the journey makes this classroom victory worth the while.
Jul 2019
Malaal
The movie has nothing new to say about the star-crossed romance, and is too timid to mirror the unabashed celebration of unreconstructed malehood that marked the source material.
Jul 2019
- Jul 2019
Article 15
...isn’t exactly nuanced about the brutal system that continues to subjugate Dalits, but neither are the times. The implausible portions balance out the moments that echo the headlines. For every scene that seems out of place, another comes along to remind us of why this movie is effectively landing its punches.
Jun 2019
Kabir Singh
...reimagines the Indian hero archetype in interesting ways, but its inability to even consider the flaws in its leading man’s romantic outlook is its undoing. Is masochism the flip side of machismo? Both movies seem to agree, but they never ask why.
Jun 2019
Game Over
Saravanan and co-writer Kaavya Ramkumar deliver a taut and highly watchable thriller that, despite falling short of its ambitions, has a clever take on the way in which violence against women gets imprinted on bodies and souls.
Jun 2019
Bharat
...is an unfeeling and overstretched affair that botches its source material and squanders the opportunity to say anything meaningful about Bharat’s journey from the 1940s till the 2010s.
Jun 2019
Nakkash
Imam doesn’t have enough layers to weave around a threadbare plot, and the double life that Alla Rakha leads, which is the most interesting aspect of the story, gets drowned by the melodrama.
May 2019
PM Narendra Modi
Any insights the movie offers into Modi’s rise are inadvertent. The monomaniacal focus on one man above all else will surely be of interest to those who study how cinema can be used for propaganda.
May 2019
India‘s Most Wanted
The overheated and undercooked film doesn’t have enough substance to justify its flourishes.
May 2019
De De Pyaar De
The movie barely works as an age-gap saga but is more effective as a comedy about moving on and finding new soulmates. Ranjan and Jain heavily pad up material that is just about enough for an extended sitcom episode with songs, uneven comedy and needless melodrama. Ironically for a film directed by an editor, the pacing is sluggish.
May 2019
Student Of The Year 2
The sequel that nobody wanted is neither an improvement over the original nor a downgrade of it. The bar is low to begin with, and when the butter-limbed Tiger Shroff is around, it’s easily surmounted.
May 2019
Blank
...has the plotting heft and production values of an episode on the popular television series CID.
May 2019
Kalank
The movie retains its hauteur and attention to period haute couture even as it goes off the rails, finally chugging into its destination after leaving broken hearts and unmet ambitions in its wake.
Apr 2019