Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast voice over:  Andy Samberg, Katie Crown, Kelsey Grammer, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Jennifer Aniston Rated:  6/10 Cute as they come, the charm of  Storks  comes from the newness of being. Well, for one, there’s never been a storks story on animation. Yes, there have been birdies but only as sidekicks to bigger jungle animals. So when storks come visiting they come pregnant with ideas that have so far not been explored. And these storks are into delivering everything through their company cornerstone.com, except — yes you guessed it right — babies. So when a baby-demand letter gets through and falls into the fertilisation machine, there is chaos. Also, there is a baby that pops out and she has to be delivered. The film is full of fun and keeps you alive with its characters, colour and characters. The storks are well caricatured and so are the penguins and their huddle characteristics. The baby is too cute to be true and the story is giggly and...

Cast:  Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Emma Thompson Rated:  5.5/10 Dear diary, I met up with Bridget Jones today after many years. She looks old, pretty old actually. At 43, she is having a baby but her bumbling persona remains all the same despite her changed (read wrinkled) face. Nothing around her seems to have changed except for the fact that despite her plus-size craziness, she is still a tall executive with a TV company and does pretty well for herself. Personal life? Well, she is still looking for solace with one man but gets many, actually three, to her bed and spends a whole lot of time — actually the entire movie — trying to figure out who the father of her impending child really is. As fathers for this late coming baby are concerned, you must give it to Bridget, they are all dishy men with deep pockets. Of course there is the long lost Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) with his quizzical undertoned charm. He wants her but she knows work is his f...

Cast:  Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt,     Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensme Rated:  5/10 One thought magnificent would mean grand, Western would be wild old Charles Bronson type, and seven would be all able and fired up, led as they are with the extremely mission-oriented Denzel Washington. None of the elements that used to make westerns westerns, add up here. Denzel is sluggish as are Chris Patt and Ethen Hawke. There is a village alright. There is siege alright. There is a population that needs to be saved alright. But there is very little life in the film even after a recently widowed village belle gets out to seek justice for her fellow dwellers who are under the evil grip of a businessman duo. The violence that has been the foundation of all westerns over the ages, dots this film too but despite its playing-to-the-gallery overtness, it does very little to engage the viewer. The magnificent se...

Cast:  Amitabh Bachchan, Tapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari, Andrea Tariang, Angad Bedi, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Piyush Mishra Rated:  9/10 You can call it an uncomfortable masterpiece. The subject is everyday. The presentation is extra-ordinary and the actors fleshed out to the core. Pink is a moving, hard-hitting, stark and candid film on eve-teasing, bullying and character assassination of working Indian women and it has been stitched up with a lot of care and caution. The first outstanding thing about it is that it does not wear kid gloves — not for the victims and certainly not for the well connected perpetrators. It shows up the police as it is, a hand-maiden of unscrupulous political masters, deceitful and totally insensitive. Though Shoojit Sarkar is not the director of this speaking film, he is everywhere, in every frame, in every dialogue. But  Pink  is not about being or not being director’s film. It is intensely subject oriented and the subject is so com...

Cast voice over:  Matthias Schweighöfer, Kaya Yanar, Cindy aus Marzahn, Dieter Hallervorden, Aylin Tezel Rated:  7/10 Not the time to release such a fun movie for kids considering examinations are on full blast and Hollywood films rarely make it beyond two weeks. All the more so as this one would have been a roller-coaster for kids. It has everything that an animation should have — the colour, the character, the locale, the story and all the fun, frolic and humour. Crusoe has been an adventurer story we have grown up on so kids are pretty familiar with his seas journey, the shipwreck and the lonely island he washes ashore on. The animals on this island become his friends and it is satisfying to see how each one of them, be it a macaw, a parrot, hedgehogs or an old goat have their very own distinct character. The menacing ones, like the cats on prowl, look mean and menacing enough. The cute ones look cute and the bumbly ones bumbly, thanks to the animators’ exceptio...

Cast:  Blake Lively Rated:  6/10 Shallow is a deep one on will power and fight for survival against all odds, in this, the odds being a killer shark, a marooned surfer in a deserted ocean and a bird for company. That’s a pretty constricting platform to make a 2-hour film on but director Jaume Collet-Serra keeps you on the edge all the time. You live the protagonist’s fears, her helplessness, her will power, her hopelessness and her fight with the shark. Much like  Gravity , this one too is a solo performance and nothing much except the shark and the ocean water move here after the surfer from Texas is attacked while navigating a wave on a secret beach where help is none and public far away. Blake Lively gives in a stunning performance as does the shark. Giving up her medical career after failing to save her mother, she goes solo to a secret beach in Mexico to find her mother’s favourite place. What happens to her depicts much more than just a shark attack and ...

Cast:  Emraan Hashmi, Kriti Kharbanda Gaurav Arora Rated:  5/10 Familiarity breeds contempt but in this case, boredom. As the Bhatt brothers realised, the haunted house in a distant land theory has been done to death by the House of Bhatts. That’s why they have announced an end to this series. So you can go and be with reboot without any major issues. Yes, it is the same old story narrated in the same old way. There is a sexy couple, in a sexy foreign location (this time it is Romania), a bad spirit, an exorcist, a mind reader, and of course melodious songs. Yes, there’s Emraan Hashmi too. Just like the evil spirit there can't be a  Raaz  series without him so he does his bit in this one too. Yes, he lip locks, yes he gives those come bother looks and yes he gets the girl. But then there’s a twist and that brings in all the difference. The story spans everything that Raaz  movies have done in the past so there are few surprises, except maybe the un...

