An old man stares ferociously at a girl in the park. The girl — white Apple earbuds in place, out on a jog, sweaty and out of breath as she does her stretches — stares back, unblinking. She looks wary of the stare but not afraid of it. It is an uncomfortable moment with the […]
Review: Nitya Mehra’s Baar Baar Dekho
I wonder if Katrina Kaif is good at poker. In Baar Baar Dekho, Kaif wears an all-encompassing blankness, looking like a striking but not altogether realistic waxwork. She’s a vision, albeit one whose accent-soaked Hindi — more unbearable than ever — gets in the way of possible appreciation, and I wager she’d be an unnerving […]
Review: Remo D’Souza’s A Flying Jatt
The good thing about casting Tiger Shroff as a superhero is that, thanks to his fluidly lithe movements, it does sometimes become hard to spot where the actual moves stop and the wire-work begins. Watching Shroff, an endearing, almost unbearably earnest performer, reminds me of those early Salman Khan days when he was a lanky […]
Review: Rohit Dhawan’s Dishoom
There are some filmmakers who make feature-length trailers. They think they’re making an action movie, of course, but the fact is that everything — from an overabundance of slow-motion, to the way words like “one day ago” fly across the screen in the Dhoom font, and the way the film starts and ends with music […]
The 2016 Half-term Hindi Cinema report card: The Good and The Bad
Six months of 2016 are almost up, and as tradition dictates, it is time to take stock. Here I step back and take a look at what’s worked and what hasn’t. The Good The Top Films For me, there have been three standout films in 2016 so far, and these couldn’t be a more diverse […]
Review: Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab
There’s an old joke about how two smack-heads score their fix in an unfamiliar new city. They stand on opposite sides of the road, and one tosses an imaginary length of rope while the other grabs and fastens it. The first person to duck under the rope as he walks by is the man to […]
Column: Censorship, Udta Punjab and the $*&@#@ state of Indian cinema
The masterful Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi once used a fine analogy to describe the shapeshifting state of censorship in his country. “The restrictions and censorship in Iran are a bit like the British weather: one day it’s sunny, the next day it’s raining. You just have to hope you walk out into the sunshine.” In […]
Review: Ram Gopal Varma’s Veerappan
Ram Gopal Varma has never been one to let truth get in the way of a good story. His new film, Veerappan, for instance, opens with a quote that “a Society gets the criminal it deserves,” which is credited to Voltaire, who — to my knowledge — never said any such thing. The quote is […]
Review: Omung Kumar’s Sarbjit
The film Sarbjit ends with a black screen, with many a line dangling in the air and many ellipses allowing them to do so. It tells us what the film’s makers declare happened to the real Sarabjit Singh and his crusading sister Dalbir Kaur, what continues to happen today, and then, with much solemnity, it […]
Review: Tony D’Souza’s Azhar
When news of the match-fixing scandal broke, my very first thought was for Mohammad Azharuddin’s wrists. The heartbreak was unbelievable, and echoes of that particular ache still remain. Believe the hyperbole. Cricket was tantamount to religion back in the untainted day, and the idea that some of our heroes were thieves was a crushing one, […]
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