A cult graphic novel seems to hold clues about viruses and other catastrophes that threaten to annihilate humankind. Fancy that as an eerie dose of entertainment in the time of pandemic.Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn writes and executive-produces eight...

National security, terror threats and intelligence-ops make for ready thriller scripts across cinematic formats. The OTT space, with its multi-episodic structure, allows a longer time frame for stories to gestate, and that would definitely seem like an advantage...

Dolly and Kitty could be any smalltown cousins. In the world of Alankrita Shrivastava, they become fictional case studies of real desires that the Indian woman of today might harbour, even as she grapples with an innate conservative mindset and a society that...

There are films that set out with noble intention but actually have no clue how to go about it. Atkan Chatkan is one such effort. The aim is to celebrate the underdog, and a spirit to win against all odds. Amateurish execution comes in the way, and rags-to-riches...

Standard rule: If the top-billed star of a commercial entertainer plays a killer, the script will furnish ready justification for his murderous spree. Telugu top gun Nani makes an antihero splash with his new film, and the script makes it obvious within 10 minutes...

Lots of insanity, lots of blood, a little politics and loads of quirks. Season two of The Boys is a continuing toast to irreverence, taking the brutally bizarre superhero universe of the franchise to a new high.Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's bestselling...

A passenger plane crashes somewhere in the mountains of West Bengal and it turns out the flight, JL 50, is actually one that had disappeared 35 years ago. As the CBI officer in charge of the probe sets out to solve the puzzle, he realises there is little...

Lockdown has had its upside, too. It has triggered off a whole new breed of cinema. Call it the Lockdown Movie if you will, but a series of well-executed efforts -- films as well as web series – have emerged in these past months that experiment and at the same...

Sadak 2 comes with a throwback whiff, though not a happy one. It reminds you of a lot of the kitsch that summed up Hindi commercial cinema once upon a time, which you thought had left the Bollywood screen for good.Mahesh Bhatt returns to direction after over...

The clown as a tragi-comic icon has been a favourite device of filmmakers to define the quirks of life. From the Raj Kapoor classic Mera Naam Joker in Bollywood to Appu Raja starring Kamal Haasan among other films, numerous instances abound. Dig deeper for...

Prakash Jha is back with a new smalltown story, and the familiar notes of crime, violence, caste and class kick in even before the half hour mark has passed. Jha has added a new relish to his brand of raw, realistic drama this time. He digs out skeletons (literally...

There is something very earnest about Mee Raqsam that endears, about the way debutant director Baba Azmi tries using his story to reiterate a message that is all-too familiar yet always relevant. Despite lacking in nuances that would have helped set up a layered...

Twenty-five years into his career, Bobby Deol can at least claim to have given a debut performance worth attention. Class Of 83 technically qualifies as a debut -- it is his first bow on OTT -- and his act is far more impressive than the film itself. Of course,...

Lockdown and Covid become tools to set up a smart thriller story in this limited series helmed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, which literally keeps the suspense behind closed doors.The plot introduces the Gujral family. Rajeev Gujral (Sanjay Kapoor), his wife Suneeta...

Vikram Bhatt products bear a trademark. The genre is normally thriller. The crime factor is juxtaposed onto inevitable sexual tension between the hero and the heroine. Music plays a big role. Content and execution often reveal, uh, foreign inspiration.You could...

This time, Vidyut Jammwal keeps his shirt on for most parts. He is not much in the mood to fight either -- well, not at least to unleash the familiar choreographed martial arts blitz.In "Khuda Haafiz", Vidyut is a coy Lucknow boy who remains in non-violent...

We will gloss over veracity of facts, particularly the presentation of Indian Air Force, and keep the scope of this review to discussing cinematic elements. Factuality has never been a strong point with mainstream Bollywood, after all.Gunjan Saxena's life...

Every once in a while in Bollywood, you get to see the Second Half Syndrome. Put simply, a film starts off on a promising note, scales a sort of high as the plot builds up, only to lose steam somewhere post interval.The malady becomes particularly obvious...

Meghna Gulzar''s "Chhapaak" is a hard film to watch. It is brutal in impact, horrifying in its depiction of pain and trauma, and seems a tad too long despite a runtime of just around two hours given the heavy subject at hand.At the end of it you feel "Chhapaak"...

Article 370 is one of the most sensitive and responsible topic to be discussed through a medium of cinema, but so was the topic of Surgical Strike. And we have all witnessed the stupendous success of Vicky Kaushal starrer film ‘Uri : The Surgical Strike’. Similarly...

