Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast : Swara Bhaskar, Sanjay Mishra, Pankaj Tripathi Rated : 8/10 This is the film of the week — raunchy but not crude, unapologetic but not unreasonable, shameless but not shameful, audacious but not embarrassing. The centre point of all this intense paradox is the stunning, captivating and entirely enervating Swara Bhaskar as bombshell Anarkali, Anar to her fans. It is entirely Swara’s film in which she finally gets a role deserving of her powerhouse of histrionic excellence. Playing a rustic singing superstar in the town of Arrah, she gives the film energy, pace, emotion and the right dose of unfailing raunchiness without which the film would have fallen flat, something that the keen eye of debutant director Avinash Das has written and unfolded as a seasoned man behind the camera. Other than the fact that Swara helms the film, it is delightful that other characters around her are equally excellent in their skin, more so the ever-brilliant Sanjay Mishra. He encapsulates...

Cast : Anushka Sharma, Diljit Dosanjh, Suraj Sharma, Mehreen Pirzada Rated:  6/10 It is a beautiful film with a lot of heart. It is hilarious when required and moving when in the flashback. It saddles two worlds — one 98-years-old when it was beneath good family girls to even consider writing poetry, and the other where the widowed granny, and the rest of the family, is a whiskey-guzzling song and dance family. As producer, Anushka has literally done a ghost of a job. No really. The sets of pre-independence India are keenly stitched up, the shades are just right for a sleepy Punjabi village and the love story is crackling chemistry between an earthy Diljit Dosanjh and a deceptively docile Anushka Sharma. But the film opens 98 years after both are dead and gone, almost. We see Anushka as a glitteringly beautiful ghost in gold and tissue, floating around confused in a Canada-returned rapper Punjabi  munda ’s bedroom. The interactions between her and the munda , ak...

Cast : Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya Rated : 7/10 This slow starter seems to have lost the race in the beginning but moves can be deceptive and this one is extremely so. After the first half-hour, the film — an extra terrestrial horror show with an unexpected end — picks up like rocket fuel on the burn and keeps you on the edge through the rest of the one-and-a-half-hour movie. After the biologist on board a space ship on a mission in Mars, taps a hibernated life cell on the Red planet and shocks it into life in a lab experiment, the deadly turn of events start never to look back. Though the confines of the space ship can be claustrophobic for a two-hour drama mainly focussing on sealing the escape pipes and tunnels of the ship apparently to save the earth from the catastrophic lab alien, the drama around this octopus-like shape is enough to catch you unawares and make you wonder if at all space mission...

Cast:  Rajkummar Rao, Geetanjali Thapa Rated:  5/10 To carry a two-hour movie as an edgy thriller from an inaccessible two-room 37th storey abandoned apartment with just one human, a rat, a cockroach, two pigeons and a handful of ants is a difficult proposition. But it’s a proposition Hollywood has experimented and sometimes even been successful with. For Bollywood, and Rajkummar Rao, it was a first. For a first-time effort, it was by and large a good gripper. But the problem lies not with the film or its execution, but the fact that it has been made for an audience that has no attention-staying powers and is largely ill at ease with such subjects. For the Indian audience at large, to be with the film that feeds on the monotony of isolation is a difficulty factor which only a handful of discerning viewers can tame. After renting a 37th floor apartment in an uninhabited building, Rao feels he has the ring in the girl’s hand finally but all goes wrong once he ge...

Cast:  Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Emma Thompson Rated:  7/10 It’s a much feted fairytale the whole world knows about, has read many times as a child and an adult, sat through plays, enacted in schools and seen in films too. So, you would say, it would not work yet again, especially not so soon after Disney brought the stunning Broadway type stage musical with the same title to town just the other year. Nothing of that sort in this carefully curated CGI wonder. The beast, the castle, the ice and doom, the cute human-turned-curios, the megalomaniacal villain, the landscape and the heroine — all of them stitch up an arresting tale seen best from behind 3D blinkers. More human than their 1991 animated masterpiece, Disney this time plays on Emma Watson’s histrionics as the ultimate Belle and the good looks of the beast who finally transforms into the groovy looking Dan Stevens. But it is the dressing up of this musical that...

Cast:   Mustafa Burmawalla, Kiara Advani Rated : 3/10 Let’s admit it. Abbas-Mustan, an era in themselves, have finally become prisoners of their time and are actually way past their prime. They can’t let go of their old worldly mores and the modern world can’t give them enough time to build a story or a sequence. After belting out blockbuster after blockbuster throughout their career of more than two trendsetting decades, after shaping up the careers of the likes of Shah Rukh, Akshay and Salman to name a few, after lending swish polish of sex and thrills and pace and race to the Indian screen, after sustaining their efforts through a fast changing Bollywood, they’re now on a downhill. After delivering something as modern as  Race , they dented their journey with Kapil Sharma, and now they have done their ultimate no-no film with  Machine . This despite the fact that they were very guarded in launching Abbas’ son Mustafa. To avoid any untoward incidents...

Cast : Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian, Toby Kebbell, John Ortiz, Corey Hawkins Rated : 7/10 If anything, this film is about bigness. Kong, as the name suggests, is supposed to be big. But how big you realise once you see him towering over the mountains and pulling down choppers from high heavens. We have known King Kong earlier too, and with a lot of emotion. This time round however, it is King Kong in his terrain, protecting, guarding and being a loner in the jungles of an unknown, unexplored, storm-drenched island. The difference? He is fighting not human predators but much bigger monsters which rise from the underground — a cross between lizards and crocs. And just then, the humans arrive and get inadvertently involved in this massive turf war. The film is engaging, high on CGs and tastefully mammoth. The action, almost incessant, keeps you on edge and gives you value for money. As for the emotional content, there’s not much and what...

Cast: Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt, Gauahar Khan, Mohit Marwah, Aakanksha Singh Rated: 7/10 Jhansi meets Kota in a bubble of rustic romance that’s somewhat better and chirpier than Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania. In both cases, the dulhaniya is Alia Bhatt who holds not just Humpty but also Badrinath by the beat of their heart. Here, as a Woman’s Day special, she delivers a message against domesticating career-oriented women and she does so with a lot of zing. She looks effervescent, for once has got the accent right though its more Bihari than UP. She sports a naturalese that’s becoming and gives you a hundred reasons to love her just as passionately as her Badri does. Varun Dhawan as a hurtling chhotey shehr ka chhora, high on his male chauvinistic father’s wealth, complements Alia in every which way. The director has kept the ambience full of fun and frolic and it is the laughs that take you along even when the film dashes into the designer environs of Singapore, which inciden...