Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

*ing: Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Lawrence  Fishburn Rated: 6/10 After the heartbreaking apocalypse of   Avengers finishing off in the recent Marvel outing, it is rather cathartic to watch the gentle proceedings of an everyday life depiction of the quizzical Antman and his beloved Wasp. Add to that, the crack-jackery of an ageing Michael Douglas and the rare appearance of Michelle Pfeiffer and you have the ball rolling, or should we say buzzing? Antman here takes a quantum leap into physics and its innate ability to bring a being into its molecular form of which the Antman and the Wasp, on a mission to save the world, becomes a victim of. The darling wasp capsizes into quantum space waiting for a release from her forced molecular form even as the villain helps a victimised vamp try and extract the wasp’s energy to survival. It’s a simple life story around a complicated maze of scientific fiction but ably managed and directed ...

*ing: Diljit Dosanjh, Taapsee Pannu, Angad Bedi, Siddharth Shukla Rated: 6.5/10 A biopic on a hockey player, who is neither Dhyan Chand, nor Dhanraj Pillay or Sardar Singh, needed a big heart and a bigger conviction. More so, when sporting biopics are just about becoming a genre in the otherwise song and dance drama monopolising Bollywood’s box-office obsessed sagas. So far, we have had big banners around Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Mary Kom in recent memory. Both did well at the box office. Soorma, the amazing story of a rising hockey player, whose life gets felled for more than a year by a stray bullet on a train, is intrinsically emotional and inspiring. Director Shaad Ali has kept the proceedings somewhat errantly under-toned for a story which could have been a compulsive tear-jerker. However, the gentle humour, the subtlety in relationships and the quirky situations that life pastes on the journey to growth have been used well to punctuate the story of man who literally...

*ing: Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Bob Balaban, Kunichi Nomura, Ken Watanabe, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand Rated: 5/10 The only thing that struck me throughout this roughly animated dog film was that how different and often strangely compelling the movie is. Though in the animation segment, it comes across as the first draft of drawings by a Disney or Marvel artist, without any fine-tuning, just thoughts around the characters, the story compels you inexorably. Set on a cold Japanese island, where dog hating is an administrative compulsion, propelled by mean extermination scientists, wicked gangsters, dog haters and an army of canine saturators, the poor animals are incarcerated on a cold trash island from where there is only one escape and that's slow, horrible, dog-flu infected death. A teen Samaritan, indeed, turns up on the grim island in search of his bodyguard dog Spots, but a lot has happened in the interregnum which unfolds with a l...

*ing: Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner, Jeffrey Donovan, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Catherine Keener Rated: 6/10 This sequel to the widely appreciated   Sicario , comes with a major pressure point — that it has to live up to the great expectations of its parental mount which, incidentally was a surprisingly high grosser in the action-thriller segment. To tackle this back-puller, ... Saldado   clothes itself in constant violence, mostly of the extreme kind, and only after that takes the refuge of the storyline which is competent and tight enough to take you through the wild, bloody terrain on which the plot unfolds. ...Saldado is a new chapter in the no-rules drug war with cartels switching to trafficking terrorists across the American border. So, the mysterious Alejandro Gillick (played to the hilt by Benicio Del Toro), whose family was murdered by a cartel kingpin, escalates the war on behalf of FBI and kidnaps the kingpin’s daughter. A whole lot happens on ...

*ing: Sylvester Stallone, Dave Bautista, Huang Xiaoming, Jaime King, Jesse Metcalfe, Wes Chatham, Titus Welliver Rated: 5/10 Last time there was a prison escape, Sly had august company — Arnie. That was way back in 2013 and it punched in an impact, what with action stalwarts like Stallone and Schwarzenegger helming the show. This time round, five years later, there is only Stallone, a much more aged version of himself. Him, and a band of fighters with no legacy. Him, and a prison which is much too high-tech to evince keen interest. The goings-on here are too puzzling to enjoy the thrill of an escape. The computer-induced mumbo-jumbo intrudes on all the fun we could have had with Sly. His players have all the skills to escape — the fitness and the muscles and all that — but not the mojo of Stallone who has a somewhat starved presence in the film. He gets into action much later, actually much into the second half by which time the viewers have had enough of the laser beamed p...

Sanju *ing: Ranbir Kapoor, Paresh Rawal, Manisha Koirala, Dia Mirza, Vicky Kaushal, Sonam Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Jim Sarbh Rated: 7/10 In the deft hands of Rajkumar Hirani, films, characters and situations mostly flower into fun, laughter, poignance and often introspection.   Sanju , a Hirani version of a Sanjay Dutt biography, almost comes into that rarified zone of cinematic brilliance, but for a few flaws. Had it not been coy in places, trying not to depict events and Dutt’s dalliances which have been public knowledge, and had Hirani stuck to a true-life-bang-on story instead of hiding behind the tag of cinematic liberties, this one would have been a much more impactful and happening film by a director who knows his actor through and through, both at personal and professional levels. Having said that, what comes your way in Bollywood’s bad boy story — which incidentally is still evolving in his real life — is eventful and interesting if not entirely captivating. The...