Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

Cast:  Anil Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Ileana D'Cruz, Athiya Shetty, Neha Sharma Rate :  8/10 It’s a rollicking, largely Punjabi, comedy which comes clean on all counts. There are the peg-sheg one-liners that you expect from a gathering of multi-hued sardars, and there are some witty ones too, that you don’t. But director Anees Bazmee gives you a non-stop roller-coaster of a London-to-Chandigarh  achaari  family entertainer, packed with Punjab  di mitti de  Punjab  de  well-meaning puttars having a rollicking wedding feud between a  praa  and a good old bebbey in a hilarious comedy of errors. Mubarakan is one of those few slapstick comedies that do not falter till the very end despite being spread over a more than two-hour span. Most laughter films coming out of the Bollywood stock fail the challenge and drizzle out with a tedious over-the-top mostly un-comic episodic existence. Bazmee has made his reputation with nonsensical...

Cast : Teresa Palmer, Max Riemelt Rated:  6/10 Hollywood has had many episodes of predator-prey, naive girl held-hostage stories but Berlin Syndrome is a slow, tenacious thriller that keeps you in the suspense for adequate amount of time for the film to race to an intense but expected climax. Adapted from a 2011 suspense thriller jotted down by Melanie Joosten, this film by Cate Shortland pegs itself in an eerily deserted apartment building in a mostly snowclad Berlin with proceedings so icy that they run a chill down your spine. An Australian photographer on a bag-packing tour of Germany ditches the group for a romantic dalliance with a dishy, young teacher in Berlin who looks and sounds normal. It is not till he draws her into his apartment and holds her hostage there as his sex slave that the film takes off. Mostly a staccato picturisation with slow motion sequences and eerie music in the background,  Berlin Syndrome  may be the usual but tries to get u...

Cast : Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Rutger Hauer Rated:   5/10 Director Luc Besson has dedicated this beautiful spatial odyssey to his father. Perhaps, that’s why it is so other-worldly. But for the Indian viewer, it is somewhat of a bewildering cascade of aliens, issues and landscapes. So there are all these species in the universe that have been staying in cohesion for some centuries in a galactic colony floating the Milky Way with annual get-togethers and understanding guarded by the humans. Imagination runs amok here, be it the picture-perfect beach destination in a struck-off-from-the-registers planet in Mul, or its pearl collecting, environment-friendly, glittery statuesque species inhabiting that planet in giant conch shells, or the slimy monstrosities doing the crack job of contract criminals, or the artificial intelligence gatherers which look like golden goblins – the unimaginable are all here t...

Cast : Konkona Sen Sharma, Ratna Pathak, Aahana Kumra, Plabita Borthakur, Sushant Singh, Vaibhav Tatwawaadi Rated:   8/10 Lipstick Under My Burqa   is meant to raise a stink and it does so with a starkness that may make you feel embarrassed but the reality it throws at you draws you in with equal force into the life and times of four middle class, small town women, two of them suffering life from behind the proverbial   burqa. The  burqa   — and the lipstick — here are symbols of oppression that most women — of any community — go through in their daily lives. They suffer it, they try to fight it in their own little ways (that’s where the lipstick comes in) and, quite sadly, they learn to live with it in the long run. Young director Alankrita Shrivastava, a petite firehouse of somewhat unassuming feminism herself, made this everyday reality into a conscience-shaking film in which the main prop is the near-perfect fit of histrionics into the castin...

Cast:  Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy Rated:  4/10 War films have been Hollywood’s staple forever. This one, on a rescue mission by civilian boats and ferries of thousands of British and French soldiers being slaughtered by the enemy at Dunkirk, what with Churchill wanting to save the big ships for future assaults, is slow but engaging in parts. The landscape of the stark land hugging a wild frothy sea in a deserted, hungry and dry region has been captured beautifully by the director. Even the slaughtering of these helpless soldiers with scary and frequent aerial raids splashes genuine discomfort among the viewers. But the proceedings are too static, stuck up and linear to give avid sequencing to the film. The slaughter, for example, goes on and on as do the futile efforts of the soldiers to save themselves. The rescue yacht run by an old man who has lost his elder son to war, has its own side story t...

Cast:  Tiger Shroff, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Nidhhi Agerwal Rated:   5.5/10 Legend Michael Jackson would have given his life to get the 16-pack abs that his disciple Tiger Shroff sports in   Munna Michael.   He would also be delighted that Munna’s body complements MJ’s staccato dancing almost too the T, though the signature moonwalk is unduly unsung in the film apparently made to give a lasting tribute to the original star of pop music. So how do you judge a film on Michael Jackson which comes not from Hollywood but from the drama company of Bollywood, is not a biopic, has desi song and dance all mixed up with   Haryanavi goondas, reality shows and also a romantic triangle. It’s a   kichadi   you may not want to relish. But full marks to Tiger Shroff for virtually patenting the genre of a dancing-action sensation. He dances to perfection. He fights like he is dancing to perfection. He romances while dancing to perfection and he lives his M...