Cast:  Sidharth Malhotra, Katrina Kaif, Sarika, Ram Kapoor, Sayani Gupta Rated:  5/10 Sidharth Malhotra and Katrina Kaif make for an unusual jodi  alright. He underplays brilliantly. She is a wholesome package of beauty, song and dance. He is fair, tall and handsome and she a delightful bimbette on screen. Together they could have woven quite a pulsating romance but thanks to modern vagaries of technology, they sadly get caught in futuristic concepts like time travel and lose the heartbeat in the needless and fruitless journeys back and forth, between 2016 and 2063 AD. As a concept, it is quite Hollywood and modern. But in Indian circumstances and with a script which is neither entirely romantic nor entirely futuristic,  Baar Baar Dekho  is an unfleshed film mounted on the star value of its lead actors and producers, the producers being Karan Johar and Farhan Akhtar. To show up the Math wizard Jai (Malhotra) as a complete loser unable to handle the m...

Cast:  Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Arbaaz Khan, Amy Jackson, Jas Arora Rated:  5/10 It seems that the director and producers are fans of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s contribution to acting and have made this film merely to serenade his histrionic prowess. Nawaz, as  Freaky Ali , delivers. He encapsulates the nuances of an unemployed chawl youth dabbling in failed businesses and mildly illegal acts till he gets to playing golf and rising to the top without, however, changing much in his personality. As far as creating a movie out of nothing is concerned, Nawaz is brilliant in holding it up. He is adequately flippant, fearless, brazen and foul mouthed when needed. He has the simple goodness in him and also the aspirations and greed for money that are endemic to poor lads. However, even this powerful actor gets lost in the patchiness of the film and that’s sad for this differently-abled effort. The script is shallow, the events in the film pretty few and the laughter element r...

Cast:   Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney Rated:  8/10 It was in 2009 that an American airliner with 130 plus crew aboard had to make an emergent landing in the freezing Hudson river and it was the courageous pilot’s quick-thinking mind that saved the lives of everyone on board. Indeed, it is quite a thing to survive a plane crash and the pictures of the passengers standing on the wings of the plane in the middle of the Hudson have stayed in public memory all these years later. This film is based on the investigations into the act of the pilot and is riveting in its slow-moving drama thoroughly underplayed by the white-haired and impactful as always Tom Hanks. As the commander of the fateful plane which gets bird-hit and loses goths its engine, Sully as he is called, is a character to be with. Behind the heroic act of deciding to land — and successfully landing — on water he is full of fear, angst and doubts about his actions even though the nations unitedly cel...

Cast:  Sonakshi Sinha, Konkona Sen Sharma, Anurag Kashyap Rated:  7/10 Akira  is an out-an-out Sonakshi Sinha film and she does her best to save it. The problem is that she has a lot of saving to do. She has to save the plot which is patchy, she has to save the plummet at the end and she has to save the somewhat convoluted sequencing, which looks like a fallout of a fragile script. However, having said that,  Akira  is an engaging film with delightful editing and sound values which lend a lot of crescendo its kickass woman main protagonist. It is a slick, well-dressed and good-looking mount which gets somewhat dented due to its mish-mash plot of corrupt policemen on an incredibly unscrupulous cash-and-kill-run under the dark-charactered ACP played with a lot of fun and frolic by director-turned-actor Anurag Kashyap. If Sonakshi in her permed, crop-cut hair and well curated  kurta  and jeans dos is the good kickass student, Kashyap in all his ...

Cast:  Jackie Chan, Fan Bingbing, Johnny Knoxville Rated:  5/10 What do you say about Jackie Chan? His film templates are all the same, his action sequences are all the same, his plots are all the same. Yet, you go to his movies, you enjoy and you come back happy with your corn and cola and, of course, all the antics Chan takes you through. Skiptrace  is just the same good, old thingy. A cop partner dies, Chan is assigned to take care of his daughter, he is after the bad guy who killed his partner and is Hong Kong’s super evil Matador, somewhere down the line, he gets a very American partner type of funny man and the rest is  Skiptrace. All through this rumbling journey through Macau, China and Mongolia, there are varying degrees of action and fun and funniness that are Chan’s hallmarks. Another thing altogether though that Mr Chan is vintaged a little too much, a bit slow on the action swipes and yet lot of fun to be with still, despite the ultimate fami...

Cast:  Vinay Pathak, Tanishta Chatterjee, Ashwin Mushran Rated:  5/10 The film is robotic and director Ruchika Oberoi has worked really hard to bring out this stuccato robotism in the film which pegs its scary drabness on three megapolis narratives. She starts off with an IT company executive (played by Vinay Pathak) who is a human robot working through the day in such routine that it kills you seeing him. Oberoi brings out his crippling isolation in a soulless Mumbai teeming with people all around him. Forced by his company to go on a day’s vacation after winning the best employee award, he has to spend coupons in a mall and follow the orders of the fun and frolic committee. Buying soft toys, going on baby rides and being stuffed with home goodies (like a loofah), he performs the routine as a robot would, till there is a mix-up which gives him an assault rifle to become a killing machine (this too is on instruction). Till the shooting spree, Pathak’s story is flat but...

Cast:  Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto, Stephen Lang Rated:  8/10 Yes, you don’t breathe in this one. Almost all through. Only in the interval, perhaps. And, you return late night in fear, even of the radio taxi driver who is a good soul but scary because you’ve come out of such a tightly gripping murder mount. Don’t Breathe  is a fantastic house invasion action-thriller which keeps you on the edge all through — as I said, even in the interval and much after you’ve gone home. Three young burglars come to know of a deserted house in which $300k are stashed away by a blind war veteran and they look for an invasion. Nothing unusual in that but what unfolds is such a night scream that you marvel at the director’s ability to throw up the fear factor to the maximum. The dim lighting, the foiled escape sequences, the blind man himself, his secret prisoner and all the murders that happen through this night in a house on a deserted street are completely hair-...