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Good Newwz
This is otherwise a lazily detailed, shabbily staged film, where an apartment seems chosen for the only reason that it can be lit well.
Dec 2019
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Saand Ki Aankh
If your tolerance for such movies is high, if you think there's a particular sort of joy to be discovered in revisiting stereotypes you have already formed in your head, then dipping into Saand Ki Aankh wouldn't hurt you.
Oct 2019
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Article 15
There's so much more an Anubhav Sinha film can tell us about the Indian Character -- if only, he didn't wish to endear himself so completely with the urban audience.
Jun 2019
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Bharat
There is a softness in people’s thinking today: characterised by the belief that, to be a hero, you don’t have to be smart -- merely being 'good' would do. While you may scorn at its general shoddiness, it is to this popular thinking that Ali Abbas Zafar’s film panders.
Jun 2019
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Tigers
fails to understand that the phenomenon of a million babies dying because there is not enough clean drinking water in which to mix a certain packaged baby formula may have its source in a system where deprivation runs so deep that even a small gift works like a tonic.
Nov 2018
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Tumbbad
For the fantasy in Tumbbad to work, the reality had to seem equally frightening and crazy; but because the realities surrounding the parable are trimmed away before their emotional peaks are hit, the scares never quite reach us.
Oct 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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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