Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast:  James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult Rated:  6/10 For all those mutant humdingers, X-Men are here and so is apocalypse in more ways than one. For your delight, there is an array of oldest, old and new mutants spanning a situation that began all those eons ago in 3,600 BC Egypt and coming down on a 1980s unsuspecting world. At the centre of all this action packed sequencing is Apocalypse, the overtly CGI-ed and Prosthetic-ised Oscar Isaac as the world’s first ever mutant who has a philosophy as old as time itself, a time when his body hopping session goes awry and he gets trapped in the core of an Egyptian pyramid while in the middle of the process of transferring his consciousness into a another younger, more able human body. By the time he is awakened by a group of believers it is 1983 and the world is all about things he has never seen or imagined. There are nukes, there is a cold war, there are superpowers and roc...

Cast:  Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Randeep Hooda, Richa Chadda, Darshan Kumaar Rated : 5/10 The story of Sarbjit Singh Aitwal, the real one, started in 1990 when he accidentally crossed the unwired Indo-Pak border and ended in 2013 with his body being brought back from the Kot Lakhpat Jail when his release was just a few days short in 2013. Director Omung Kumar puts this long, torturous and tragic journey of a border village family into a two-hour overly dramatic, emotional melodrama at the centre of which is notSarbjit the man himself but his crusader sister Dalbir Kaur. Though Sarbjit’s saga in real life was powered more by his sister than him, the choice becomes an errant path in the film. It becomes one of the prominent problems that the film faces but the bigger one is the casting of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as Dalbir Kaur. Not that she is a bad actor but she was never made for this role and that would have stared for a mile much before the film was scripted. Dalbir is n...

azhar Cast  : Emraan Hashmi, Prachi Desai, Nargis Fakhri, Lara Dutta Rated : 5.5/10 This week, there is a Pele on one side, and an Azhar  on the other, both sporting icons though on opposite sides of the globe. One is about the rise and rise of a footballer from the poor underbelly of Sao Paolo, and the other, about the rise and fall of a cricketer par excellence. Azhar  comes with a disclaimer, saying it is only inspired by Mohammed Azharuddin and not a biopic on him. With this disclaimer it makes fun of itself and of the intelligence of its viewers. Every name, persona and depiction of Team India of the 1990s is for real. The incidents are for real. The situations are for real. Even the events and the court case are for real. But the disclaimer says it’s not all real. Mohammed Azharuddin, the real one that is, has been associated with the film all through. He has even been promoting it with the cast and crew on various TV shows. On the screen, he has been gi...

Cast : Vincent D'Onofrio, Rodrigo Santoro, Diego Boneta, Colm Meaney, Kevin de Paula Rated : 6/10 Pele’s iconic stature cannot but make for a riveting watch on screen. His painfully poor childhood where he had to clean hospital toilets with his father, his ghettoed existence in Sao Paolo, his tragic loss of a friend and his uncertainties with his one and only love — football — should make a movie packed with events, emotions and sequences. This part docu part film narrative on this brilliant footballer who fought against many odds, including poverty, to rise to the summit of the beautiful game falls a few inches short of its subject’s excellence. There was so much more it could have shown and explored so many more facets of the game and its worshipper than it does that you leave the hall wanting to be a little longer with Pele. The film is caught between flashbacks of Pele’s difficult childhood and the 1958 World Cup where the Brazilian team is the underdog. It has player...

Cast : Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan Rated : 5.5/10 They have aged. They have become crazier. And they eat, love and prey  well, in a big, fat way. And, of course, the family thing is like that air bag that bloats on impact to save you from crisis but asphyxiates, nevertheless. If  My Big Fat Greek Wedding  original was an endearing, hatke  entry all those years ago, the sequel is equally engaging, though not more. The characters are more or less the same, though the wedding is not really the central character of this heavy duty family film. A big family, extended one, lives in houses one after the other, virtually colonising a residential lane in uptown Chicago. There’s a delightful grandfather who is obsessed about being Alexander The Great’s direct descendant, there are children who are as Greek as the salad they do down there, the ladies are of all Greek hues  loud, cooking wonders and hair stylists and the men are, ...

