Mira Nair takes us on a blindingly colorful yet bumpy ride to the slums in a small town called Katwe in Uganda and shows us how a young girl earns the title of the film by playing chess. An unlikely sports film, the movie captures lots of human emotions, but drags along, unable to keep our attention on the 64 squares.
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Tim Burton's fans have always enjoyed the spectacle of his vision and this movie is a visual feast. Trouble is, you cannot get rid of a niggling feeling that you've seen this somewhere before...It's a time travel thing, I suppose.
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Neeraj Pandey proves that he is a Dhoni fanboy. The movie starts out awesomely well, telling us details about Mahi's early life we eagerly lap up. But we want to know about his growth from getting selected in the team to becoming a captain. We get Bollywood style romance instead and then we begin to look at the time: 190 minutes. Cricket wins, but...
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We make good musicals, that everyone knows. This film is about a street music band, hugely popular at religious festivals, community celebratory gatherings like dandiyas, but get no respect because they're not posh 'rock' bands. This film brings their music and their lives on to cinema and tell us an engaging love story.
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Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai has been made and remade and made again in so many languages. Now Antoine Fuqua brings you his version of the same story. It may not rent your soul like Seven Samurai does, nor does it make you drool over the easy macho of Yul Brynner and other cowboys in the 1960 version. But it's fun, fully action packed, and has seemingly unending ammunition.
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Want to see what a fizzled out franchise looks like? Then watch this film.The cast you loved is all there. It's just that they don't realise that they're all rather ancient and pretending to be cute looks just puts the audience off their popcorn.
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Rajasthan is probably the heart of patriarchy land, and the villages hide many ugly tales. But three friends are there to support one another and they eventually learn to help each other fight the ugly reality that is their life. Shot beautifully, the film seems much longer than its running time because it is full of cliches about women and the feminist text seems to be borrowed rather than believed.
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Emraan Hashmi is Aditya again. Alas there's no Bipasha Basu rebooted as Shanaya, but another pretty girl (Kriti Khabanda) rebooted as Shaina redoing the Arth mangalsutra beads are broken act, the ghosts that possess bodies are still levitating and contorting bodies, and creaking doors and yanking screaming women under the bed... Reboot means Rehash.
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A kiddie animation flick about how Robinson Crusoe learned to survive on a tropical island is fun in the beginning but gets progressively tedious to watch with so many animal antics crammed in that you stop caring. Besides, the villainous cats could scare very little kids.
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A girl in search of the beach where her mother found happiness finds something more sensational. The movie about the consistent threat that is the shark and grit and courage that is the girl is simply breathtakingly marvelous. You haven't seen such amazing underwater or surf footage or felt the excitement at the back of your throat. The threat from the shark feels so real you do not breathe.
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Two hours and sixteen minutes long moral science lessons on molestation of women and the attitude society still nurtures. You learn nothing new, you haven't seen anything different, you have heard it all before. But having Amitabh Bachchan make an argument for the cause, his whisky and honey baritone commenting on entitlement and patriarchy makes all the difference.
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M.L. Stedman's lyrical war novel comes to you on the big screen with much gut wrenching anguish you start wondering if isolation does play tricks on the mind, making ethics ambivalent. But despite the tears and the drama happening in that small isolated community, the film fails to touch any deeper chord.
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