Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast:  Bill Murray, Kate Hudson, Zooey Deschanel, Danny McBride, Scott Caan, Bruce Willis Rated:  4/10 Well, Afghanistan is a breeding ground for all kinds of nefarious activities, including a slew of meaningless Hollywood films on subjects as divorced from Taliban as, say, music. An out-of-work, virtually vegetating old music composer and a talent manager who has nothing much to do in life except con bad but rich singers into signing launch contracts in America suddenly gets this offer to go to Afghanistan on a music tour. Even he, despite his utmost desperation for money, sees this as a crazy, non-workable idea but accepts nevertheless for reasons best shown to one and all. Though pregnant with possibilities, nothing much happens in the film which shows over the top sequences on this musician’s journey into the heart of the torn land with characters as inexplicable as the mercenary Bruce Willis who sports his AK-47 like a lollipop and utters dialogues as if in a daze...

Cast:   Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood, Israel Baldecañas, Michael Caine Rated:  4/10 It looks like Van Diesel has had enough of this witch hunt. In this, hopefully, last one of the four series, he sleepwalks through the smokey, dark, dingy crevasses of the netherworld seeking to kill the queen witch whose heart is beating dangerously despite her demise. There’s a heart all right, a really messed up one, but there’s no soul in either the film or in Diesel’s act. He looks tired of immortality, of the witches around him and even of the job he has at hand. Top this with a really tedious, unconvincing and unreasonable order of the night and you have a film which refuses to draw you in despite all the good, bad and ugly spells that the director tries to weave into a story of not many twists and turns. The queen witch is slimy, all branched up, fiery in a yucky kind of way, and quite hung up on destroying humanity. For what reason? You are never really told as...

Cast:  Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Pankaj Kapur, Sanjay Kapoor, Sushma Seth Rated:  5/10 When director Vikas Bahl made  Queen , he made history, he made music and he made a real story with which the audience connected. He also made Kangana Ranaut and her future career in the industry. With  Shaandaar,  he makes nothing and unmakes a lot. An overtly struggling fairy tale, with an overtly struggling storyline, with an overtly struggling Indian wedding, with an overtly struggling  raison   d'être,  and despite the presence of oh-so-cute-but-I-am-cool Alia Bhatt and I-am-and-will-be-Prince-Charming Shahid Kapoor, there is nothing that holds you to this attempted romance in an attempted fairyland. With Bahl, that’s doubly disappointing. Despite all the trappings of the Aesop’s genre, the grandeur of an English castle, the flock of characters meant to take you over the top and a human witch in wheel-chair bound Sushma Seth who worships money ho...

Cast : Kartik Aaryan, Nushrat Bharucha, Sonalli Sehgall, Ishita Sharma, Omkar Kapoor, Sunny Singh,Rumana Molla Rated : 6/10 The sequel follows the original to the T. At least in the subject line. Yes, it is all about girlfriend bashing. Yes it is entirely misogynist. And yes, there is no pretense whatsoever about the fact that director Luv Ranjan has had a raw deal in life where the opposite sex is concerned. But the point here is not to make it a point about the film being virulently gender biased. That it was always supposed to be. The point here is whether all that politically incorrect positioning is fulfilling the ultimate purpose that of being hilarious, tickling your funny bone and making you come out in a happy mood if you are a man, and in an unhappy one if you are a woman who can’t take jokes on yourself. Well, it is hilarious but the laughs come with an unfair amount of punctuations. The dialogues are overtly aggressive in their take on women. And that 9-minute mon...

Cast : Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda Rated : 8/10 Tom Hanks is the centrepiece of this film. So is the story. As is the direction. Not to mention the absolutely stunning grasp on the pace of the film which is slow, deliberate, keen on detail and yet so gripping that you forget the popcorn for those otherwise long two-hour-20-minutes that director Steven Spielberg takes to unfold a drama that is in no hurry to create a crescendo but creates it nevertheless. It is based on a true story of an insurance lawyer first drafted in by the American administration to defend a Soviet spy much against his wishes, and then used to negotiate a swap with an American spy in the cold, hazy and ruinous East Germany just when the Wall was coming up. Spielberg catches the ambience of Germany so well that you are reminded of  Schindler’s List  and the rest of the things are helmed by Hanks and his controlled histrionics. The wry humour, the quizzical looks and a languorous bu...

Cast : Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver Rated : 5/10 This much touted film, a Gothic story of haunted love, blood and horror, is at best a visual treat of immaculate detail. Other than that, there is too much blood, too much gore and too much anticipation of both as the hapless damsel in distress brought into a run-down three century old castle in England tries to fight the isolation and the conspiracy that is meant to eventually get her and the millions she is heiress to. Mia Wasikowska as the victim of her husband and his sister’s murky dealings hold forth with not just her Goldilocks looks but also her portrayal of a bewildered bride who has nowhere to go except in the arms of forced death. The director Guillermo del Toro known for his cine fantasia skills, leaves no stone unturned in showing up the dingy castle as the centrepiece of a scare-land he creates with twisted, bloodied ghosts and black witches which turn into smoke and...

Cast : Rishi Kapoor, Anushka Ranjan, Diganth Manchale Rated : 4/10 The film is not bad but you are still constrained to ask: Why was it made. It is a done to death story, on a done to death theme, in a done to death destination, over a done to death Indian wedding, or should a say not so done to death twin Indian wedding. Top that with unknown faces which fail to switch on the chemistry despite the boy being more chocolate than Cadbury’s and the girl being poor man’s Juhi Chawla with a height advantage. So the only thing that towers in the film are those several inches that hover over the hero who, incidentally, is marrying a girl he does not love. All the ditching at the altar is so predictable that if you had not guess from the second scene of the film, the director would have put you in jail. And then there’s Rishi Kapoor, the hotel’s impeccable manager. Why is he there? No one knows. What is he doing? Nothing of consequence. So there you go!  Source: The Sunday Pioneer...

