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Waiting
It is too explanatory, too talky : you want the characters to stop describing what they are feeling; you want some quiet so you can see them feeling, and feel right alongside.
May 2016
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Sui Dhaaga
...is well made. It’s nice and safe and staid. There are several moments that warm the heart, and you cheer when sui-dhaaga win over needle-and-thread. But you always knew they were going to, didn’t you?
Sep 2018
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Delhi Safari
...does a great service to the animation-for-kids genre by stepping out of the tired mythological stories, and creating animals with distinctive personalities.
Oct 2012
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Bol Bachchan
If your nosy is not turned up too high, ‘Bol Bachchan’, less blaring than your standard Rohit Shetty comedy, can give you sporadic chuckles, and a few helpess laughs. Can’t expect more.
Jul 2012
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Dabangg 2
Because he is being Salman, whose thing of `don’t take me seriously, just have fun’ takes us into a zone where all of `Dabangg 2’ and its settings and characters become comic-book.
Dec 2012
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Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania
How about this lot in a film that toplines a smooth-as-butter, not-weighed-under- a- DDLJ-tribute plot?
Jul 2014
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Patiala House
...there’s enough that’s enjoyable in the film. The writing is smart, the lines are life-like, the characters feel right.
Feb 2011
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Finding Fanny
...a slight watch, occasionally pleasurable, but not entirely memorable.
Sep 2014
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Bajrangi Bhaijaan
This film presses many red-hot buttons, even if the treatment is strictly in-the-clouds ‘filmi’. And gives us Shirtless Salman as a dove of peace, speaking for all religions and ‘mulqs’. Believe it, or faint.
Jul 2015
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No Fathers In Kashmir
The best thing about Kumar’s film is that the problems it outlines feel urgent, even if we’ve seen them before, especially and quite co-incidentally in the sudden spurt of films set in the valley which have released in the past few months.
Apr 2019
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Ishaqzaade
It’s all in there, and yet the result is mixed : some of ‘Ishqzaade’ hits the spot, the rest is a drag.
May 2012
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Raees
And that’s where the film gets stuck, between the two stools of restraint and full blown tamasha...
Jan 2017
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Kadvi Hawa
You also wish the film was tighter: it feels like a stretch even at 100 minutes.
Nov 2017
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Sanju
...is mostly engaging, and some of it good enough to make you laugh out loud in pleasure, especially when Hirani is killing it. But you wonder too what the film chose to leave out, and you wonder if this would have been more of a film if those things had been in here.
Jun 2018
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Bharat
The good thing about the film, despite its eye-roll moments, is the underlining it does of a nation which belongs to us all.
Jun 2019
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Bharat
...while it lasts, you can laugh your head off most of the time. Not a bad reason to see a film.
May 2011
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PK
What you need to re-purpose these themes is nuance, which, after a point, goes missing. This is where the Hirani magic recedes, and the film becomes commonplace.
Dec 2014
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Padmaavat
You can easily delight in it while the going is good. But nearly three hours of it, and looping rhetoric around what constitutes Rajput valour can and does become tiresome.
Jan 2018
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Mission Mangal
How do you jazz up dry, complicated science to make it easy for the viewer who wants, primarily, to be entertained? The answer is twin-pronged: one, dumb down the science and keep it simple, stupid, and two, get a big male A-lister to front the project.
Aug 2019
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Shikara
A more nuanced sense of history would have made this film much more complete, even if you were to put aside the enormous irony of watching a film about a place which has been in lock-down for the past six months: when will the people in the valley be able to watch Shikara, and tell us what they think?
Feb 2020
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Baaghi 2
The trouble with a full-on masala film going in search of a plot is evident in the way the film unspools.
Mar 2018
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Nov 2010
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Baaghi 2
...could have been a well-marshalled case of caste-and-conscience, but it turns out to be more light-weight cash-and-carry.
Aug 2011
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Dec 2011
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The Forest
A curious mix of fact and fiction, Ashvin Kumar’s 'The Forest' takes us into the heart of a dense jungle and confronts us with our worst fears.
May 2012
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Chakravyuh
...packaged in a trying-to-be-palatable-to-all plot, which works intermittently in the first half, and not too well in the stretched second.
Oct 2012
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Uri
For a film about active blood-letting, it is curiously bloodless. There are not enough of the rousing goose-bump inducing moments that such films come armed with. When a character shouts, how’s the ‘josh’, you want to add to it: where’s the ‘josh’?
Jan 2019