Review
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Mr and Mrs Mahi is a curious mixtape of a film. At one level, there’s little that feels original except the specific plot device of a husband who wanted to be a cricketer discovering that his wife could be a great one. There’s a bit of Dum Laga ke Haisha and Bawaal in how a…
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The first thing you hear when you watch Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill is the theme from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai that plays over the Dharma Productions logo. If there is a greater red herring in the history of red herrings, I do not know it. (This is not to say that Karan Johar only produces…
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An intrguing premise – elements of the Mahabharata are reconfigured into a dystopian sci-fi story – is let down by an underwhelming film.
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A superb two-character drama about death, love, agency and doing the right thing.
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Kiran Rao’s sophomore feature Laapataa Ladies begins at a bidaai (a farewell to the bride as she leaves to go to her in-laws’ house). The bride’s face is covered with a veil so all-encompassing that she can barely see anything past her feet. There is a moment of brief panic in her face when her…
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A few days after watching Merry Christmas, I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out why it worked for me. The film is a slow burn, to the point where there isn’t really an end to the burning. You don’t see the quiet desperation of a character who has committed a crime and is…
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There is a preternatural stillness to Kaathal – The Core, Jeo Baby’s latest directorial starring Mammooty and Jyothika. People pray with solemnity, and there’s a lot of praying throughout the film. Courtroom arguments are presented in a normal tone of voice. Even a political campaign where one candidate uses a microphone is interrupted by rain,…
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Statutory warning: Here be spoilers. For more or less the entire first half of the film, I was transfixed by Leo. The writing is clean, the screenplay flows like water, the action is well shot, and Vijay finds another gear I didn’t know he had. The opening stretch involves a stunningly shot and edited encounter…
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Firstly, why the hell does the title need that extra i? Ah, never mind. Here’s the thing, and watch out, because there are going to be a few spoilers here: A young man finds out that his wheelchair-bound mostly-mentally-absent grandfather once had a dalliance with a woman named Jamini. Turns out they had, at the…
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Listen, before you read any further, this post is gonna contain spoilers the size of a Wikipedia article on Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer. So beware. There’s a moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer when the team on the Manhattan Project is setting up for the Trinity test (the first nuclear test explosion) and the titular character…
