Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Casting : Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas, Bobby Cannavale Rated : 7/10 Jumanji has been synonymous with Robin Williams, the brilliant actor who is no more. But the 2017 version of this adventure board game reinvents itself beautifully to catch your attention with a whole lot of jungle adventure yes, but also a hilarious dose of humour, fun and frolic that is engaging and enervating all at the same time. Centred around the antics of four detention students tasked to unstaple thousands of papers for recycling stumble across a gaming console which sucks them into a trickle jungle affair where a possessed man from 1996, a giant jaguar who has lost his magic jewel, a whole lot of trappings and suicidal runs lord over a jungle game which the four school detentioners are compelled to play. Besides, of course, the adrenaline that flows through the well choreographed, graphic and well-paced sequences of the jungle game, it is the characterisatio...

Casting : Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, Sajjad Delfrooz, Paresh Rawal, Sudeep, Angad Bedi, Kumud Mishra, Girish Karnad, Anjalie Gupta, Neha Hinge, Ivan Rodrigues, Nawab Shah Rated : 7/10 Sallu Bhai is back and his fans are loving it! As expected, he is on a mission to achieve the impossible, and with what consummate ease! Really bhai, it’s much too much! Salman Khan starts off with outwitting a pack of blood hungry wolves in the snow-ridden Austrian Alps – just throwing them away with his bare hands while on his skiers. He then goes flying into the Syrian crisis where a maniacal Islamic leader is on a killing, subjugating, raping, beheading, human-bombing spree. Sallu Bhai does the impossible here too — he makes none less than Pakistan’s top ISI agent lehraao the Bharat ka jhanda. And, if that was not enough, makes both the ISI and RAW team up for an incredible mission to save the 25 Indian and 15 Pakistani nurses taken hostage by the stone-faced, Oxonian Islamic terrori...

Casting:  Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels Rated:   8/10 Star Wars: The Last Jedi , the eight episode in the series and second in a revived final trilogy, triggered over a million conversations on the social media in the week of its worldwide release. The media buzz notwithstanding, you would wonder how this far, far away galactic world and its inborn fights between the resistance and the Republic, its iconic Jedi connection, its good vs evil, its evil turning more evil, its good turning evil turning good only to turn evil again, is such a fanciful world drawing you in as someone more than just a spectator. Director Rian Johnson is crafty and engaging with his newest outing and gives you so much to contend with that any kind of ennui you would normally expect from an episode so long into the number trail is happily absent. At the same time, however, ther...

Cast:  Pulkit Samrat, Manjot Singh, Ali Fazal, Varun Sharma, Priya Anand, Richa Chaddha, Vishakha Singh, Pankaj Tripathi Rated : 5/10 It should have been a rollicking return of these   fukrey   boys and Bholi Punjaban but the reunion does not pan quite as well as the 2013 original. The comic act is there, but only in bits and pieces and sadly a bit too contrived, engineered and struggling. Amid all the humour that may not measure up to your polished expectations the frontbench comedy has some laughs in it, or so the part of the guffawing cinema halls suggested. Choocha is Choocha on a  déjà chu as he quite funnily puts déjà  vu and the rest of his friends try to build up a story all their own. Richa Chaddha as Bholi Punjaban has a ring of familiarity around her but the fear quotient that surrounds her relationships in the underworld seem to be too slipshod even though her over the top dressing sense catches your attention. Pankaj Tripathi being t...

Cast:  Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini, John Cena, John Lithgow, Mel Gibson Rated:   5/10 Christmas has turned rather overwhelmingly parental this year. First, there were bad moms trying to survive the stress of organising a perfect Christmas for their kids. Now there are fathers — and some nutty grandfathers thrown in to shake up things a bit further — to catch your attention with shared homes, moms, dads and children trying to make a family reunion in some snowed out chalet booked on Air B&B. Sadly, both fare moderately in unfolding the really groovy Christmas spirit as good old Hollywood used to do some years ago with such engaging emotion. As daddies, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg make too much noise even though one is curly-haired and emotional and the other muscled and uptight. Also, you wonder what the wanderer Mel Gibson is doing as a philandering dad to one of the dads walking away with stranger women when all he should have been doing w...