17 year old Neeha Gupta has been signed by Leadstart publishing for her second book Swapped.

Indian filmmakers have come a long way from the pioneering era of horror films in the Indian film industry from the Ramsay Brothers to this modern day paranormal masterpiece. From the spiritual banks of Benares to the picturesque breathtaking rock pools of...

The makers of "Arjun Patiala" have obviously thrown caution to the wind and indulged in a care-a-damn attitude. They have given absolute hoots to the critics -- a fact that is blatantly spelt out by the end of the film.This screwball comedy, designed as...

"Judgementall Hai Kya" celebrates the bizarre, at the cost of giving in to glaring flaws, much like the grammatical gaffe in its title.At the film's core is the tested good-triumphs-over-evil formula, although done in a way few Bollywood efforts have ever tried. Quirky...

The Kamal Haasan-produced film is based on a French thriller named "Point Blank", and is not one of those run-of-the-mill, star-studded action films that are all style and no substance. It comes across as a decent attempt at giving the Tamil audience a Hollywood-style...

The first thing you notice about "Family Of Thakurganj" is the sheer number of influences that overshadow its effort at storytelling. It is almost as if director Manoj K. Jha was trying to cross the thematic essentials of "Gangs Of Wasseypur" with the smalltown...

For the uninitiated, ‘The Lion King', is the story of Simba, a lion cub, who is dispossessed and made to feel responsible for the death of his father Mufasa, by his treacherous uncle Scar.The cub's birth is announced in the opening sequence of the film called,...

"Super 30" is magnificent survivor of a film. It survives Hrithik Roshan's atrocious "Bihari" accent, probably picked from one of the many Lalu Yadav skits on the internet. It not only survives the verbal abomination, it also stakes it claim among the most...

He counts the numbers of steps she walks from the bus stop to her home in the chawl. She counts the number of missing buttons in his shirts and holes in his vest. East or ‘vest', Shiva and Astha, played by two enormously talented newcomers Meezaan and Sharmin,...

It is an audacious idea, not fully or convincingly implemented. But nevertheless interesting for the way the theme of subversion of justice is used to create a whole narrative of anarchy.And then there are the actors, some of them like Anupam Kher, Kumud...

Good morning India! Director Anubhav Sinha's "Article 15", is a hard-hitting, wake-up call to those who unknowingly and unwittingly indulge in caste and political polarisation. It offers nothing new, but it mirrors our society to the core and reminds us that...

In one word, "Article 15" is spellbinding. It is everything that cinema was always meant to be. Thoughprovoking, questioning, disturbing and ultimately cathartic because the cop-hero (played with a simmering intensity by Ayushmann Khurrana) succeeds in...

"Mallesham" - the gentle, beautiful and moving story of Chintakindi Mallesham, the handloom weaver from Andhra Pradesh who revolutionised the weavers' profession by inventing a mechanical loom -- why, because his mother's shoulder threatened to collapse with all...

An Indo-French-Belgian co-production, director Ken Scott's "The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir", adapted from French writer Romain Puetolas' novel of a similar title, is a picaresque chronicle of a poor Indian street performer who hoodwinks his audience....

Remakes, more often than not, disappoint. This one doesn't. "Kabir Singh" doesn't quite better its precursor, the astonishing game-changing Telugu film "Arjun Reddy". And really, Shahid Kapoor is no patch on Vijay Deverakonda, who sweated, bled and urinated (literally)...

A Hindi remake of the popular Telegu film "Arjun Reddy", director Sandeep Reddy Vanga's "Kabir Singh", is the story of an academically brilliant medical student Kabir (Shahid Kapoor) who goes on to become an orthopaedic surgeon, but suffers from severe...

Kashmir and its blood-soaked political history renders itself well to cinematic treatment. It is to the credit of the makers of this series that not a moment of the eight episodes feels exploitative or artificial.There is a free flow to the narrative and the...

In the beginning there is the swimming pool. A splashy symbol of the upper crust's affluence that is rapidly making the poor, poorer.Deepa Mehta's disturbingly devastating dystopian drama begins with a happy family: mother, father, child splashing in the...

Director F. Gary Gray's "Men in Black: International", the fourth instalment of the extra-terrestrial investigation, is a spin-off from the "Men In Black" film series, which is loosely based on the Marvel comics of the same name created by Lowell Cunningham.For...

With all the trappings of its genre tropes, the film "Game Over" starts with a promise. But to accept the film as a psychological thriller or a horror thriller, one needs to reject the false premise it is based on.Living in a palatial bungalow with only a...

