Three directors who work in different languages and regions, each with a distinct metier, foray into narrative zones they haven’t explored before and tell three quirky stories from the backwoods in Lantrani (Tall Tales). These are stories with heart from the heart of India. The Zee5 anthology film is studded with arresting flourishes – they...
Category: Movie Reviews
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Highly Watchable Celebration Of Love Across Man-Made Divides
What’s a good love story without conflict? A popular Shillong radio jockey playfully poses that question to his life partner, also an RJ of repute, in the course of his show. The path of love is indeed strewn with thorns in Love Storiyaan. A new Amazon Prime Video documentary series produced by Dharmatic Entertainment and...
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Rudderless Origin Story Is Dead-On-Arrival Fare
New Delhi: An insufferably clunky, over-expository and rudderless origin story of a fringe character from the Marvel multiverse, Madame Web spins a yarn so insubstantial that it snaps in no time and is all over the place. Not a pretty sight, to say the least. Barely 10 to 20 minutes in, it is easy...
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Incisive And Moving Portrait Of Rural Distress
New Delhi: Located in the liminal space between the stark and the surreal, In The Belly Of A Tiger, an Indo-US-Chinese co-production that premiered on Sunday at the 74th Berlinale, plays out in a tangible world – a North Indian village battered by poverty and exploitation. It is, however, informed with narrative and stylistic elements...
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Powerful Wildlife Crime Thriller Co-Produced By Alia Bhatt
Unsung government officials going about the onerous and painstaking job of protecting Kerala’s wildlife are at the centre of Poacher, a solidly crafted eight-episode Amazon Prime Video series written and directed by Emmy award-winning filmmaker Richie Mehta and executive produced, among others, by Alia Bhatt. As the forest rangers wage an arduous war against elephant...
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Difficult-To-Digest Inanity Starring Vidyut Jammwal And Arjun Rampal
Crakk is everything that it is cracked up to be – an extreme sports action movie replete with stunts and swerves that spring from a stunted imagination. All that the shallow genre exercise manages to deliver is extreme ennui. Written and directed by Aditya Datt, who helmed action star Vidyut Jammwal’s third Commando film, Crakk...
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At Once Charming And Thought-Provoking Film
In his felicitous directorial debut, All India Rank, screenwriter and lyricist Varun Grover travels back to the years that followed India’s economic liberalisation to tell a vivid a languid slice-of-life, coming-of-age tale of a disinclined IIT aspirant. At once charming and thought-provoking, All India Rank sets itself apart from the web shows Kota Factory and...
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Dune: Part Two Review – Rarely Is A Follow-Up Film This Invigorating And Immersive
Everything that Dune was is visibly redoubled in Dune Part Two. The film is an amalgamation of Frank Herbert’s unique vision, director Denis Villeneuve’s penchant for finding variety and depth in the visceral, cinematographer Greig Fraser’s incredible eye for detail in large-scale compositions, production design of the highest order and a magnificent ensemble cast that...
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Unlike Anything You Would Have Seen Before
Its weirdness quotient is extremely high but its steadfast resolve to cock a snook at established practices of Bollywood storytelling sits pretty on Karan Gour’s second narrative feature Fairy Folk. The quirky and provocative magic realist film is rooted in the here and now – in the home of a married couple – even as...
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Emotionally Engaging Film Laced With Doses Of Wry Humour
Kiran Rao returns to the director’s seat well over a decade after her debut film, Dhobi Ghat (2011), with a work that strikes the right notes. She does away with marquee names in Laapataa Ladies, produced by Aamir Khan Productions in association with Kindling Pictures, and employs three first-timers in a lively tale of two...