Cast:  Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny, Robert Emms Rated:   7/10 Sporting rivalries often turn into folklore and the one between zero-emotion Swede Bjorn Borg and only-emotion American John McEnroe, tennis legends of the late 70s, is replete with dramatic contrasts and stunning clashes. So, a film on this great rivalry was only waiting to happen and Borg McEnroe is an explosive encapsulation despite coming a decade or two late. The film brims with flashbacks on the childhoods of the two great players in a bid to explain their behavioural uniqueness and how they shaped into the game of tennis, emerging as individuals playing to win. Though it is a welcome prop to be used, the flashbacks come in much too often breaking the momentum of the electric matches and the lead up to the 1980 great Wimbledon Final which Borg wanted to win desperately to become champion for the fifth consecutive time and a rookie, foul mouthed, edgy teenager i...

Cast:  Liam Neeson, Diane Lane, Marton Csokas, Ike Barinholtz, Tony Goldwyn, Tom Sizemore, Bruce Greenwood, Michael C. Hall, Brian d'Arcy James, Josh Lucas Rated : 5/10 Those who know Watergate will somewhat understand this drama based on history. Those who don’t will have to take to Wikipedia to understand what’s going on with Mark Felt (Liam Neeson) who plays the second in command of FBI of the 70s. Watergate has, over the years, become a symbolic term for all sorts of political scandals, worldwide. But the original, despite the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon, is yet to fully unravel. No one, for example, still knows the real intent behind the break-in into the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington DC, or for that matter how deep the rut actually ran in the re-election campaign of Nixon who, by the way, amid allegations and speculations, enjoyed a landslide win. But this one was more about the enigmatic, home troubled, superseded FBI man who for...

Cast voice over: Arbaaz Khan, Sunny Leone, Arya Babbar, Sudha Chandran, Salil Ankola, Hanif Noyda, Richa Sharma, Bhani Singh, Gauhar Khan Rated: 1/10 From the very first shot of a sexy Sunny Leone lying unconscious in an empty house dominated by paintings, I waited and waited and waited for the film (I might be penalised for calling it a film) to end. It is mounts like this that make you rue the job of being a film critic who is doomed to sit through such utter screen nonsense as   Tera Intezaar   that can give a complex to all kinds of kitsch put into one movie. I wonder how desperate out of work Arbaaz Khan would have been to do this project and why Sunny Leone is so anxious for popular support that she dresses to kill and instead kills you with boredom around her heaving breasts, beefy thighs and half open pouting lips. It is an insult to her overt sexuality that the viewer is forced to dip his head and eyes into the corn basket rather than her contours, whi...

Cast:  Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, Jacob Tremblay, Mandy Patinkin, Daveed Diggs Rated : 8/10 Propelling the virtue of kindness in this fast growing unkind world was never so emotionally packed and yet full of positives as   Wonder   is. Thanks not so much to established superstar Julia Roberts or the eternally sweet Owen Wilson but to the kid packed in believable prosthetics to, well, look like a deformed monster as his insensitive classmates call him, that makes you fall in with this Christmas-y family drama with a message. Jacob Tremblay, or Auggie as we know him in the film, is born with a genetic flaw so intense that even after 29 surgeries of his face, he looks barely human. So, he hides behind his astronaut helmet and is completely traumatised when his mom forces him to attend school. Tremblay holds forth with such season histrionics that Auggie and his plight seeps into your heart and tear ducts. At the same time, his quiet perseverance, resignati...

Cast : Kapil Sharma, Ishita Dutta, Monica Gill, Inaam-ul-haq Rated : 4/10 Kapil Sharma is not here to make you laugh, or cry, or think, or, well, do anything at all actually with your brains. From courting multiple women in his previous big screen outing of no ripple, the fallen   badshah   of television comedy, makes a comeback to public eye by weaving a pre-Partition British era   pind di   story where there is everything but comedy, an act he is singularly good with. In fact, you amble along his do-gooder story of a simpleton Punjabi  munda  falling for a coy village belle Sargi, joins a White businessman as an orderly, takes pride in serving the goras  even as Gandhi is on a roll with the Swadeshi Movement. Howsoever indulgent you may be about Kapil of the erstwhile The   Kapil Sharma Show, Firangi   is not half as engaging despite an earnest effort by the lead actor and producer of the film. Amid the raja, the   gora, ...

