-
Zero
The characteristic outstretched arms of SRK get smaller, as does his height, the creative ambition gets bigger but the film stays resolutely middling when it could have been much more.
Dec 2018
-
Lafangey Parindey
Despite being "not too bad", it doesn't quite go beyond the lacklustre either.
Aug 2010
-
Ek Villain
A clumsy mess of a narrative loop—stories within stories and backstories within backstories, all leading nowhere.
Jul 2014
-
X: Past is Present
There is a big idea here, which gets communicated to the viewer at times and eludes at others.
Nov 2015
-
Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana
Rajkummar Rao is earnest and tries to give his best to a film that doesn’t deserve it.
Nov 2017
-
Guzaarish
Bhansali's painterliness wreaks havoc on the subject. The visual excesses distract from the basic emotions. You don’t feel for the central character.
Nov 2010
-
Baby
In the name of supposed 'realism', the film plays on and magnifies the popular perceptions about 'Islamic terror'.
Jan 2015
-
Street Dancer 3D
The dance here looks like action set-pieces, bodily contortions and jumps and leaps in the air. Similar and repetitive at that, and stretching way too long over 150 minutes.
Jan 2020
-
Simmba
Be it as brutal violators or patronising saviours of women, Simmba shows that it all boils down to the same toxic masculinity which the men behind Simmba have been perpetuating film after film. There is a saying in Hindi: “Sau choohe khake billi haj ko chali (After eating a hundred rats the cat goes on a pilgrimage)”. Need I say more?
Dec 2018
-
Sarbjit
...the director doesn’t seem to know how to calibrate emotions well. He goes overboard with melodrama, is so overtly manipulative that it leaves the various portrayals seem like cardboard cut-outs than throbbing with real life.
May 2016
-
Toilet
If there were any doubts that Akshay Kumar is the poster boy of this regime they can be laid to rest with Toilet: Ek Prem Katha.
Aug 2017
-
Padmaavat
...may well be Bhansali’s most sterile and insipid outing since Saawariya and Guzaarish. It manages to wear down and exhaust rather than engage.
Jan 2018
-
Batti Gul Meter Chalu
The well-intentioned, cause-driven ‘Batti Gul Meter Chalu’ is more boring than engaging.
Sep 2018
-
Student Of The Year 2
Despite the fresh, young faces at the centre, a staleness looms large over SOTY2.
May 2019
-
Baaghi 2
Nothing matters other than Tiger Shroff in a film that bores as well as amuses with its inanity.
Mar 2018
-
Nov 2016
-
Shreelancer
All of it gets protracted, hallucinatory and pointless, the viewer’s connect with the growth, change and self-realisation in the character remain distant.
Aug 2017
-
Love Aaj Kal
In the faux intensity and pointless philosophising of his newer lot of films the soul goes entirely missing and a turgidity underlines the telling.
Feb 2020
-
Rocky Handsome
An adaptation can always be done with one’s own distinct touch. But Rocky Handsome is happy and satisfied in living off borrowed aesthetics even while clinging to its Indian self for all the wrong reasons. It ends up being neither here nor there.
Mar 2016
-
Phillauri
Even the ghosts are sporting a tinge of nationalism in Bollywood films these days.
Mar 2017
-
Force 2
...Abhinay Deo doesn’t want us to put the thinking cap on. He just wants to please us with long chases and car crashes, bullets and blood, the views of Chain Bridge and Hero’s Square in Budapest.
Nov 2016
-
Fanney Khan
Despite the presence of a heavy duty cast, the film is just not able to fly. So bogged down does it get with its predictable arc and overt sense of righteousness that it ends up flat and deadening; silly rather than scintillating.
Aug 2018
-
Bombairiya
This kind of multiple stories device has been used time and again in cinema to great effect. Bombairiya, however, is a call to give it a long, if not permanent, rest in Bollywood. Its use in the film feels entirely needless...
Jan 2019
-
Fukrey Returns
The quirky characters and their oddball humour is again the mainstay even as the thin plot gets stretched to its utmost limits. You want the things to come to a closure fast even as they drag on and on with one laboured situation piling atop another.
Dec 2017
-
Aiyaary
What could have been an engaging tale of army corruption ends up a convoluted film with confusing narrative devices.
Feb 2018
-
Jun 2017
-
Satyameva Jayate
Director Milap Zaveri dishes out the same old vigilante justice cinema that we grew up watching in the 80s with a special doff of the hat to the classic Deewar (1975). But his added tadkas can’t hide the essential staleness of the concoction.
Aug 2018
-
Fitoor
...wants desperately to be a grand, epic romance but depends way too much on its stunning Kashmir canvas to achieve that than characters and story that you can empathise with.
Feb 2016
-
Rustom
...there is nothing remotely credible or engaging in the thriller. The film, in fact, feels like a parody of the several murder mysteries and court room dramas we have seen down the ages.
Aug 2016