Archive for the ‘Movie Reviews’ Category
By Subhash K. Jha
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Emraan Hashmi,Randeep Hooda, Kangna Ranaut, Prachi Desai; Directed by: Milan Luthria;Rating: ***
It's the way he looks at the camera. Almost as if it doesn't exist. Ajay Devgn as Sultan Mirza is NOT Haji Mastan, please note. He's just this Robin Hood in the 1970s who happened to be a smuggler and who at some point in the taut plot, locks horns with a junior recruit who, please note, is NOT Dawood Ibrahim.
So who, in the name of immoral crime and haphazard policing, are these two men? So stylishly masculine, so sweaty in their realism and so menacing in their demeanour and complete denial of the existent morality they remind you of the anti-social heroes from Sam Peckinpah's Westerns?
"Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai" takes us back to the beginnings of gangsterism in Mumbai. Milan Luthria excels in creating smouldering combustive stress between two ...
Film: Maryada RamannaCast: Sunil, Saloni, Nagineedu, Brahmaji, Rao Ramesh, Supreet, Kanchi and othersStory: SS Kanchi;Music: M M KeeravaniLyrics: Sirivennela, Anantha Sriram, Chaitanya Prasad;Cinematography: C RamPrasadArt Director: Ravinder;Stylist: Rama RajamouliEditing: Kotagiri Venkateswara Rao;Action: Peter Hein;Produced by: Shobu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni;Screenplay and directed by: S S Rajamouli;CBFC Rating: U;Release date: July 23, 2010What’s it about! Click On Read More 4 ReviewRamu (Sunil) loses his father in faction feuds in a village in Rayalaseema, so his mother takes him away from Rayalaseema to save her son. He grows up in Hyderabad and after his mother’s death, he tries hard to meet ends. One day, he receives a notice from the village to claim 5 acres of land, so he boards a train to the village. On board, he meets a beautiful girl Aparna (Saloni) who happens to be daughter of Ramineedu (Nagineedu). Ramineedu has been waiting to kill Ramu for years, as ...
Film: Maryada RamannaCast: Sunil, Saloni, Nagineedu, Brahmaji, Rao Ramesh, Supreet, Kanchi and othersStory: SS Kanchi;Music: M M KeeravaniLyrics: Sirivennela, Anantha Sriram, Chaitanya Prasad;Cinematography: C RamPrasadArt Director: Ravinder;Stylist: Rama RajamouliEditing: Kotagiri Venkateswara Rao;Action: Peter Hein;Produced by: Shobu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni;Screenplay and directed by: S S Rajamouli;CBFC Rating: U;Release date: July 23, 2010What’s it about! Click On Read More 4 ReviewRamu (Sunil) loses his father in faction feuds in a village in Rayalaseema, so his mother takes him away from Rayalaseema to save her son. He grows up in Hyderabad and after his mother’s death, he tries hard to meet ends. One day, he receives a notice from the village to claim 5 acres of land, so he boards a train to the village. On board, he meets a beautiful girl Aparna (Saloni) who happens to be daughter of Ramineedu (Nagineedu). Ramineedu has been waiting to kill Ramu for years, as ...
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Daniel Olbrychski
Director: Philip Noyce
Rating: ***
Salt is one of those rare action flicks that has non-stop hard hitting action for ninety minutes straight and is all done
with a brain. Originally, written for a male lead star, in which Tom Cruise was the primary candidate but
after he turned it down because it was too similar to his role in Mission: Impossible the makers changed the script
and took on Angelina Jolie to play the same role reworked for a female main lead.
Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a C.I.A. officer who is amazing at her job. She has done everything to protect the United
States. One day, as she is leaving work to go home to her husband for their anniversary, a strange man walks into
the C.I.A. offices with an extremely odd accusation about Salt. As she and her partner, Ted Winter
(Schreiber), ...
Starring: Akshay Kumar, introducing Trisha, Urvashi Sharma, Rajpal Yadav, Asrani, Milind Gunaji and Manoj Joshi
Director: Priyadarshan
Rating: *1/2
Satire is a genre rarely touched by Bollywood mainstream filmmakers, so when a big star like Akshay Kumar decides to co-produce one with a director like Priyadarshan with whom he has never delivered a flop, naturally expectations run high. But what one gets at the end of the day is a migraine inducer. Remake of Malayalam film Vellanakalude Nadu (1988) starring Mohanlal, Khatta Meetha neither entertains nor offers anything new.