Casting : Vidya Balan, Neha Dhupia, Manav Kaul Rated : 7/10 Sullu is you, she is me too but with an added zing for life peppered with small ambitions and housewifely attributes that make for a happy home with husband and child. Another matter though that our Sullu is  baravi fail and bullied by her better-placed elder twin sister and father. She fights it all with a rare verve which never takes away her positivity. Our Sullu is also totally unapologetic about being plump, middle ageish and totally without make-up, making do with dollops of body cream applications at bedtime and only a  bindi  for daytime. She snoozes after a heavy duty morning shift of packing off her husband and son to office and school, respectively. She has won all the housewife competitions in her colony, is an engaging mimic and carries a yen for singing Balasubramanian’s famous  Batata vada  song with all the depth and voice modulations. She also has a very supportive husband...

Cast:  Irrfan Khan, Parvathy, Bajrangbali Singh Rated:   8/10 He looks unkempt, dirty and tousled. Like an urchin at his worst. He slurps through his tea cups and loves the   pakodas   and   kebabs   straight off unhygienic carts. Yet he travels business class, drives around in a Merc, takes the Orient Express to Rajasthan and is as irreverent about money as you may be about those without it. He has girlfriends down the years and you wonder why did they never insist he take a bath, shave, comb his hair and somehow be less of an OTT character than he is, wearing an attitude as gaudy as his clothes. She, on the other hand, is his direct opposite — an urbane, polished, understated, well-mannered, well-read Tamilian woman. A working widow who takes life seriously and is too proper to think about men after her husband passes away. Yet she is bored enough to hesitatingly go to a dating website to look for some serious mirth in her life. That’s how t...

Cast:  Rajkummar Rao, Kriti Kharbanda, Navni Parihar, Govind Namdev, Nayani Dixit Rated:   6/10 Small town films, with small town characters and very small town quirks, depending on which State the film is coming out of, has given Bollywood some great moments recently and all of them mostly through Rajkummar Rao. He is engaging, humble and real in this one too though the message of dowry gets somewhat messed up in this romance drama which glides from Allahabad to Kanpur to Lucknow. Rao has been doing some brilliant work in such films, with  Newton  being his show-stopper film thus far though his side role in  Bareilly Ki Barfi  dwarfed the hero with the simple realism he lends to the character he plays. In this one, he is a   seedha-saadha   middle-class boy Satyender (Sattu to friends) who has been voluntarily put on the marriage market after getting the “ sakari naukri”   of a clerk in the Excise Department. Through the family...

Cast:  Irrfan Khan, Parvathy, Bajrangbali Singh Rated:  8/10 He looks unkempt, dirty and tousled. Like an urchin at his worst. He slurps through his tea cups and loves the  pakodas  and  kebabs  straight off unhygienic carts. Yet he travels business class, drives around in a Merc, takes the Orient Express to Rajasthan and is as irreverent about money as you may be about those without it. He has girlfriends down the years and you wonder why did they never insist he take a bath, shave, comb his hair and somehow be less of an OTT character than he is, wearing an attitude as gaudy as his clothes. She, on the other hand, is his direct opposite — an urbane, polished, understated, well-mannered, well-read Tamilian woman. A working widow who takes life seriously and is too proper to think about men after her husband passes away. Yet she is bored enough to hesitatingly go to a dating website to look for some serious mirth in her life. That’s how the ...

Cast:  Siddharth, Andrea Jeremiah, Atul Kulkarni Rated:   4/10 Bollywood is yet to get its horror genre right, despite the Mukesh Bhatt kind of haunted slickness that comes visiting you, unapologetically from between the bed-sheets every once in a while.   The House Next Door   comes on Hollywood lines but without the desired results. Based out of a groovy house (with a red lit giant cross in the hallway!), the story revolves around a whole lot of untenable “inspired by true story” incidents which keep you somewhat bored for much of the proceedings. There is a Chinese family tale of 1935 interwoven into the possession by ghosts of a teenage girl who has the hots for the dishy neurologist living next door — happily married to his wife of some years. A child sacrifice, some skeletal remains, scary spirits dripping blood and a crazy Chinese patriarch complete the circle here but not too much avail. The production qualities are fair enough but the soul as...

