Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast : Anya Singh, Sachin Pilgaonkar, Prince Parvinder Singh, Aadar Jain Rated:   4/10 YRF gets ambitious here in bringing in an issue-based film high on musical notes and ditties on our Judicial, law enforcing and skewed prison systems but the film is nevertheless an interesting concept. Another matter though that the film is too well-dressed to be convincing or motivating. The pace somewhat comes from the lyrics that have not only been penned well but also sung with gumption getting you involved with their high octane notes challenging the system. Based on the plight of the thousands of undertrials languishing in our overcrowded, dingy, crime infested jails, it focuses on a group of youngsters who are caught in the Sunny Deol kind of “date after date after date” situation, some being incarcerated for more than three-four years despite not even having committed a crime or having committed a crime too small for the punishment. After they perform at an Independence...

Cast : Sidharth Malhotra, Jacqueline Fernandez, Darshan Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Kushal Punjabi, Hussain Dalal, Supriya Pilgaonkar, Rajit Kapur Rated : 6/10 A swishy pacemaker, this romantic spy thriller on a Miami to Mumbai junket pans out on the broad shoulders of Sidharth Malhotra and the gyrating sexiness of Jacqueline Fernandez. Add to that the slick dressing up of the scenes by directors Raj & DK and you have a film that keeps you and your popcorn brainlessly and aimlessly but sufficiently engaged. Malhotra plays a good guy and a bad guy, all at the same time, playing out both portions in equal measure. As an IT programmer with a big firm, a big house, a big dream and a big amount of loneliness, he is both   sundar   and susheel   but too right to be husband material for the fun-loving Jacqueline he is rooting for. As the bad guy, but actually not a bad guy, he is a crack killing machine who can do pretty much everything that the good one can’t even...

Cast : Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Bidita Bag, Jatin Goswami, Shraddha Das, Divya Dutta Rated : 2/10 I kill, you kill, we all kill — kill, kill, kill. That’s the movie in summary. And helming this killer film from the badlands of cow belt is Nawazuddin Siddiqui. It’s an impossible situation really for Nawaz, the contract killer who lives on the edge, taking contracts, humping prostitutes and enjoying his drunken stupors and fake Ray Ban collection in his ramshackle bricks-only ruin of a house in the middle of nowhere. The impossible task is to make sense of all the senseless blood and gore that he orchestrates. It’s a usual but boring violent caper from the underbelly of Bihar where unscrupulous debauchery of power and lust are the norm to kick up a film from. So you have a power hungry, beedi   smoking, sindoor   wearing jiji   (Divya Dutta is good in the role) as one power centre, battling with the totally debauched (but wife-oriented) Dubey on the other end, u...

Cast:  Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L Jackson, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek, Élodie Yung, Joaquim de Almeida, Kirsty Mitchell Rated:   5/10 A heebie-jeebie kind of thriller action, bullets oriented drama helmed by the comic skills of a beautifully head-tattooed Samuel Jackson and baby faced top private security agent looking for redemption,   Hitman’s Bodyguard   is a film which you may want to go to if you have nothing else on hand. On pretty much a road trip from the Manchester prison to The Hague for nailing the genocide man from Belarus, it is more Jackson than Reynolds at any given time. The love-hate relationship, the jigs of the contract killing world, the histories and the geographies make this high speed, action choreographed bromance. Sought to testify against the self-styled President of Belarus, under house arrest in Amsterdam, Darius Kincaid (Jackson) signs a plea bargain with the spooks that will get his oomphy, foul-mouthed but golden-hearted wife...

Cast:  Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Claudia Kim, Fran Kranz, Abbey Lee, Jackie Earle Haley Rated : 3/10 Stephen King will certainly not like this filmy mould of his —  the interesting dark thriller he wrote mainly because it is un-happening despite the presence of a man in black, a gunslinger and a child with a shine. Matthew McConaughey is coolly dressed evil sorcerer, obviously there to destroy the world with his funny commands to poor humans, like ‘drop dead’, ‘stop breathing’ and ‘kill each other’. They all, obviously, obey. The last of the gunslingers (Idris Alba) is, obviously, out to kill the sorcerer but his expressions make it look like a tedious, prolonged job. The boy, obviously, is a mind reader who can jump time to see back and forth, so, is, obviously, needed by the sorcerer to destroy humankind. Well? Got the message? Obviously yes! So save some money please.

Cast : Khushmeet Gill, Manmeet Singh, Surekha Sikri, Sushmita Mukherjee Rated : 4/10 Children’s film is still a genre in need of getting its mojo right, that despite many of them being made from time to time by Bollywood. Amol Gupte is a veteran of this genre and yet he goes wrong with this one, completely wrong actually as he fails to sniff what could have worked for a story around a child who has no sense of smell. The thing about children’s films is that it needs to be essentially endearing which Sniff is not despite the cute sardar child playing the lead. Moving from the vagaries of not being able to smell, to getting the smell nodes back in a surreal chemistry lab accident, to sniffing the criminal behind car thefts in his society — everything comes across as far from real. Also, the society seems to be of senior citizens whom Gupte has rather wrongfully caricaturised. Wish he was as real with the film as the people he chose to make it around. Source: Sunday Pioneer...

