Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast:    Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig Rated:  8/10 Miles away from America and its 1960s, India still knows the John F Kennedy assassination tale by heart. So does America. Or so both nations and their gentries thought, till Jackie came along to press their imagination on what might have happened behind the scenes four days into the assassination of the most youthful and handsome President of America. Straightaway, full marks to Natalie Portman who plays the agonised and terrorised but determined and poised Mrs Kennedy all through the aftermath of her husband being killed. Straightaway, full marks to director Pablo Larrain for making such a compelling docu-drama, that too coming all the way from Chili if you don’t mind and not being great with English language! Jackie is his version of what might have happened in the White House in those four days, an imaginary version if one must point out. The in-fights, the tensions, the issues of world...

Cast:    Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, David Wenham and Nicole Kidman Rated:  7/10 The film ends with the adopted mother coming all the way from Tasmania to an unknown belly of India called Khandwa to hug the biological mother of Saroo and one would have wanted to know more of life after. But Lion does not tell you that. What it tells you is an amazing, rare and incredible story of a small boy lost in a train, marooned in the bad streets of Kolkata for some years, taken to a shady orphanage and then getting miraculously adopted by a childless couple all the way away in Hobart. He grows up there and it is only after 25 years that he makes an amazing return to his roots of which he did not know or remember anything other than the place he called “Ganeshtalay”. It’s not on the map, it’s not even in his memory and no one knows how far it is from Kolkata where he was found. But he finds it, and that’s an amazing part of the journey that this sensitively made fil...

Cast:   Saif Ali Khan, Shahid Kapoor, Kangana Ranaut Rated:  6/10 Rangoon, the name itself conjures up a compelling nostalgia that director Vishal Bhardwaj has worked hard, apparently for more than a decade, to portray in this war-romance. The canvas is big and the intentions honest but Rangoon unfortunately gets too caught up in the razzle-dazzle of looking and sounding much too grand and thereby walking away from both the war at hand and the romance brewing around the uniform, at a time when India was in the midst of many battles. But there’s no denying the fact that this film is a visual, musical treat as is expected from the haunting strains of Bhardwaj, which suddenly peak in the film and catch you unawares when the director passionately sings the INA version of the rashtra gaan. It is a musicless, deep-voiced rendition that compels you to stand up in ovation and while you are paying your respect to the nation, you do spare a nod for the film’s lead chara...

Cast:  Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Ciarán Hinds, Liam Neeson Rated:  6/10 It’s a masterpiece on religion. It is a thinking movie and yet a commercial one. It is maestro Martin Scorsese’s 15-year-old dream that has been framed with finesse. Revolving around the tale of two missionaries in Japan and the choices they need to make in an era when Christianity was banned,  Silence  is titled — and entitled — to raise deafening issues around religion. There is a lot of gore, stark gore like blood-splashing beheading etc and Scorsese’s dogged ‘I will not let up come what may’ keeps you constantly on edge. And while you are on edge with what meets the eye, he also secretly and copiously works at jogging your mind, thinking about the fallout of faith, talking less and showing you more about the violent instincts that often need a prayer to save you from the very faith you are propelling. Scorsese is radical about religion this time but perhaps bec...

Cast: Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali Rated: 6/10 This introvert movie on Black life and times through the coming of age of a gay Black boy has won 8 Oscar nominations despite its slow-moving, introspective and often uncomfortable tale of a typical Black boy growing up amid drugs, bullying, crime and addiction. For those not squeamish about being with issues at cinema halls will be totally taken in by the depiction of Little’s life which has been broken down into three chapters by the director. The beauty of the film lies as much as in the fearlessly slow scripting as in the distinct characterisation of all the three stages of Little’s growing up. Language and diction may be a problem for Indian viewers but the emotion often flows from the eyes and the twitching lips both of which are the most powerful medium of this film. The film gently persuades you to not judge or categorise life, understand the...

Cast:  Keanu Reeves, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ruby Rose, John Leguizamo, Ian McShane Rated:  5/10 The big star is here but his movie is not the biggest one of this week. Keeanu Reeves is back as John Wick in this second installment of chase, kill, blood and gore mount, this time with a much higher body count. Pulled out of retirement from an underground rogue organisation, by an unscrupulous brother wanting to kill his sister for an all-powerful ministerial seat, Reeves is literally singed out of his house and retirement and is made to do things he had left doing long before his wife died of health complications. Reeves goes about doing his job as a bullet sprayer, fisticuffer and a silent killer without much ado. The film is not about him so much as it is about screechy but not scary car chases, continuous spraying of bullets, gory fights and a lot of eardrum-breaking noise. The end is wantonly greedy and has no qualms of saying John Wick wi...

