Cricket and marriage get into an awkward tangle in Mr & Mrs Mahi, a sports melodrama that hinges on action on the field of play and plenty of reaction off it, mostly in the realms of a relationship that runs into tricky terrain. The Sharan Sharma-directed film is about sport but it segues into a...
Category: Movie Reviews
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Anil Kapoor Manages To Be One Of The Bright Spots Of Harshvardhan Rane, Divya Khossla’s Film
A gender-reversed, Indian mythology-inspired adaptation of the jailbreak thriller The Next Three Days (2010), which was in turn a remake of the French film Pour Elle (Anything for Her, 2008), Savi huffs and puffs its way through the tale of a homemaker who fights tooth and nail to get her murder convict-husband out of a...
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Pratik Gandhi Shines Bright In A Desultory Film
A common man fighting for his rights in a system loaded heavily against him is a familiar figure in Hindi movies that seek to address the inequities that plague the nation. The protagonist of Dedh Bigha Zameen is cast in the same mould. Written and directed by Pulkit and streaming on JioCinema, the film roots...
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The Series Retains The Edge Despite A Few Stray Passages
Small change may not have much currency these days but a piggybank still counts in large swathes of India. It definitely does for the small-town household in which Gullak, a mellow, bittersweet family drama now in its fourth season, plays out. The five new episodes of the TVF-produced Sony LIV show drives home, with a...
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Rarely Spooky Enough To Deliver Jump Scares
Konkani lore meets pop culture excess in Munjya, a horror comedy that lets the funny edge out the spooky, often unintentionally so. Messy and muddled, it demands willing suspension of disbelief and fails to secure it. Directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and written by Niren Bhatt on the basis of a story developed by Yogesh Chandekar,...
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Vikrant Massey Spares No Effort To Go With The Swing Of The Scrappy Film
When filmmaking is reduced to a shot in the dark attempted more in hope than with any degree of conviction, Blackout is what you get. It is an out and out non-starter. Written and directed by Devang Bhavsar, the slipshod crime caper is beyond abysmal. Neither the makers nor the actors cast as sketchily etched...
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Kartik Aaryan Pulls Off A Career-Best Performance
The long-forgotten but incredible story of Murlikant Petkar, India’s first-ever Paralympics gold medallist and Padma Shri recipient, comes alive on the big screen in Chandu Champion, a sweeping and somewhat overdone biopic spearheaded by Kartik Aaryan as the spirited titular hero. Chandu Champion, writer-director Kabir Khan’s second sports film in succession (after 83), intense emotions,...
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Psychological Drama Heralds The Arrival Of Ishana Night Shyamalan
In her directorial debut, Ishana Night Shyamalan crafts a cinematic confluence of Irish folkloric horror and psychological drama. She overlays what emerges from that combination with stylistic norms inherited from her producer-director-screenwriter father whose chequered career has drawn sustenance from unusual conceits and confounding twists. Working with a group of fully clued-in actors who bring...
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Jitendra Kumar Maintains His Equilibrium With Impressive Control
Incessant prattle and the rattle of complex mathematical equations and problems run all the way through Season 3 of Kota Factory. To that extent, the TVF-produced Netflix series offers more of what we have come to expect from it. But that isn’t all there is to the five new episodes that take the struggles of...
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An Overly Hurried, Steadfastly Middling Thriller
The principal plot premise of Bad Cop, streaming on Disney+Hotstar and produced by Fremantle India, is as trite as they come. Two identical twins end up on two sides of the law. One becomes a police inspector, the other a small-time conman. Bad Cop is really just another Bollywood potboiler stretched out into an eight-episode...