Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast:  Imaad Shah, Ira Dubey, Tom Alter, Barry John, Auritra Ghosh Rated:  4/10 Film festival movies work under a certain veneer of art cinema and seldom harbour box office ambitions. They live and die in a far removed (from regular film viewers) world of applause that may not always make sense to an average cinema goer. But modern-day young directors, this one (Agneya Singh) having directed his first at a callow age of just 22, are ambitious for a far bigger, multiplex kind of splash for cinema that’s more often vacuously affected than really meaningful, all the awards notwithstanding. M Cream  comes into that category. Serenading a journey of four youngsters, one in particular, up in the hills to ostensibly look for the mythical M Cream, a divine hash which gives a high as no other, the story instead (as expected) gets into the more grounded existential issues plaguing Generation Y. Peeping through a haze of alcohol and drugs, flimsy relationships and a mean...

Cast : Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Billy Burke,  Rated:  5/10 Scary, screamy and totally engrossing, this tale of a bad spirit with a skin disease is arresting. Opening in a warehouse where a very bad looking ghost brutally kills the owner after he gets off the phone with his wife, it sets the pace for the rest of the proceedings with elan. You may say scary movies are scary movies, so what’s new. Nothing really is new but when it comes to scaring you,  Lights Out  does it as refreshingly as , I Know What You Did Last Summer  did all those years ago. The spirit, pegged on a mental asylum existence in real life, is made to look scary and completes her deadly death-dos in quick sweeps which is good as it keeps the fear factor at a high. The characters around this spirit, including a cuddly boy, his much grown up elder sister and his neurotic mother are all well fleshed out and help in keeping up the ambience of the tale. A good ...

Cast:  John Cho, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Idris Elba  Rated : 6/10 Good, old  Star Trek.  Oh! The good old Captain James Kirk and the ever enigmatic Mr Spock. The bumbling Scotty, the disagreeing doc, the Starship Enterprise. It’s all delectably the same. Those school days heroes who used to go into space — the final frontier — where no man has ever gone before, are back and how! The groovy call from the past does well to stand up to gizmotic spatial mounts of frenetic present-day cine activity. The beauty of this edition of  Star Trek  is that it is still the same, still languorous, still drama-oriented both at the space and the inter-personal levels and it is still as engaging as ever before. This time the mission is to save themselves from a rogue soldier who has the technology to destroy the Enterprise and much of the Federation with an ancient tool of destruction. He used to be a Fed too,...

Cast:  Irrfan Khan, Vishesh Bansal, Jimmy Shergill, Tushar Dalvi, Nitesh Pandey Rated:  6/10 Irrfan and the common man cause make for an arresting combo on screen, what with no womanly or otherwise intrusions in his singular mission of avenging his son’s death to corruption and negligence. When a technical professional and single father loses his nine-year-old son to a bridge collapse, he first immerses himself in suicidal depression and then emerges from it with a promise to himself that he would somehow, anyhow bring justice to his son. So, he kidnaps the Home Minister’s son and goes on a long journey into wilderness (mainly in Rajasthan) using his technical abilities to remain untraced and yet communicate to the law enforcers what his demands are — those being hunt for his son and bring to book those responsible for his death. The resulting cat-and-mouse game is predictable but stands out because Irrfan emotes to perfection, the dialogue writer inserts appropriate...

Cast:  Rajnikanth, Winston Chao, Radhika Apte Rated:  5/10 As I write,  Kabali  has already become a box office superhit. Holidays have been announced, shows have started as early as 5 am, crazed gentry in Chennai and other places has been giving headless chickens a complex, running around for that all elusive first day first show ticket and, of course, the movie has crossed the Rs200 crore mark in advance booking! That’s bigger than Hollywood and all Salman movie profits put together! So, forgive me all you murugans , you superstar (in blue dots) Rajni cultists, I will stick my neck out and write the truth: Me, more the Amitabh Bachchan types, even a wee bit Sallu Bhai types, me also the one in awe of Rajni following types, me thinks the movie Kabali  is a bore, a prolonged serenade of a super-duper star who has aged and slowed down but still continues to draw from past reputation. As do his fans who see no reason other than being with Rajni for those 2...

Cast (voice over):  Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Simon Pegg, Jennifer Lopez, Queen Latifah Rated : 5/10 I  have loved  Ice Age  and would go to the end of the world to be with it. And this one is actually pegged on apocalypse with a giant meteor headed towards Earth, all set to destroy the animal kingdom and the mammoths within. It is a fanciful journey dotted by usuals — the mammoths, the weasel, the rodents and the like. Friendly, well animated, not forgetting the storyline even once and full of emotion and drama, the journey of the Ice Age family takes you through a roller coaster ride which is, however, slower and flatter than previous ones. But, on a week when you have an embarrassment to Indian cinema in the name of  Great Grand Masti staring you down from cinema hall posters, this one is a safe haven to be with. Mildly interesting, somewhat engaging and pressing your buds of familiarity,  Ice Age: Collision Course  is wor...