Cast:  Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons Rated:  7/10 This gentle but little known Afro-American tale buried in the segregation issues of deep southern America is the feel good movie of the week. This inspiring tale of three Black women and their fierce and path breaking struggle for identity in NASA’s ambitious space programme of the 60s is heart-warming even though America’s bleakest and most squeamish race issue is on display. The three Black women — a mathematician who is now 98 and still alive in real life, an aspiring space engineer and a programming mind in days when IBM was struggling to structure its first computer — are entirely fleshed out characters with distinct stories but singular problem. Katherine, a single mother raising three daughters, has the mind of a calculator who lands in the scientific room of NASA’s top docket programme to send the first man in space. Run by the eccentric workaho...

Cast:  Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Shawn Roberts, Ruby Rose, Eoin Macken Rated : 6/10 This is the sixth one in the series and is called the Final Chapter. But there have been many final chapters in many movies which have opened and reopened much after their profession finalities, much like the careers of many a Pakistani cricketer. So,  Resident Evil  buffs need not go in just for the final hurrah or loyalties to the franchise over the years. What they need to buy the ticket for is Milla Jovovich, the keen fighting woman action lady who has led the series from the front with all her killings, chases, muscle flexing and, of course, futuristic gun-toting. She is good and engaging in this one too where she has to reach “The Hive” to dig out an anti-virus and rid humanity of the ultimate wipepout threat. With her director husband keeping up the pace of the movie from behind the camera, though with some timefoolery and over-the-top, wantonly aggressive action scenes,...

Cast:  Gary Oldman, Asa Butterfield, Carla Gugino, Britt Robertson Rated:  5/10 It’s been quite some Valentine seasons that no good romance from Hollywood has swayed your heart. Not just Hollywood, even Bollywood has not planned anything special for this special month. The Space Between Us is an attempted romance in the sci-fi spatial genre and works hard at creating those moments with an ethereal looking female lead and her comp-and-romp interlude with a man from Mars, literally from Mars. The film has its moments but they are as sparsely populated as life is on Mars from where this blue-watery-eyed 16-year-old comes. Born to an astronaut who boards the flight to Mars hiding her pregnancy from the world, and her husband, his vital organs are not equipped to handle gravity and thus he has to be banished to live on Mars for life, summarily sentenced to such spatial isolation by a company which had manned the mission. After his mother Sarah Elliot dies in child birth...

Cast: Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D'Onofrio, Aimee Teegarden, Bonnie Morgan Rated: 5/10 The horror flag of this week comes with a lot of evil spreading the fear through a video game. Not exactly a scream this one as the fear element is slow and stealthy but it does have its moments and can be placed in the middle of the ladder when it comes to sibling assessment of the Ring series. It all starts with a nose-bleeding hyper flier who tells his neighbour on a flight to New Jersey about feeling squeamish after watching a video a girl at the party gave him before vanishing into the blue. And just then, slush flows into the plane, there is a scary girl emanating out of the insides of the wiring and then the plane crashes. For starters, it does makes you wonder what’s up next and it is this gentle suspense that keeps you on tenterhooks despite the long winded ghost chase that a teen couple is put on. It all ends up where it shouldn’t and that too gives you t...

Cast:   Akshay Kumar, Annu Kapoor, Huma Qureshi, Saurabh Shukla Rated:  8/10 Jolly LLB 2 is a crackling, near perfect, all-in-place rarity. Call it the star power of Akshay Kumar or the syrup of an eventful script, this one is strides ahead in presentation and engagement from Arshad Warsi’s Jolly... As the Kanpuriya working out of the file-burdened bustling courts of Lucknow, Akshay as Jaggannath Mishra and his janeoo are a slice of small town life, both outside and in the courtroom of small-town India. Akshay shows yet again how powerful he is on the screen even when his muscles are not rippling and his fists are not making too much of an intrusion in his personality. As the wannabe, unscrupulous lawyer whose marital high lies in plying his middle-class wife with whisky secretly and cooking a meal for her as she chomps away as the man of the house, Akshay’s personality has been built with a lot of consideration and is, thus, riveting. But the beauty of this film l...