• I have to confess that I only watched the last 15 minutes of Kai Po Che. My wife was watching it, and she gave me a 3 minute synopsis so that I could understand what was going on. And yet, I found myself moved by the closing shot of Ishaan’s face, just before the end credits started

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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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  • Iron Man 3

    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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  • King’s Cross

    Many years ago, there was this brief period when I was extremely depressed about a bunch of things. My grandfather had just passed away, my thesis seemed to be going nowhere…  I once spent a fair amount of time venting about it to a friend of mine named Satish. He listened quietly and then told

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  • Django Unchained

    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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  • Regular readers of this blog, such as there are, know that one of the genres I have a soft corner for is the one where a bunch of unlikely musicians get together to form a band. Bandslam approaches this from the point of view of a boy who wants to manage a band, not play

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  • Four and a half reasons

    Dear Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The next time Mr. Daniel Day-Lewis does the lead role in a motion picture, I request you to simply disqualify all other potential Best Actor nominees for reason of not being Mr. Day-Lewis and present him with the statuette forthwith. To support my humble

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