Cast:  Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Cheryl Hines, Christine Baranski, Susan Sarandon Rated:   6/10 Clearly, when it’s Christmas time, moms have a terrible time — working, stressing, angsting and generally being plagued by efforts to “take back Christmas” as they would like it to be. Premised on three such stressed out moms, this X-mas time celebratory movie is a sequel to   Bad Moms   who were good on screen. This time round, you do get some sweet family time to spend with popcorn and cola but come on, it’s Christmas so who has the time to fold in a neat story? Just amble along moms being visited by their moms and getting into a rigmarole of being bullied by the oldies to become that perfect mom who can throw that perfect party for their children. It’s Christmas so there is humour, tears, reunions, loneliness, friendship and many such elf indulgent emotions that keep you involved in the proceedings. You wish two things though even as you...

Voiceovers*:  Emily Blunt, Kristin Chenoweth, Liev Schreiber Rated:  5/10 Animations mostly take your heart with their slick production qualities and cuteness and the same goes for this one too. Only, My Little Pony is a girlie pony film with girlie ponies (read unicorns) flapping wings and batting their eyes while doing the magic rounds of their colourful make-believe dwelling place within the clouds and the stars. The animation qualities are good but not the best and the story is an adventuresome of these pony friends take to save their world taken over by the thunder king on a mission to take evil charge. To assist him is an evil, actually a pony on retribution after losing her magic horn to a childhood incident in which her friends stood her up. A sweet film with sweet characters – more for girls than for boys. Wish it had been more universal.

Cast:  Kalki Koechlin, Sumeet Vyas, Hitesh Malhan Rated:  5.5 /10 Kalki Koechlin is on a roll these days and with  Ribbon , she brings to you yet another introspective aspect of modern cinema, this time on urban life and times. She is the centrepoint of this hatke  kind of parallel cinema that has been mushrooming in Bollywood for some time now, with ambitions to make a mark at the box office. With evolving audiences in tier 1 and even some tier II cities, such cinema is, fortunately, gaining ground and Ribbon, throwing up the travails of a key-latch nucleus family trying to make sense of survival in a concrete jungle, makes sense. However, as it ambles along showing the plight of a woman who gets pregnant and then has a baby, trying all the time to keep up with her job in a patriarchal society, the storyline gets confused and shifts summarily from the main plot, making you wonder whether it was all about the stress of life in a megapolis or about the m...

Cast:  Anthony Hopkins, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson Rated:  7/10 Marvel is clearly having fun here and doing so on a strict agenda to make its super-hero and Avengers  buffs in the mood for a treat at Asgard, Thor’s original home — and of course his battle to save his land from none else but his own blood sister, the totally delightful Goddess of Death. Had Kate Blanchett not been helming this lean, mean, stag-headed character on a death roll in sheer black and gothic make-up, you would have wished fervently she had, so tailor-made is the role for her. She devours people and footage with style and chutzpah. But the film is not so much about her wish to kill every inch of the ground she walks on, as it is about the thrills that she inadvertently unlocks when she is at it. Veteranism is at play all through this Disney film so there is a balanced package of fights, humour, inter-galactic mysticism, ...

Cast:   Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Alexandra Maria Lara, Ed Harris, Andy García Rated:   5.5/10 This catastrophic climate thriller comes with all the thunder, lightning and storm that a big screen spatial odyssey can manage in a single outing but the roller-coaster ride with an under-toned Gerard Butler comes a bit too late into the proceedings. Nevertheless, debutant director Dean Devlin, who carries the massive reputation of writing and producing mega movies like Independence Day and Godzilla, does well to keep up the stunning special effects but, in the process, somewhat forgets to lend soul to the story. Expert technician Butler rushes into space to avert a cataclysmic weather situation by fixing a spatial weather system he designed, as his bro manages ops from a state-of-the-art control room back on Earth. And as the two, and many others, take on the fast approaching tidal waves, all the action opens up to keep you interested. For a lean movie week like t...

