Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

2 States Starring:  Arjun Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Ronit Roy, Amrita Singh, Revathy Rated:  6/10 Two States  will beget two very strong opinions — the overwhelming one will be that it is too slow, too long and too personal. The other, however, will be effervescent, much like Alia Bhatt is in this film on writer Chetan Bhagat’s early days as a student and lover. Somewhere in between these two very distinct views lies the truth — it is an engaging film, for once largely true to the book it is based on, slow in parts and yet interesting enough as a love story with apt regional divides. The director, it seems, is sold out on Bhagat as he has modeled Arjun Kapoor who plays the writer’s role, as a controlled man with huge understanding (very un-male if one can say) and someone who rarely gets provoked. Yes, it is sad that his growing up years were spent playing father to his mother as he puts it very aptly, and it is even more unsettling that this happened to someone you h...

Transcendence Starring:  Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Rebecca Hall Rated:  7/10 Hollywood is going nuts on the imagination front and I am loving it! Just the other month, it had the main protagonist falling in love with a computer operating system with has a woman’s voice, which, hold your heart guys, dumps him and gives him a massive heartbreak! Then there was Sandra Bullock who, not too long ago, got suspended in space for the entire movie, which, again hold your heart, won no less than seven Oscars. And now you have a star no less than Johnny Depp dying of radiation only to digitised his brain cells and live as artificial intelligence happily ever after with his wife. You could call it a riveting love story where an uploaded Depp manages to experiment with nano technology to regenerate human bodies and give sight to the blind, muscle to the crippled and unexplained strength to a man blown up by dynamite. Being an unabashed Deppist, one would have wanted more o...

Bhoothnath returns Starring:  Amitabh Bachchan, Parth Bhalerao, Boman Irani, Sanjay Mishra Rated:  6/10 Bhoothnath Returns  could mean many things for many people but the unanimous vote for it will still go to it being a surprise package. For one, it is far removed from what you would have thought it was all about — a caper on an ageold  bhooth’s  antics with a child or a group of cherubic children, a little bit of  darr  and a lot of harmless fun in  bhoothdom  on Earth. Far from it, actually. The film is a serious effort at gentle yet stinging satire on the plight of the Indian nation, its corrupt politicians and its election faultlines. The ultimate winner of this slap on the face of dirty Indian politics is not Amitabh Bachchan as much as it is the dialogue writers Nitesh Tiwari and Piyush Gupta whose pithy one-liners are punches that hit you hard. Yes, you laugh at what they say but you also marvel at the catching up they have ...

Rio 2 Starring:  Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Leslie Mann, Bruno Mars, Jemaine Clement, George Lopez, Jamie Foxx Rated:  5.5/10 As is the case with most animations from Hollywood, this one too (from Blue Sky Studios) is beautifully sketched, coloured and executed. Anne Hathaway, Jesse Eisenberg, Bruno Mars and Jamie Foxx render an excellent voice-over to the clutch of human and bird characters that soar into the eclectic Amazonian forest, threatened by unscrupulous and illegal deforestation. The film, no better as a sequel, is still captivating, thanks to the stunning colour schemes, the choreography of the bird and dance sequences and the message that all this comes with. Kids will love it, and also learn from it, so don’t hesitate in taking them to the cinemas.  Source: Sunday Pioneer, 13 April, 2014

Divergent Starring:  Kate Winslet, Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Ashley Judd, Jai Courtney Rated:  5.5/10 I  don’t much like living in a complicated, futuristic world where the only thing I can recognise as connected with my kind of humanity are the concrete buildings and some technologically retarded metro trains which do have a malfunctioning ‘stop’ button, compelling passengers to jump in and jump off at precarious points!  But then, the world has moved on to such mounts and in this genre,  Divergent  is pretty consuming, or should I say dauntless in its intent to save the humanity in quite a different way. As the theory of faction above family and choosing a way of life which puts men apart from boys takes shape under the ruthless wings of Kate Winslet, there is danger of humanity being turned into mindless robots injected with a serum demanding — and getting — instant subservience to instructions. In all this mumbo jumbo, Winslet, though in a...

Oculus Starring:  Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff Rated:  4/10 Too much jargon, too little happenings and some not-so-terrifying horror sequences makes this one a lazy ghost of a story. But that does not take away from the ambitious premise that this film fails to cash in on. A rugged as iron mirror which has stood the test of centuries — and accorded horrific deaths to its owners — is the centre of attraction though the reflections that it throws back at you are somewhat predictable, sometimes inane and quite repetitive at times. Yes, the blood and gore is adequate, as is the syrup that comes from Karen Gillian’s controlled performance (which includes a bloody scene of her eating up a bulb and she delivering a 13-page monologue), but she meets quite an unnecessary and abrupt end which dents into the film’s extra-ordinary circumstances. The problem with this one that there are too many intrusions into a film where a little bit of silence here and there...

Main Tera Hero Starring:  Varun Dhawan, Ileana D'Cruz, Nargis Fakhri, Anupam Kher Rated:  6/10 Votaries of “meaningful” or even “slightly meaningful” cinema can get ready for an audacious boob-moving kick by the young gun from the House of Dhawan. With daddy’s full sanction, a six-packed, chikna chested Varun does everything that a David Dhawan hero must do to tickle all your bones, not just the funny one which Govinda tickled so vigorously all those years ago that you may still be reeling under the effect. But then, Varun is no Govinda though he tries very hard and even apes him in very many sequences — if, that, is you can call anything a sequence in a David Dhawan movie. And as we go down the roller-coaster of unbreachable nonsense, we can be rest assured that David Dhawan, despite a secret desire to dabble in meaningful cinema, has not slowed down his fetish for kitsch. It’s this no-pause-comma-no fullstop-genre of cinema that he has propelled unabashedly, this...

After the third bell Starring : Udayan Banerjee, Akanksha D Sharma, Sukhesh Arora, Sukhesh Arora, Akanksha Dahiya, Gauri Dewal Rated:  5.5/10 A group of guy next door youngsters, more men than women, star is this rather homely crime thriller which comes across more as theatre than as a film. It was rather refreshing to sit alongside the entire crew of the movie, clapping away at their own performances, as the film unfolded. On the whole it is a happeningly different thriller where a bunch of seven suspects are being interrogated for a murder of their friend on stage during a show. Quite obviously, this is a low budget movie, but the director has done well to keep it chic nonetheless. It is adequately modern in its presentation and content delving into the young world of theatre artists where being gay, living-in, taking drugs and immersing in complete theatrics is the order of the day. It is sad that such Bollywood ventures by newbies die under the weight of publicity n...

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Starring : Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Hayley Atwell, Robert Redford, Samuel L Jackson Rated : 6/10 Captain America is back and it’s a marvel that decades of being buried in ice have only brightened his aura. Like all superhero movies, this one too comes with the usual “save the world” tag pinned on the ageold suit of the skipper, one which he lifts from a museum so blatantly that the security guard feels “I am so fired.” The new thing about this Marvel comic story is that it comes with political overtones and the fight is between an ex-S.H.I.E.L.D commando smashed into becoming a rogue with lost memory and forgotten good deeds, and his buddy Captain America who continues to be good, a wee bit too good for the world he returns to. To say it literally, the action is HYDRA-headed even though there might be bit too much of a similarity in the rash of superhero movies. But the sequences are well scripted, the dialogues wr...