Sitting through the 10 artificially frenetic episodes of this thriller is a slog. Not because of any lack of tempo and tumult (both of which you will find aplenty), but because of a glaring absence of plausibility in the plot.Adapted from an Israeli series,...

It's easy to be dismissive of a film that has no formal structure, one which doesn't compartmentalize life's flow but chooses to go with it. The flow, I mean.But then again, it takes almost three hours of playing time for us to realize that "Bharat" is no...

What works for "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" is the simplicity of its narrative, but for its franchise fans this would be a disappointing issue.Dark Phoenix is the twelfth and final instalment of the successful franchise that began in 2000. It tells us how during...

Adapted from the 2014 released South Korean film, "Gukje Shijang" aka "Ode to my Father" in the international market, "Bharat", mounted as a comedy-romance-drama, follows the exceptional life of Bharat (Salman Khan), from his childhood to his old age.Bharat...

Confession time. I had never heard of, nor heard the songs of, the Jonas Brothers until Priyanka Chopra married one of them.Be warned. There is very little of our Priyanka in this exceptionally revealing documentary. But she is not missed."Chasing Happiness" is...

"Nakkash", meaning engraver (one who designs on metal or wood), is a balanced faith film that does not preach any religion but opens your eyes as to where humanity is heading. The messages hit you straight, on target, when you hear, "Kaam aur mazhab ke beech kissi...

There is something to be said about Bengali cinema's ongoing fascination with Satyajit Ray and yes, you can add Uttam Kumar to that. At one point in this able fable, the film's scholar-hero Subarn Sen (played by the always watchable Abir Chatterjee) says cheekily,...

A patriotic fever seems to have gripped the country big time with filmmakers trying to bring about winds of change.Writer-director Lom Harsh's "Yeh Hai India", is a mission film. A mission to change the perception of the country from the various negative...

Director Omung Kumar's latest film "PM Narendra Modi" is a biopic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The narrative begins with a lengthy disclaimer which mentions it is a fictionalised piece of work. And over the 136 minutes of its runtime, those who are aware of...

'De De Pyaar De' is a light-hearted rom-com that addresses the real and plausible, issue of an older man falling in love with a girl half his age and how it is viewed upon, by the Indian society.Ashish Mehra (Ajay Devgn), a 50-year-old London-based business...

Okay, guys, there is news. Ajay is back to spelling his surname as Devgn'. He confuses me in every film, dropping an 'a' as though it was a primetime soap's fluctuating ratings.In this film Devgn's title is not all that is confusing. His 50-year old highly...

For those who were wondering why a third version of the same rape-and-retribution story that was filmed earlier in Telugu as "Temper" and in Hindi as "Simmba", here's the answer."Ayogya" betters both by leaps and bounds. It is what remakes are meant to be....

Let's not talk what is novel or original in this film. Let's not talk intelligent stuff too. If you are fine with this, then let's proceed. Needless to say, SOTY2 is a fluffy, well-packaged  rehash, inspired from various films of its genre.Unlike its...

In a film that runs on and on, almost as fast as its agile leading man, for nearly two and a half hours, "Student of the Year 2" (SOTY 2) leaves us with nothing except repeated  visuals of youngsters pouting, preening and posing for the camera.But...

There is an infectious appeal to Chhota Bheem and his numerous adventures. While the Chhota Bheem franchise, with its numerous editions have acquired iconic stature among  the young Indian audience, this is the fourth film after 'The Throne of Bali",...

A glut and an ensuing slump in standards was bound to happen to the web series in India. After hitting high notes with "Rangbaaz", "The Final Call" and even the excessively gruesome "Abhay", ZEE5 touches rockbottom with this ridiculous crime drama set...

Director Jenny Gage's "After" is based on the romance, fan-fiction novel of the same name, written by Anna Todd. It is an innocuous teen pulp that unfolds more like an aspiring writer's checklist of narrative influences of first romance than a fleshed out story...

Designed as a mystery thriller, "Blank" is the drama of a suicide bomber who is on a mission.Debutant Karan Kapadia plays Hanif, the suicide bomber who is connected with a "dead man's switch". This "DMS" is a complicated bomb attached to his chest and is connected...

In a film where the devil lies (and never tells the truth) in the details, it is significant that debutant Karan Kapadia, who plays the title role of a suicide bomber whose mind has apparently gone blank after an accident, is not mentioned in the opening...

"Avengers: Endgame", the final chapter from the Avengers franchise, has broken box office records in India by registering an opening day collection of Rs 53.10 crore, becoming the biggest Hollywood opener in the country till date.From Iron Man to Captain America...