Cast:  Richa Chaddha, Kalki Koechlin, Arslan Goni Rated:   4/10 A discovery of life, on a road trip through virgin film territory of Sweden, that too between gifted artistes Kalki Kochelin and Richa Chaddha, should have been fodder for a hit in the meaningful cinema section by all counts. But sadly, and somewhat shockingly,   Jia Aur Jia   is such a big mess that you desperately look for something, anything to save this “oh why was it made” venture. The film, meant to be a learning experience for the two ladies, loses its mind quite early in the film as the two get so doused by vodka shots and liquor trips that learning of any kind becomes the first casualty. It is sad to see a film with so much potential to make a mark through a storyline and the weighty actors propelling it, go down the drain without so much as a sensible ripple despite all the talk around life and death, romance and marriage. The direction is a big letdown even though it stretches ...

Casting : Aamir Khan, Zaira Wasim, Meher Vij Rated : 7/10 It is, indeed, a secret superstar. The film got bare minimum publicity, that too despite it being produced by the master of film marketing Aamir Khan, that too despite it being Khan’s big Diwali release, that too despite it fighting for a place with the perceived blockbuster   Golmaal Returns . That it stops you in its track is the hallmark of it being a good, meaty, meaningful & moving film. Centred around the dreams and aspirations of a small-town Muslim girl from Vadodara, who silently battles domestic violence on her doting but illiterate mother (well played Meher Vij!), you would think it to be a tad ill-timed for Diwali. But Advait Chandan’s undertoned drama is a captivating and humble film which takes your heart with its simple realism. The bone-marrow of the film is Zaira Wasim and her arresting role-play as the secret superstar. She was great in Dangal but is excellent here too. Not a shred of mak...

Casting : Ajay Devgn, Parineeti Chopra, Tabu, Arshad Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor, Shreyas Talpade, Prakash Raj, Neil Nitin Mukesh Rated : 3/10 Rohit Shetty may care two hoots about opinion on his films and the cast he has assembled for the fourth edition of the   Golmaal   series may be equally irreverent, but fact is that despite some cool but infrequent one-liners, the film screams the place down with such mediocre nonsense that you feel that Shetty has lost the script. Of course being comprehensively over the top is the DNA of  Golmaal  and, of course, it is meant to be larger than the biggest buffoon you thought existed on tape, but No 4 is flat, screechy and too fixated on  bhootyapa  as Talpade says with deliberate intent to make you take notice of the proceedings in this mindless drama which will haunt for a long time after the night is over. The scene shifts from Goa to the sylvan tea estates of a never-before so well showcased and green Oot...

Cast : Anupam Kher, Jimmy Shergill, Satish Kaushik Soundarya Sharma, Himansh Kohli, Taaha Shah Badusha Rated : 1/10 Why on earth would one make such a film? The producer could well have donated the money to the needy this Diwali instead of paying for such a bad-cash, bad-hash, bad-grade movie on a crazy but rippleless bank heist in a Bihari stretch of general lawlessness. To mount this atrocity on an unsuspecting public as a general festival season opener is beyond shocking. The story comes to you without any rhyme or reason, build on the uninterestingly engineered chaos, spreading the irritants all around from the persona of unknown, unwanted actors and ends on a story that not even once creates an interest in the proceedings or even deigns to introduce a moment or two into the deadpan proceedings. Best to stay way. Source: Sunday Pioneer,  15 October, 2017

Cast : Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard, Adeel Akhtar, Michael Gambon Rated:   8/10 This Judy Dench special is heading straight for the Oscars, and when it does reach those hallowed precincts, it will be her eighth nomination to this top-notch recognition. Playing Queen Victoria for the second time in her long and eventful career, years after she did so with equal flair in Mrs Brown, Victoria and Abdul is a languid and platonic romance between the most unmatched characters in history – and 80 plus-year-old queen bored to death with royal life and a surprisingly polished Muslim man from Agra. Immersed completely in the British Raj’s imperial flavour of 1887, 30 years after the Sepoy Mutiny troubled the stiff upper lip, the film is un-daunting with the servility of Abdul to the queen even though Dame Dench does her best to give status and reputation to her subject who teaches her Urdu and is the teller of stories from India, a dominion she has never visited but wants...