Category: Movie Reviews

New Delhi: A boxing analogy may not be out of place in a courtroom drama – it comes from the mouth of one of the advocates involved in the legal battle on which the film hinges – but Patna Shuklla, starring Raveena Tandon and streaming on Disney+Hotstar, does not come anywhere near generating the energy...

A one-eyed crime branch sleuth dealing with a troubled past and a series of bizarre murders is the pivot around which Inspector Rishi revolves. The Amazon Prime Video series blends the conventions of a police procedural with the chills of a supernatural horror drama. It does a nifty job. The series opens in the heart...

As he scours the country for naturally gifted footballers, talent spotter and coach par excellence Syed Abdul Rahim asks a young P.K. Banerjee what makes a good player a great one. Talent, answers the latter. Talent is of no use without focus, the older man asserts in an obvious jibe at the rising football star’s...

Stunt sequences on the big screen have never been so drearily monotonous. Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, directed and co-written by Ali Abbas Zafar, has a surfeit of explosive action. The string of loud and flashy set pieces leaves no room for anything else at all. Bade Miyan Chote Miyan is all clones, cliches and cacophony....

Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila, a lively, deftly crafted ode to the power of song and performance as tools of rebellion, opens with a violent death. The bullets end a music career and birth an undying legend. The film embraces a range of contradictions. And why not? Amar Singh Chamkila is about a man whose...

Writer-director Aban Bharucha Deohans expands the canvas of crime to a significant extent in the sequel to Silence: Can You Hear It?, the slow-burn police procedural that she crafted around a murder investigated by Assistant Commissioner of Police Avinash Verma and his team of Mumbai Special Crime Unit (SCU) sleuths. The killing that saw the...

When democracy begins to recede and the safety nets fail, violence and chaos inevitably rush in to fill the vacuum. Civil War, a tautly edited, blisteringly powerful political thriller, drives home the point with unsettling force and a rare level of insight and integrity. Writer-director Alex Garland imagines a dystopian near future where the United...

There is a dichotomy in Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 that makes itself instantly apparent. The film probes the not-so-secret virtual lives of a generation of youngsters with severely limited attention spans even as it demands complete focus on its bewilderingly whimsical flow of images and sounds. You take your eyes off the screen or...

A drama about extramarital affairs – yes, not one, but two – that threaten to tear a couple apart could easily have lost its way and turned into a convoluted mess had Do Aur Do Pyaar been just another Bollywood marriage story. It is not. There is confusion all around when forbidden love begins to...

Growing up and tiding over teenage angst is grist to the mill of a young adult drama. A certain degree of predictability is inevitable in a genre that has its own established rules but Dil Dosti Dilemma, helmed by Debbie Rao (Pushpavalli) and adapted from Andaleeb Wajid’s 2016 book, Asmara’s Summer, successfully skirts around most...