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X: Past is Present
A big part of the disappointment of watching X is in knowing that there were real flashes of brilliance in the script that did not materialise on screen.
Nov 2015
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Tamasha
The dread in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha feels real. The silliness, however, comes across as too orchestrated.
Nov 2015
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Poorna
This movie is a perfect example of a city-bred director scanning our heartlands, and instead of taking in all the complexity, all the denseness, stopping to ask himself, "What are the corrections I can highlight in these lives, and how do I stitch together a narrative around these corrections?"
Mar 2017
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Laali Ki Shaadi Mein Laddoo Deewana
If you want to be disappointed, there are better movies to be disappointed by.
Apr 2017
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Sarkar 3
For me, a director's cinematic approach often says a lot about his larger philosophy, and Ram Gopal Varma's present approach suggests an extreme literalisation of the punkish values he once advocated through his interviews. This makes me wonder if Varma's ability for self-destruction was always built into his greatness.
May 2017
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Hindi Medium
...works because it somehow manages to stretch itself beyond its scrubby elements, easy half-baked jokes, lessons about consumerism and our love for English, into a simple story about a boy who would do anything to see his girl smile.
May 2017
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Lipstick Under My Burkha
When the film is not making points, it has some life. When it goes off into conscious revolting, it's just distributing pamphlets.
Jul 2017
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Indu Sarkar
...is an effective propaganda movie only to the extent that it knows its mission statement and knows whom to shame and whom to take in its stride.
Jul 2017
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Gurgaon
Director Shanker Raman, with an appetite for noir and a natural temperament for fast-cutting, takes you so swiftly and so deeply inside Gurgaon's anomie that you may mistake his vision of the city for some dystopian view of the future.
Aug 2017
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Bareilly Ki Barfi
There were moments in the movie when a loud laugh escaped my throat. But it didn't seem to matter. Because they were all laughing and my laughter was getting drowned in the laughter of those around me.
Aug 2017
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A Gentleman
...is an assumed piece of filmmaking, where the small-concerns-interrupting-big-moments kind of humour doesn't quite fit the slapdash setting.
Aug 2017
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Newton
The picture wants you to craft change, but it first wants you to give up on your fantasies of quick and easy change.
Sep 2017
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Tu Hai Mera Sunday
...is pitched as a story about ‘coming together.’ But Milind Dhaimade’s true strength, perhaps, is in taking a microcosm, splitting it, and analysing its small segments. It’s when he tries to bring everything together, that his energies get dispersed.
Oct 2017
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Ranchi Diaries
...unless you’re a movie watcher who can swallow a good chunk while spitting out the rest, you are likely to forget this stretch of Ranchi Diaries five minutes after you have staggered out of it.
Oct 2017
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Ittefaq
...is a whocareswhodunit but what it does have, as compensation, is the shock and suggestiveness of pulp served hot.
Nov 2017
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Qarib Qarib Singlle
The subject of Qarib Qarib demanded a director with a natural talent for informality and offhandedness. Which is why Tanuja Chandra may strike you as a curious choice.
Nov 2017
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Kadvi Hawa
...don't let anybody tell you that Kadvi Hawa is a manifesto for the fight against climate change or that it's an austere, unforgiving, movie. This is an intensely felt, beautifully expressed, sustained piece of cinema.
Nov 2017
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Mukkabaaz
My worry is that many who are not fond of Kashyap's usual complex sensibility would like this latest move: They'll applaud the fact that he's going for the tear glands with brass knuckles on.
The tragedy of Mukkabaaz is not that it aims low; the tragedy is that it aims low and hits.
Jan 2018
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Pari
The best horror movies are ones that make you laugh as you scream -- laughing presumably at your own screaming -- but Pari doesn't operate on that level.
Mar 2018
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3 Storeys
Writer Althea Kaushal and director Arjun Mukherjee have cleverly used this feature to fashion an absorbing new genre: The lower middle-class thriller.
Mar 2018
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Daas Dev
Has Sudhir Mishra just given us Indian Cinema's first Soap Opera Classic -- a Soap Opera for all our daytimes and all our nightly longings?
Apr 2018
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Omerta
...is a work of true moral force; it is, at the risk of sounding fancy, a motion picture for our times.
May 2018
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Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain
What we have here, I guess, is a director who understands how people fight, but has not a clue about how they make love.
May 2018
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Mulk
I wish racial and gender issues were explored more humanistically in our cinema so that aspects such as buried prejudices, history, and culture would bubble up through the smallest of back-and-forth.
Aug 2018
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Vishwaroop II
An auteur, who is 'half-made,' is only as good as a politician and Vishwaroop 2, eerily enough, feels like a movie made by a politician -- with one-upmanship, quick fixes, and self-memorialisation aplenty.
Aug 2018
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Stree
Not only are the concerns expressed in Stree (patriarchy, consent, prejudice against women) mere excuses to touch our 'sentimental hotspots', the movie itself is a few tricks cobbled together.
Aug 2018
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Gali Guleiyan
Part of the experience and also the frustration of watching Guli Guleiyan is overlooking the heavy sense of importance the movie assigns to itself and acknowledging Dipesh Jain's virtuosic control over film craft and his unique (though not entirely satisfying) artistic sensibility.
Sep 2018
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Love Sonia
When I walked out of Love Sonia this Monday night, I walked out with a hushed audience that seemed too overcome by the raw power of the film to even pause for applause -- and so they made their way to the exit very slowly, very silently.
Sep 2018
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Manto
If Manto, the film, falls short of being a masterpiece, it's ironically because Nandita Das the filmmaker does not quite crack the Manto code herself: she doesn't quite see her subject with the same wholeness that Manto saw his people. This imperfection in the film, in a way, becomes the greatest tribute to Manto.
Sep 2018