Cast : Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Ryan Reynolds, Jordi Mollà Rated : 6/10 Big names, big imagination and good execution make this memory transplant thriller a good one to be with, especially with Kevin Costner doing a pretty good job with a character he has never played – that of an emotionless, incarcerated, brutal killer in whose brain a do-good, wife and daughter loving dead CIA’s agent’s (Ryan Reynolds) remembrances are inserted for a trail that is important for the organisation. The underdone role has been handled well by Costner, much like a successful experiment. As he gets acquainted with emotions of love, caring and affection that have been alien to him, he starts turning from a monster to a human being but the director does well to not completely erase his original personality. So, there is a mix and match, there is brutal violence as also gentle gestures, like battering a man to death in a car hijack and saving a hair brush for the little one. The f...

Cast : Arvind Swamy, Himanshu Sharma, Ekavalli Khanna Rated : 5/10 More than anything else, even more than the serious subject this film deals with, it is an Arvind Swamy film. Remember that chocolate boy with arresting and strangely calming screen presence in  Roja  and Bombay?  He has grown up in this last decade of absence from the screen  grown up to be a more mature, more arrived actor, happy in his rarified cinematic space and ready to experiment with cinema at his own pace, on his own terms. That’s why, probably, he has opted for a film like  Dear Dad   a gentle take on evolving familial relationships riding an uncomfortable closet skeleton. Swamy, a much more rounded actor in many ways, is a delight in the film which is otherwise in a bit of a hurry to hurtle to a happy conclusion of a complex relationship issue. The subject, a gay dad and his son, is both sensitive and bold. It signifies the new wave cinema that Bollywood is now acce...

Cast : George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O'Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe Rated : 6/10 Julia Roberts and George Clooney. You would have thought it to better be a groovy, even if middle-aged, romance, a syrupy tale of light but becoming emotionality. Nothing heavy, just soufflé soft and butter smooth chemistry that explodes all over you. Nothing of that sort, this one. But then, when Jodie Foster is at the helm as director there is hardly space for second hand emotions like love. There is thrill, chill and the will to take the film by its collar and throw it into the deep end of differently enabled action. So, at hand, is a fast-paced, run-for-your-money thriller with an aggrieved man sporting a gun, a bomb trigger and explosive intentions capturing the airwaves live. At the centre of the turmoil are investing options TV star George Clooney (Lee Gates) and his behind-the-scenes director of the show Money Monsters, Julia Roberts (Patty). As entire America watche...

Cast  : Sunny leone, Tanuj Virvani, Nyra Banerjee, Narendra Jetley, Khalid Siddiqui Rated : 5.5/10 You would have thought this one to be the same old Sunny Leone type of caper  mostly between the sheets, high on testosterone and low on an actual story. The director, for what’s it worth, thankfully gets over the bedroom romps  in this case romps in the kitchen, in the bath tub and then in the bed  pretty early in the film to get on with the actual story of an obsessive lover who goes crazy after a one-night stand with Leone in Thailand. The film is not all that un-happening. Leone, for one, after the bedroom scenes, looks great and also manages to act. That her personality is untenable and unbelievable is not her fault. I mean, come on guys, which perfect wife, mom and daughter-in-law with a very righteous chip of family responsibility on her shoulder, would actually go in for a one-night stand with a stranger, that too without any provocation or situation bac...