Cast:  Kriti Sanon, Rajkummar Rao, Ayushmann Khurrana, Pankaj Tripathi, Seema Pahwa Rated:  7.5/10 Just like a good  barfi , this film is soft, sweet and flavourful. The endearing small-town nuances, ambience and behaviours are beautifully captured by director Ashwany Iyer Tiwari who makes a two-bit romance between a two-bit boy and girl into a wholesome, unhurried entertainer. Bareilly Ki Barfi  (BKB) is Tiwari’s second tier-III town movie after she debuted with the acclaimed and interesting  Nil Battey Sannata  (NBS). While Kriti Sanon is the centrepiece of  BKB,  Swara Bhaskar shaped NBS. Sanon is a  bindass  Bareilly  ki chhori  and plays out her role with gumption and allure. As the small town rebel who loves English movies without knowing much of the language, steals her father’s cigarettes to smoke secretly, takes pillion rides with strangers and pretty much does her own thing till it comes to marriage (o...

Cast : Stephanie Sigman, Talitha Bateman, Anthony LaPaglia, Miranda Otto Rated : 5/10 Well, dolls will be dolls — scaring the hell out of you in forlorn, dingy mansions constructed by horror Hollywood. However, this recreation of that wide-eyed, chubby cheek, red lipstick doll with killer instincts (she is the first and only one from a limited edition toy line) is not so scary, slow on the uptake and rather stretched on the imagination front. But in between it does have those scary, screechy moments that come with those errant Hollywood dolls, cherubic children, a lost daughter, parents who want her around even if she returns as a not so friendly spirit and a mansion in the middle of nowhere adding to the isolation and silence that are essentials to deck up any strain of haunted drama. In this one, Annabelle remains locked behind a Bible-pasted closet as the couple of the house live 12 long years in the fear of unleashing its evil intent. But once the couple invites some ...

Cast:  Akshay Kumar, Bhumi Pednekar, Anupam Kher, Divyendu Sharma, Sana Khan Rated : 8/10 Earthy, real, contemporary and fun — Akshay Kumar helms a largely entertaining film on an issue that is pan-India, serious, in focus and long pending, not to mention, one of the star campaigns launched by the Modi Government. From railway tracks in concrete urban jungles, to open fields in the countryside, horrifying incidents have long been happening, more horrifying than the mindsets of the people propelling them.  Toilet: Ek Prem Katha  keeps a tight hold on the jocular vein to throw-up national issues like religious regression, patriarchy, corruption, social taboo, crime against women, feudal mindsets and a mass angst against any kind of sanitation drives that may upset a population’s ageold societal more. The film is a gem because it treads the razor edge of laughing at but not laughing about the social evil of open toilets. It is a very serious crime and healt...

Cast : Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman Rated:  6/10 The blonde is truly blonde — and truly atomic, more so as she treads as a shadowy spy agent in the murky environs of a world war Germany when the wall was high and the intrigues higher. Charleze Theron, who is also the co-producer of this Mi6-CIA-KGB Cold War thriller, is brave enough to dominate the frames as a battered and steely assassin spy for a bulk of the de-briefing proceedings which keep popping back into the operation with layers and layers of intrigues, smoky buildings, kills, lesbian dalliance, mafia and a list of atomic bomb research which will shake the world if it comes out. The fight sequences are perfectly choreographed and Theron is at the centre of them all. She fights the traditional kind of way — going for the goons with punches, black belts and precision hitting, taking to the gun only when she has reduced them to pulp any which way. The film is a tightly edited, on the roll actio...

Cast : TJ Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Maya Rudolph, Steven Wright, Jennifer Coolidge, Christina Aguilera Rated : 5/10 Full marks for having such a vivid imagination around those icons making cute faces at you on your smartphone screen. Yes, those emojis say a thousand words with just one face to capture and convey your emotional state and this animation film serenades their world in all the colour, drama and fun it could gather around the algorithms. The child sitting next to me knew all the emojis even though he doesn’t own a smartphone. “This is the twitter bird, this is poop which you throw at friends when you are feeling bad or when you are angry. This is the original smiley who can’t stop smiling and this is the hi-5 that we have trashed for new emojis,” he tells me. Besides the fact that kids know what they are talking about, the film which imaginatively centres around an identity crisis assailing the central emoji, has all the props of an arresting animatio...

Cast  : Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma, Sayani Gupta, Evelyn Sharma, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Aru Krishansh Verma, Paras Arora Rated : 7/10 Jab Harry Met Sejal,  he had become a veteran of romance — been there, done that in much peppier love stories down the years since  Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge  made him the king of romance in 1995. So, somewhat aged for the emotion, in love with a bubbly young girl, teaching her the mores of attraction in a veteran kind of way and yet getting swayed by her impromptu, completely untailored attraction will have the critics ready with their stones. And yes, there is also this matter of a lot of the annoying facial hair that Shah Rukh Kahn (SRK) has been sporting to look his age which is 50 plus I am told? But alongside come a host of vintage mannerisms which have SRK written all over them — vintage SRK, not over the top SRK mind you — and that’s what Harry and this movie by gifted director Imtiaz Ali is all about. Yes, y...

Cast:   Akshay Oberoi, Pankaj Tripathy, Ragini Khanna Rated : 6/10 This edgy, slow thriller is a reality bite on the life and times of the growing concrete jungle called Gurgaon. Stark, relentless, candid and tempestuous, the film comes with packed performances by all its characters, the acts of whom are by and large shaped by the culture — or should we say lack of culture — of an unforgiving and brash Gurgaon. Director Shankar Raman is perfectly captures the crime-prone atmosphere in which a real estate magnate and his family grows up in. The son, played to the hilt by a gifted Akshay Oberoi, adds to the brooding ambience with his dark looks, deeply disturbing eyes and his monosyllabic existence. Patriarchal, unscrupulous, ambitious and angry, the boy has problem with his sister (Ragini Khanna is brilliant as a Haryanvi girl back from a foreign sojourn at daddy’s expense) who is the heir of the empire and not him. Through an unfolding revenge story, Raman do...