If you were so inclined to do so, a survey that you’d undertake for today’s pre-teens and teens that’d include the question What do your parents tell you when you don’t live up to their expectations?, would yield the answer In my days, I didn’t have it as good as you do now, or a … Continue reading ‘13 Reasons Why’ review: An Education Most Harrowing
With Dunkirk, director Christopher Nolan, who also wrote this project, scales cinematic heights that’s as startling as it is audacious. In Dunkirk, Nolan devours the screen edaciously, opening up the wormhole of his vision to you - no screen size on this planet is enough to encompass this spectacular vision, but for now, we’ll have … Continue reading ‘Dunkirk’ review: A Powerful Cinematic Dynamo
In my school days, I always wanted to be a comic book hero. No, I didn’t want comics based on my life, but be one of the heroes from the comics I so desperately devoured in a state of dervish during the summer holidays. Not for me Phantom (didn’t quite fancy his life until Diana … Continue reading ‘Spider-Man Homecoming’ review: Does Whatever a Teen Can
Long after it exits the cinema halls, Mom will be remembered for two things, primarily – apple pips and Sridevi’s stunning performance. While I’ll refrain from speaking about the former, I have no qualms in piping up about the latter. For, in director Ravi Udyawar’s debut project, it is Sridevi who effortlessly dominates the screen … Continue reading ‘Mom’ review: A Dish Best Served Simmering
There’s a scene in Patriots Day where Veronica (Khandi Alexander, the only scene she’s in for the length of the movie) from the High-Value Interrogation Group, is interrogating Katherine Russell (Melissa Benoist), wife of terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze), who along with younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff) set off bombs in Boston and has … Continue reading ‘Patriots Day’ review: The Terror and the Terrible
There I was, as usual coming out of the Friday show, same theatre, this time from director Kabir Khan’s latest outing Tubelight (here, an Indian usage coined to describe a dimwit, and not a documentary on the fluorescent equipment) wondering what strong beverage to quaff, and also about what made the director remake the 2015 … Continue reading ‘Tubelight’ review: Flickering Barnacles
As I trudged wearily into the shop floor at around 2200 hours wearing my yellow-colored hard hat, the familiar refluxive and reflexive gut feel kicked in every night, the white fluorescent lamps ensconced inside wired mesh cages doing little to dispel the darkness that invariably descended inside of me. The drainage gutters on either side … Continue reading ‘Deepwater Horizon’ review: Pipeline of Evil
If you were a cook – no, this isn’t a career advice column – and you come across a rather impressive recipe penned by your favorite aunt or loving grandmother or any such rare, benevolent species in your family, what would you do? You would, in all probability, light up the gas stove, and get … Continue reading ‘The Mummy’ review: From Bandages to Dark Ages
As director James Erskine sat down to write the script for Sachin: A Billion Dreams, one can only imagine him grappling with the quintessentially existential questions that must haunt anyone who sets out to make a docu-drama on a much-loved, much-adored, and much-revered personality – what’s to be the POV for this feature? How much … Continue reading ‘Sachin: A Billion Dreams’ review: Batsman Returns
It was so with Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans, where to me, the highlight was the letters Gopal wrote from the USA to his younger brother in India. And it was so with the photocopied page of a foreign magazine that I had in my possession, listing signage across the world, ostensibly meant to guide … Continue reading ‘Hindi Medium’ review: Nightmare on Ed. Street