Cast:  Vivek Oberoi, Riteish Deshmukh, Aftab Shivdasani, Urvashi Rautela Rated:  2/10 It is an insult to the reviewer to actually waste newsprint and words on this limp, below the belt blow from the  ‘Masti’  franchise. For, it is neither great, nor grand nor masti  in any sense of the term. In fact, it is so amoebic that it defies any kind of structure whatsoever. Add to that, an over two-hour rising of the male parts wrestling with tables, cushions and cold pads to come out of bondage. But then, the effort is so limp that it does not even qualify as porn. The makers could be booked for sexual retardation of the most offensive kind had there been a law to catch such misadventures. Just to let you know that it is a Balaji film, there is what one of the OTT characters says “a lot of  bhootyapa ”, what with a boobs-popping virgin aatmaa  dying to, well, just do it! And the three sexually muscled buffoons, or so we thought, are always there to o...

Cast : Salman Khan, Anushka Sharma, Randeep Hooda, Amit Sadh Rated : 7/10 First things first. The much-touted briefer than brief chaddi that Salman Khan sports for Sultan makes quite a, well, brief presence, almost like an apology that needs to buried deep into the quilts of embarrassment. Just a minute or maybe even less in the movie and Sallu’s “rape-like” clothing is done and over with in just two short scenes. Now, about the film. Surprisingly, this one is not any of those tapori-mixed I-am-superstar kind of movies that Sallu habitually catapults into the 100 crore club just by being himself. This one is an all-out performance, rippling like Salman’s muscles, his journey from being front benchers’ Sallu to emerging as Salman Khan, liked by all strata of viewers. It’s as much director Ali Abbas Zafar’s film as it is Salman’s, Anushka’s or the support cast’s. It is a wholesome entertainer, serious in places, utterly romantic and, of course, serenading the main topic — wre...

Cast (voice): Louis CK, Eric Stonestreet, Tara Strong, Ellie Kemper, Hannibal Buress Rated: 6/10 There are dog people. And then, there are cat people. Also, there are good pets and rogue pets, abandoned pets and militant strays. The Secret Lives of Pets is about all these genres of the domesticated animal kingdom with loads of fun, attitude, visual effects and becoming animation. On a week swept off by superstar Salman Khan’s high octane Sultan, on a week when most Hollywood films as also Bollywood ones were postponed for a quieter less polarised week of movie-going, this one makes a quiet mark for all those who are not swayed by Sallu pyrotechnics. A little away from Disney type animation, here the cats are round as balls and smug too, the dogs are of all shapes and grooming, the birds and the bees are there too, not to mention revengeful bunnies and old hawks who work hard to give up their predatory instinct just as you may be fighting to give up on carbs. The film is ful...

Cast:  Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mahershala Ali, Keri Russell Rated:  4/10 This one from the American Civil War and on one Mr Newton Knight’s heroics against the Confederacy is a detailed piece of faction presented in slow, sometimes tedious detail, especially for a viewer as far removed from American history as an Indian Art student. However, despite the prolonged but simple warfare on horses, in Mississippi’s swamps and around the 19th century,  Free State of Jones  is a free spirited mount on fault lines of America, the racism, the fight for liberty and a vision of a free State that took centuries to arrive. Matthew McConaughey in the saddle as Knight, an Army deserter who builds a force with fellow deserters and renegade Black slaves, is the film’s finest ploy though it would have been welcome if the southern swagger of the language was tackled with running English subtitles.  The film is long and spans a period ofmore than a century,...

Cast:  Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent,  Christoph Waltz Rated:  5/10 This one from Warner Brothers is a different take on the legend of Tarzan wherein Hollywood’s most loved jungle boy (Alexander Skarsgård) is a Lord of British Parliament, a much married and well-heeled Englishman being smothered by urbanity and concrete in his stone castle before being yanked into the sinister jungles of Congo Africa where a devious man is busy enslaving a population and building an Army for power and diamonds. Phew! That’s quite a new take on the rope-swinging apeman of yore, but still not interesting enough to make you really, really watch. The localing, the landscapes and the aerial shots, combined with the CGIs, the colouring of the canvas and the ambience are mediocre in comparison to what a director of the repute of David Yates (Harry Potter man) could and should have achieved. The storyline is much too elaborate and t...

Cast:  Jimmy Shergill, Ashutosh Rana, Sanjay Suri, Narendra Jha, Suha Gezen Rated:  6/10 Those from Uttar Pradesh, be it in the 70s or today, would know what riots can do a city and its people. They tear you apart as a society, they kill without remorse and install the kind of fear in you that has no comparison. What happened in Muzaffarnagar in 2013 was just the tip of what has happened in the narrow by-lanes of old Lucknow in the 70, 80s and even the early 90s. So,  Shorgul , though being touted as a reflection of the Muzaffarnagar carnage, could actually be a take on any Hindu-Muslim riot anywhere in India. The blueprint is the same — there’s a small issue between the two brittle communities (in the case of Shorgul  a misguided one-sided inter-community love story) that triggers the violence, often fanned by vested interests and politicians. The RAF steps in, there is shoot-at-sight, the city comes to a standstill and destruction is the all-pervasive s...