Sachin Tichkule (Akshay) is a road contractor who is forever cash strapped and in a mess after he attempts to go corrupt. His extended family consisting of a brother (Paritosh) and two brothers-in-law (Milind Gunaji and Manoj Joshi) all staying together under one roof are neck deep in corruption where PWD contracts are involved. Sachin is often ridiculed by them for being a blot to ...
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Alfred Molina, Teresa palmer, Monica Bellucci
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Rating: ***
The underdog is a perennial Hollywood favourite and has led to two types of film. The chick-flick, like chic-lit, where a
nerdy girl, like Cinderella, finds out she is indeed a queen. Or the other where an average Joe, mostly a male
teenager, an object of ridicule, comes of age led by some event or some person. "The Sorcerer's" is the latter.
Over a thousand years back, a master sorcerer was betrayed by one of his apprentices, Maxim (Alfred Molina).
Before dying he gives his most loyal apprentice Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) a dragon ring which will choose the next
master. Since then Balthazar, has been fighting evil and trying to look for the next master to teach him magic.
In the year 2000 destiny leads the next apprentice, David, a boy of 10, to him but when ...
By Subhash K Jha
Starring Sanjay Dutt, Bipasha Basu, Kunal Kapoor, Anupam Kher
Written & Directed by Rahul Dholakia
Rating: ***
Everyone, says someone important in this searing document of our times, is playing politics in the Kashmir Valley. In a milieu of all-pervasive politics, thank the Lord for a creative voice that can look into the burning Valley with dispassionate compassion.
Lamhaa is one of those docu-dramas that could have easily toppled into the territory of over-statement and over-simplified politics. And boy, havent we seen that happen in very successful political cinema in recent times?!
Rahul Dholakia who earlier made the gently persuasive Parzania on the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, doesnt lose his storytelling equilibrium even when the sitiuations of crises described by the skilfully-written plot scream for attention. Restraint and honesty go hand-in-hand in Dholakias Kashmir, which wed like to believe, is the real Kashmir, unalloyed, non-magnified, intense and ...
Starring: Ali Zafar, Pradhuman Singh, Sugandha Garg and Piyush Mishra
Director: Abhishek Sharma
Rating: ***1/2
There are some films that are winners right from the time their very first promo is unleashed and Tere Bin Laden is one such film! Since the time many months back the hilarious promo of this Abhishek Sharma debut directorial venture came on, tremendous curiosity value for the film arose despite the fact that the film doesnt carry any big face value. The film thankfully lives up to the promise and entertains making it a winner in all its departments.
The film narrates in a tongue-in-cheek manner a Pakistani reporters attempts to migrate to the US and chaos it all leads to. Ali Hassan (Ali Zafar) is an ambitious young news reporter from Pakistan Ali (Ali Zafar) who is extremely desperate to migrate to the US in pursuit of the American dream. His repeated attempts to immigrate are shot ...
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao
Director: Christopher Nolan
Rating: ****
It is believed that humans barely use 5 percent of their brain capacity. Most cinema thus involve you only that much. Yet, there are a few that challenge you and thus fall in the other 95 percent of your brain. "Inception" is one such challenging film.
In a futuristic world where it is possible to trek through a humans mind as if it were a place, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief extraordinaire. He specialises in stealing information from the minds of people. Yet, he is on the run from his own country and his children because he has a warrant on his head for having killed his wife, who it is obvious he loved very much.
When Cobb gets an assignment to do just the reverse of his skill, i.e. to plant an idea instead of ...
Cast: Rajat Barmecha, Ronit Roy, Aayan Boradia, Ram Kapoor
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane
Rating: ****
In 1959 in France, a teenage boy ran away from a juvenile home. That moment in "400 Blows" was symbolic for French cinema, as with it they left the baggage of clich behind and embraced a new, youthful vibrancy that would change cinema of the World.
Fifty years later, Hindi cinema finds itself just at that moment of epiphany with this year's, perhaps even this decade's best Hindi film, in "Udaan". Will Hindi cinema hold on to the wings of this film and take flight?
Rohan is just another 'average' kid, rebellious and dreamer. After being expelled from boarding school, he has to live with his authoritarian, oppressive father in the steel town of Jamshedpur. It is obvious that the apple has fallen as far from the tree as it is possible.
The father runs a small steel plant and wants his ...