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Singh Is Bliing
Why can’t we make just pure comedy – without action, without missing mothers, without villains? I’d have ended up happier had I walked out during the interval.
Oct 2015
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I Don't Luv U
...isn’t terrible and it could have been saved with a rousing climax, but the end is shockingly low-key.
May 2013
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Happy New Year
...relentless cannibalisation (and self-cannibalisation) is a pity because Farah’s real talent lies in the mad bits she cooks up...
Oct 2014
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Kurbaan
Yet another story about yet another terrorist. The hardware is there, but where’s the heart?
Nov 2009
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Agneepath
...is thunderously staged (quite literally; the background score is a force of nature) and it's never boring, but the film never amounts to anything.
Feb 2012
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Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola
Bhardwaj gives the feeling of having worked hard – really, really hard – on these scenarios and we are torn between admiring the thought and effort that’s gone in and being exasperated by how it all comes together on screen.
Jan 2013
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Manjunath
This is the kind of film about which you use words like “well-intentioned” and “earnest” and “solid.” But it never catches fire.
May 2014
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Feb 2010
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Lekar Hum Deewana Dil
After a point, the film turns as clueless as its characters. It’s a nice little loop. Arif Ali is laughing at his leads (both of whom wilt under the bad writing), and we are laughing at him. He cannot decide what kind of movie he wants to make, and for whom.
Jul 2014
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The Shaukeens
It’s only when Akshay Kumar shows up – he plays himself – that we perk up.
Nov 2014
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Fitoor
After a point, I didn’t want a movie about Kashmir, I didn’t want a movie about Noor and Firdaus, I just wanted to see Hazrat grow old and batty.
Mar 2016
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Daddy
A barrelful of gangster clichés makes for a stylish but been-there-done-that biopic.
Sep 2017
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Badrinath Ki Dulhania
At the “leave your brains at home” level, Badrinath Ki Dulhaniya is undeniably fun. Only, it doesn’t want you to leave your brains at home. It wants you to think about the things it’s doing. That’s the trouble.
Mar 2017
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Click
...what could have been a prime entry in the hitherto underserved elegiac-horror-as-gothic-romance subgenre is reduced to a mere jump-out-of-your-seats exercise.
Feb 2010
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English Vinglish
There is a lot to like in English Vinglish, which is the very definition of a gentle and urbane entertainment, but I couldn’t get past this manufactured premise, which makes all successive events seem manufactured.
Oct 2012
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We Are Family
An entirely needless remake supposedly targeted at women respects them the least.
Sep 2010
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TE3N
I kept wondering why none of this was working, and I think at least part of it is because we aren’t invested in anyone’s plight.
Jun 2016
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Maximum
Had the director Kabeer Kaushik done little more than chart the story of his protagonist, Maximum could have ended up a gripping little film.
Jul 2012
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Fukrey
What’s missing is the sense that something is at stake. Rather, we see what’s at stake, we know it, but we don’t feel it as the film progresses.
Jun 2013
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May 2015
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Aug 2016
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Sanju
Hirani is more interested in event and entertainment. He transforms a feel-bad life into a feel-good story.
Jul 2018
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That Girl in Yellow Boots
...scratch the arresting surface and we're left with a subplot-heavy narrative whose discursions end up undermining her story. Several sequences work very well on their own but they don't build cohesively and they don't detonate in your mind with a bang by the end of the film.
Sep 2011
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Oct 2012
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Happy Ending
Surely directors this smart should know that you can’t mock a genre and embrace it at the same time.
Nov 2014
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Pyaar Impossible
That such a mating is possible is the fiction we need these films to feed us – why else would we watch rom-coms? – and yet you can’t help wishing that the fantasy weren’t so many light years removed from reality.
Jan 2010
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David
...this movie too could have been named Shaitan, and here too Nambiar comes off more super-cool technician than storyteller.
Feb 2013