Category Archive: Crime

‘Gurgaon’ review: What lies beneath

A noir slow burn thriller that uncovers what lies beneath layers of patriarchal subjugation.

‘Badla’ review: The Story’s in the Details

Director Sujoy Ghosh lays out a detailed, conversational thriller that’s high on the quality of ingredients, even if the flavors are all too familiar and predictable. But the point of ‘Badla’ isn’t to surprise you as much as it is to make you pay attention and revel in the atmosphere. Plus, of course the top notch acting that rivets, diverts, and then delivers a climactic scene that’s more heartbreaking triumph than a twist.

‘Sacred Games’ review: Buntings and Bubbly

Directors Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane whip up a fantastic first season for Netflix’s original content debut in India. Dividing the story-telling into two tracks, they add layers of conflicted and murderous characters who clash and collide, sparking off intense drama and hard-to-look-from away scenes. The action’s intense, the notes are grungy and the suspense an undercurrent to the main arc: the boiling cauldron of religion, politics, and power. Add to it an all-round superlative cast and an anxious background score, and you have a bloody winner.

‘All the Money in the World’ review: Getty Disturbing Images

Director Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski paint the screen with tones of tension, shades of noir, and ratchet up the heartbeat that much more. But the best lighting and atmospherics is when Getty is onscreen, the shades dark, temporally lonely, and enveloped in an impermeable wrap of green-bags and isolation. Actor Christopher Plummer lends an air of imperiousness that’s impenetrable and sometimes unfathomable – and you know he’s hiding an uneasy past all through for his character. That somehow, tragically, also justifies his own manic obsessiveness with money, estate, paintings, and deals.

‘Murder on the Orient Express’ review: Standard Gauge

The director fails to capture the stifling, terrorizing claustrophobia of the coach, making it look all very simple and straight-forward. Even the top shots inside the carriages that he shoots are more distracting, taking an almost detached view of the goings-on below, you wondering what to make of all the heads you see. With the result, the breathtaking scenery is memorable, the mystery less so. Is that why the denouement, weak by any detective movie standards, takes place outside the train – all the passengers lined up on chairs, as if guests of honor at a valedictory event – instead of inside of the dining car, where the tension in the book and the 1974 movie was unbearable?

‘Elle’ review: Fire and Ice, Burning

As the protagonist on the qui vive, Isabelle Huppert is the movie’s stunning lighthouse, plunging you into her character’s darkest and deepest desire, while using her binoculars; or when she realizes who the rapist is, and walks a razor-edge line between fantasy and a terrifying roleplay. Huppert is why Elle is the crepuscular triumph it is. You want to give her a cinematic salute for this brave-heart-stopping performance. She trapezes with such strength, whipping out a searing act, exploiting and being exploited at the same time. She’s fiery, all fire as she burns with desire, and then all ice as she plots her revenge.

‘Mindhunter’ review: Into the Darkness, Empathetically

Every passing interview, Holden and Tench change too – their strengthening bond suddenly frayed, as Holden discovers an almost devious delight in manipulating his interviewees with empathy and sympathy, both at first forced, but as they go deeper, the line between analyzing them to joining them in verbal jousts that speak their language, shattering the sanitized questionnaire into shreds; straining the team’s tenuous ties to the point of breakdown. And in a brilliant turn, as Holden gets manipulative and pushes the boundaries of ‘accepted procedure’ he gets better and abrasive, even.