Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast:  Arjun Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor, Rhea Chakraborty Rated:  3/10 Half Girlfriend  is as pathetic as the face of Bill Gates shown in the film. Not just pathetic, this Arjun Kapoor-Shraddha Kapoor starrer, which came with a lot of weight, and we are not talking about Arjun’s body mass here, is a confused, slow, anti-romance. A Bihari boy in love with a rich Delhi girl who has domestic violence issues at home was doomed from the very start, only director Mohit Suri failed to see it. Yes, he does create drama but gets carried away with it, to disastrous fallouts. Based on celeb writer Chetan Bhagat’s novel of the same name, the film desperately looks for a way out of the existential mess it creates pretty early into the sequence. And what was it with Shraddha? She wears crazy clothes, plays bad basketball, walks like a zombie in the rain and carries a guitar on her slight back without playing it much. She also has dreams, that of being a solo singer in a New ...

Cast : Irrfan, Saba Qamar, Deepak Dobriyal, Dishita Sehgal Rated : 8/10 Hindi Medium  is cutting edge axe that falls on our pretentious society at more levels than one. It tells you of our complete and collective mental subjugation to everything British despite more than five decades of Independence; it shows up the nursery school admission mess that reins the Capital; it lifts the veil on deceitful school owners and their limitless corruption; it laments the decrepit state of the Government schools where talent goes awry due to lack of faculty, interest and infrastructure. Last but not least, it is a stinging slap on our skewed education system which needs an urgent overhaul. And this long awaited axe is borne delightfully by none less than Irrfan who lives the role of a well-heeled Chandni Chowk shop-owner who may own a BMW but is below the poverty line when it comes to speaking English with utmost realism. As a film, it is beautifully executed by director Saket C...

Cast: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling   Rated:  4.5/10 Two reasons to see this slow and steady, old world winner: First, the film is directed by Ritesh Batra, the guy who directed the highly engaging  The Lunchbox . This is his English debut and he does a measurably good job with it. The film may not hold you in thrall throughout but the tugging at your heart and the very many points you may identify it, makes it a movie worth watching. Batra has done well not to overdramatise the look-back by an old who goes back and forth in time and finally emerges from it all to set all his foolish mistakes aside, apologise for his misbehaviour and realise the importance of family. Yes, there are a lot of “blimey” down the way, and at times being with the good meaning old man becomes tedious but it the acumen of the actor that he manages to draw you back into the proceedings and you then sit back and introspect alongside. It all starts with the old man’s ex-girlfriend’...

Cast :  Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Shroff, Manoj Bajpayee, Amit Sadh, Yami Gautam, Ronit Roy Rated : 5/10 You are almost scared that Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) is back because he has been throwing howlers at you of late, cringe worthy howlers and you do not want Sarkar to join that side of the RGV bandwagon. Of course, you have the weight of an Amitabh Bachchan to take care of that but even Bachchan has erred massively in films like Boom. Remember? Sarkar 3 is not freakishly offtrack, irreverent or nonsensical but it is familiar, lazy and meandering in the corridors that have long back closed to public imagination. Even RGV seems to have gotten bored with the franchise, or so it appears when the thinned down storyline starts unravelling. There are no wow moments, no screechy violence, no startling acoustics that RGV is known to have heightened to unsafe limits. There is no conspiracy or dirty politics either. Now, a Sarkar without much murkiness is like chalk being named ch...

Cast :  Ayushmann Khurrana, Parineeti Chopra Rated : 4/10 Some relationships are not meant to be. Some films, too, are not meant to be. Meri Pyari Bindu is afflicted by both. An overly sweet romance between a bhadralok Bengali and his Tamilian neighbour suffering from attention deficit disorder would have made for a pulsating romance but for the director’s complete lack of control over proceedings flitting between then and now. Ayushmann Khurrana as the engineer-turned-writer of pulp fiction is oh-so-sweet that you may get diabetes and if you are the centre of his attraction you too may bolt much like Parineeti does. Only problem is that she keeps bolting from everything and everyone and you kind of get tired with this hop, skip, jump situation of the film. Everything is so overly concocted that even the infectious vivacity of Parineeti and the husband-material stability of Khurrana kind of makes you fed up. Good, thrilling romancing are sadly not coming our way anymo...

Cast :  Charlie Hunnam, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Jude Law Rated : 4/10 Big, medieval, fantasy, historical, mystical, drama. Call it what you must but director Guy Ritchie is no magic builder if, that is, he is not with Sherlock Homes and the elemental Mr Watson. And if there is this Guy directing the proceedings, there has to be Jude Law with all his steely eccentricities which, in this film, translate into being a mean, lean, deceitful, wily usurper of an unloved monarch, a brother who kills for power, a husband who kills for magic and a father who kills for a desperate comeback. To remain big both on canvas and imagination, Ritchie brings in quite a handful. There are mammoths like anaconda hissing and gobbling up people, completely unproportioned elephants spewing fire and of course a band on bats, eagles, wolves and the girls-wrapped octopus riding the watery waves in a dungeon to empower Law with the black magic for which he sacrifices both his wife and daughter. T...

Cast :  Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir Rated : 3/10 It seems this horror film outer space was made in Hollywood’s silly season. Someone just thought of making a journey through space, connecting with an alien theme, splashing the horrors on an Earth-like planet and then rampaging through an attempted story, not so happening camera work and a mildly interesting story line to build up a mammoth. No doubt the film has mammoth intentions of becoming big down the line. What with existential questions from a synthetic created by a doctor in pursuit of origins of mankind, what with created trying to become creator and what with astronauts on a mission to save the remaining colonies deep into the galaxies. There are sci-fi intentions too, what with an animated mother controlling the spaceship, a synthetic working on sleep boxes as astronauts go into cryogenics to save the years and the wrinkles perhaps and outer globe landi...

Cast : Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell Rated:  6.5/10 For followers, this one is as much a riot as the original 2014 edition was, the only difference being that while the first one must have taken them by surprise with its tumultuous and irreverent spatial proceedings, No 2 is a familiar you-know-what-is-coming kind of a built-up anarchy. The action here is much more lionised, technologically honed and prolonged in a bid to keep you engaged for much of the 2.5-hour movie, drawing much of its power from the nebula of the galaxy — a band of bickering, naughty, chilled out and yet impatient odd-balls on a mission to save the galaxy. It all starts with the guardians hard at work on a contract to kill a nauseatingly slimy, mammoth for the gold-plated race of Sovereigns led by oh-so-uptight Miss Ironpants Ayesha. With the incorrigible raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) stealing some Sovereign batteries, the chase of splendid...