Cast  : Manoj Bajpayee, Jimmy Shergill, Divya Dutta, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Parambrata Chatterjee, Kitu Gidwani, Vishal Singh, Sachin Khedekar Rated : 5/10 Well, it is a noble subject on which the film is based. A true incident put on to the screen with the very obvious stumbling blocks of the monotony of the ride once the mission sets the tone for a fast-paced action. A child is brain dead after an accident and another child is dying and in need of a heart transplant. How the traffic police and doctors create a corridor for the journey of this heart 160 miles away from the recipient is the premise of this film. The actual incident took place in Chennai which made news and history after the traffic cops created a safe passage for the heart without hitting any traffic jams and losing its heartbeat before reaching the recipient. The problems with the film are two one, how the director keeps the pace of the film to give the viewers that experience of ultimate urgency, and tw...

Cast:  Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor, Sudheer Babu, Paras Arora, Sunil Grover Rated : 7/10 That’s the rating for Tiger Shroff, not the film so much. He has done all that’s impossible in this second film of his. For one, and most importantly, the  chikna chamela  has managed to grow a stubble; then, he has mastered the art of ultimate fluidity. His body is a jerkless spring which throws up smooth, graceful and incredible antics — like the film’s signature scene in which he is introduced as an icon of kalaripayattu, a martial artist standing upside down on one finger and a thumb. He looks amazing, almost unreal, all muscle rippling and a form of body art that we would all pay money to fawn over. He also fights with an agility that comes naturally only to a spinning cheetah. The fitness of his being, the absolutely chiselled frame, and the action sequences that he and his second-time director Sabbir Khan conjure up, hold much of this film in good stead. Yes, Tiger Sh...

Cast:  Jennifer Aniston, JUlia Roberts, Kate Hudson, Jason Sudeikis, Britt Robertson, Timothy Loyphant Rated:  4.5/10 For a film that has a groovy, goosepimply subject of motherhood on the plate and a sterling star cast of none less than America’s sweethearts Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson to play moms of all hues; some teary-eyed, some out-of-the-box, some life-changing daily life situations to peck on, this one should have been a runaway bride. But, no! It gets going rather slowly. The introductory stories — that of a divorced mom, a mom married to an “Indian” on the sly to escape her racist Texan mom, a daughter-mom with mom abandonment issues, a single dad who’s still crying over the loss of his children’s mom, a gay mom, not to mention a teen mom who gives up her child to emerge as the leading lady of television commercials on “Mother’s Day” jewellery — there were too many of these moms in the marinade. And, despite all these heart-strung tales,...

Cast:  Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher, Jr. Rated:  8/10 As thrillers go, this one is a genius of the genre — different and refreshing, on-the-edge and extremely gripping, it flowers in a very confined space of an underground cellar. Kidnapped after a car accident and kept holed up in a basement bunker with enough supplies to suffice for a lifetime, a young girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) goes through a plethora of emotions — from fear to hostility to resentment to finally reconciliation with her situation. Her capturer (John Goodman) is hard to figure out as his psychotic intentions seem to be pretty well-balanced with his almost genial demeanour. He is no crazed killer, maybe just a lonely man who needs company and gets it by holding two hostages which he thinks is in all good faith — to save them from impending doomsday. Conjured up and balanced beautifully by star director JJ Abrams, the guy who moulded biggies like the  Star Wars, ...

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY Cast:  Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Devika Bhise Rated:  7/10 Srinivasa Ramanujan was just 32 when he fell tragically to tuberculosis, after a rigour-filled, prolonged ship journey back from England to Madras as the first native royal fellow at an ivy league college of Imperial Britain. The ultimate Mathematics wizard, a genius of prime numbers, an original thinking mind quite away from the perceived hub of all knowledge, a man who knew infinity as a gift of God himself, Ramanujan took on everything — be it the mathematical stereotype, the racist and highly prejudiced Faculty at Trinity College of London, or the perception that Indian “natives” were a mindless tribe of idiocy meant only to serve their White masters. But, in the hope of getting published more formally than on the temple floors back home, Ramanujan took on all this and much more in a painful journey against all odds. A vegetarian in England was hopelessness personified; a brown ma...