Jazbaa Cast:  Aishwarya Rai, Irrfan Khan, Shabana Azmi, Jackie Shroff Rated:  7/10 Aishwarya Rai’s comeback movie, after her long hiatus due to motherhood, may not dazzle you as completely as her stunning beauty does, but it sure keeps you much more than mildly interested all throughout. Though an out-an-out Aish vehicle with director/producer Sanjay Gupta quite overtly in awe of her beauty and persona, it is startling how Irrfan pulls you inexorably towards his unkept, alcohol doused, corrupt character. He is a complete counterfoil to Aish and her pristine looks and yet it is no measure of his screen presence that in a woman-oriented vehicle, he takes the best position — the centre-corner seat. Despite the film being a taut thriller born out of a single mother’s battle to save her kidnapped daughter, the chemistry between Irrfan and Aish is crackling and much of the credit for that goes to man of the film, his laconic one-liners, his portrayal of self-defeatism an...

Sicario Cast:  Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Victor Garber Rated:  5/10 You are told at the very beginning that Sicario is the Mexican word for Hitman. So, you know what to expect — a gun-toting, drug doused, atrocities ridden world with CIA, FBI and who all not on a dark and bloody trail of drug lords. The nexuses, the scenes behind the scene, the dusty road-trips, the unaccounted for operations, the illegal ways and means — it’s all there in abundance. At the centre of all this is a woman FBI agent who inadvertently unearths a hostage graveyard (all 46 of their decomposed bodies sewn in the walls of a drug lord’s safe house) during an operation to dig out criminals. She is promptly picked up by CIA operatives and included in a secret mission to kill the big fish deep in the heart of Mexico (Al Passo) without being told anything about what’s exactly going on. It’s all illegal, but it’s all sanctioned, she is told. There are shady men all around doing...

The walk Cast:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale Rated:  8/10 When a 25-year-old French juggler Phillipe Petit did a death defying, 45-minute illegal aerial walk on a sheer cable tied between the terraces of the Twin Towers, 1,400 feet above the ground, the entire world stopped and gaped. It being the 70s, YouTube was entirely unborn and all these four-and-a-half decades later can only show still pictures of the event. So when, writer-director Robert Zemeckis decided to depict this cloud-kissing, immortal moment in history in a full length feature film, it was sure to make the world gape too. That he skillfully manages to do so, all those 42 years later, and much after the World Trade Centre went down to a terror attack that tore the social harmony of the world forever, is a feat no less than the actual walk itself. If ever there could be nausea in the knees, and if ever your legs could turn so completely jelly, it is in the ...

singh is bliing Cast : Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson, Lara Dutta, Kay Kay Menon Rated : 4/10 Nonsense gets a new, over-the-top and super hyper meaning in Singh Is Bliing with Akshay Kumar helping the highly caricaturised kitsch on just one premise — that anything he touches, even wanton lunacy, will, well, bling! Singh Is Bliing is that alag level ki incredible nonsense that amazingly and pretty often strikes a chord among our front benchers. Soon there will be figures floating around the film, calling it a Rs100 crore super duper success in the first week. But fact is that despite the incorrigible Akshay, despite his Sikh act and despite his brand of unapologetic humour, this one is really and in the truest sense a movie doting on madness of the mind, body and soul. The only thing beautiful is Amy Jackson and the only thing correct about this film is to have maintained her language issues. Other than that, of course there is no question of a plot or a coherent story, or of a...

Cast : Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels Rated : 7.5/10 Hope flutters eternal in human breast and under director Ridley Scott, it blooms unexpectedly. He lends trust to hope, campaigns for it, fights gargantuan impossibilities and manages to convince his viewers to root for his hero deserted and almost sure to die on a lonely planet millions of miles from Earth. It is refreshing to see that this spatial saga is not some deep, dark highly gizmotic science fiction heavy on machines and jargon even though a lot has been taken from NASA for authenticity. That Scott uses wry humour as the main vehicle of hope in his cryptic sounding hero Matt Damon only adds to the allure of this film. Scott was a late entrant to the show but leaves his indelible mark on the proceedings, much enhanced by their inherent positivity. Fighting a storm and being hit flat out by his antenna, Damon is inadvertently left behind on Mars for dead by a fast exiting crew inte...

Cast : Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Neeraj Kabi, Sohum Sharma Rated : 8.5/10 Depending on which side you are seeing it from, you may differ or agree with Vishal Bhardwaj’s version of who killed Aarushi Talwar. But from whichever angle you see the film, the unanimous view will be that it is a cutting edge whodunit in which very few or no cinematic props, otherwise called dramatisation, have been used to delve into one of India’s most talked about perfect murders. It is taut, stark and to the point with Irrfan breathing life into a case of death most foul. As a CBI officer who was removed from the case unceremoniously and sought voluntary retirement in sheer disgust he is just brilliant. Konkona Sen as Nupur Talwar, Aarushi’s stone-faced mother, shows too much emotion on screen departing from the popular image of the lady now in jail. Neeraj Kabi is utterly convincing as Rajesh Talwar. Though Bhardwaj stitches together all the theories around the murder at length, the film,...