Review
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Thalaivaa begins, as all films in multiplexes do these days, with a fairly long and graphic advisory on the hazards of tobacco consumption. While I appreciate the thought, I cannot help but chuckle at the irony of placing it at the beginning of a film about an underworld don and the son who takes his…
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Spoilers ahead! Does that bother you? For a Rohit Shetty film, no less? Really? WhoWhat are you? It helps, I think, to think of Chennai Express as a Hindi film set in Tamil Nadu for the benefit of non-Tamilians. The film often feels like a distilled cinematic expression of the benign bewilderment with which the…
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If you’re gonna be stuck in a tin can for 15 hours (Dubai to San Francisco), you better hope that you can sleep through most of it, or that your airline has a decent in-flight movie selection. I ended up with option B, and here’s the result: Olympus has Fallen High-octane hostage drama set in…
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Beware: Here be potential spoilers! It’s not a bad movie by any stretch, but it’s not a brilliant one either. But if Race 2 is a hit, this one deserves to be the blockbuster it has turned out to be, so there you go. I don’t have the patience to write a full-length review of…
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Now, I can be a bit of a churl when I am reviewing movies. But honestly, my expectation from a regular Tamil masala movie is simply that it go about its business without fuss and not make too many mistakes. If the hero wants to beat up a score of snarling interchangeable henchmen all by…
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I don’t know about Sophomore Jinxes, but the third film in a trilogy is almost always a tricky one. The thrill of discovery is gone after the first one, the assured handling and dramatic heft is covered by the second one, so what remains? Emotional baggage, mostly. (And killer mutant teddy bears sometimes, but that’s…
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In Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino has achieved that rarest of feats (for him, anyway) — he has made a film that bored me to tears. I make my case through the contrast between two exchanges. In Kill Bill Vol 2, there is a scene where Bill tells Beatrix the story of Pei Mei’s Five Point…
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For most of its running time, Silver Linings Playbook fills the screen with people who don’t get along. So much time, in fact, that when we see them enjoy themselves, it feels like a small miracle. Then again, the story is crowded with people who are dysfunctional in some form or shape. Pat Solitano Sr…
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There is an exchange in Zero Dark Thirty between the CIA Director and an agent named Maya, the protagonist of this film. She mentions that she got recruited to the CIA right out of high school and he asks her what she’s done so far. It turns out that pretty much the only thing she…
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The last time Neeraj Pandey made a movie was nearly 5 years ago. It was a taut, two-character drama called A Wednesday and gave its stars — Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher — such good material to work with that their sheer joy at playing these characters shone through. The film was not without its flaws,…
24 frames per second 