Cast:  Jason Flemyng, Amanda Root, Shabana Azmi, Kavi Raz, Satinder Sartaaj Rated:   6/10 The Black Prince   is the no punches spared film on the life and times of Sher-e-Punjab Ranjit Singh’s son Duleep Singh’s life and times. It was a life ridden with injustices. Taken away by the British forcefully to England as a five-year-old to be raised as a baptised Christian by a royal lady and a faithful doctor, told that his mother had lost her mind and was in no condition to take care of him, serenaded in English society as The Black Prince, Duleep Singh’s life was sad, unfortunate and unhappening. And these are the shades reflected in this Hollywood film on a chapter of Punjab history which killed the most powerful kingdom of its times. Indian-origin British director Kavi Raz keeps it lowbrow and slow to bring in the fact that Duleep was the king who never could be the   maharaja   he was meant to. The film centres around how Duleep Singh, a litt...

Cast:  Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Sayani Gupta Rated : 8/10 It took three-and-a-half years in the making, tided over the real life lovers’ crisis of its lead pair, overhauled its music after the entire score had been charted, which by the way is all of 35 songs, changed the storyline, awaited its director to come into the mood and, phew, it finally released this weekend. But  Jagga Jasoos  has been worth the wait, mainly because of Ranbir Kapoor’s impeccably riveting acting but in no small measure because of the novelty of the idea shaped and decorated to stunning results by director-writer Anurag Basu. Basu, by the way, has come a long way from his House of Bhatt , Murder, Metro  and  Gangste r days. He has since given us a differently-enabled blockbuster like Barfi and now comes with another novelty in  Jagga Jasoos . Never has Bollywood attempted a genre that defies catagorisation with such impunity — a spy, adventure, fantasy, romantic, ...

Cast:  Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn Rated:  7/10 For war junkies, blood-enthusiasts and thrill-kill punks, these apes ain’t doing all of that. They are into serious survival and relocation efforts helmed stunningly by director Matt Reeves. They have no revengeful and vicious Koba amongst them this time. They have a Caesar to lead them — pacifist, reasonable, emotional and yet a warrior when it comes to it. So, in literal terms, this ape edition of the three-part series popping up regularly on the Hollywood horizon since 2011, carries a misleading title of war. There’s very little of it, most of being fixated in the opening sequence. The rest is about Caesar trying to build peace and home under the advancing threat of humans. But that does not make it any less riveting despite being a slow-paced, emotion-intensive landscape-hopping drama, featuring apes as the real humans and humans as a xenophobic band of troops with a crazed out colonel in an unreasonabl...

Cast : Sridevi, Adnan Siddiqui, Sajal Ali, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Akshaye Khanna Rated:  8.5/10 It is a difficult venture to knit a racy thriller around a rape incident and even more difficult to not belittle the victim’s plight in the process of playing to the gallery by taking the law into your hands. But this “justice-denied” rape and vengeance drama is both sensitive and racy, flitting deftly between action and emotion without letting down either — and never ever, not even once, straying from the rape survivor’s unenviable plight and fight with life from behind drawn curtains, silent sobs, skin scratching midnight showers and constant fear after the incident. And, Sridevi, back after a long gap since making waves as a determined yet gentle housewife in English Vinglish , is the reason why this almost similar rape movie does not plummet down Raveena Tandon’s Maatr way  but holds you on to the edge-of-your-seat till the very end of a 2.5 hour drama. Besides Sri...

Cast:  Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Jon Favreau, Zendaya, Donald Glover, Tyne Daly, Marisa Tomei, Robert Downey Jr. Rated : 8/10 For now, he has refused the seat and the suit to be part of future Avenger missions and, in that sense, it is the true homecoming of this radioactive good boy who has been fighting his callowness and schoolchild impatience to be part of something big, like Iron Man and Captain America. Not that this makes the film bereft of action — there’s plenty of those dizzying shots of tall towers in New York by the night being surmounted by our beloved web swinging hero Spidey. Yes, in this one, he is not Toby Maguire. Neither is he Andrew Garfiled. But, as Tom Holland, he is the same old Peter Parker with the same old becomingness, the same old aspirational youth quotient and the same old “I am there to clean up the world” mission. Only, after being dropped home by Iron Man after the Civil War mission, with a promise that an Avengers call will come hi...

Cast : Paresh Rawal, Kartik Aaryan, Tanvi Azmi, Kriti Kharbanda Rated : 4/10 Just because it is Paresh Rawal and Tanvi Azmi trying to be funny in London does not mean you do not get angry with their lame efforts. Rawal has been carrying the weight of comedy on his lone shoulders with a lot of courage and determination but in  Guest Iin London  he crosses the line. Well, to be straightforward, this film is one big fart. Come on guys, fart humour, besides being embarrassing, is also the oldest trick in the world to try and make the audience laugh when there is nothing else to do so. In  Guest Iin London , the loud banging in your face farts far outdo the dialogues. They are explosive sounds emerging out of Rawal’s backside with deliberate intent and so openly to push the humour that you feel like plugging his butt as well as his effort! Really, there is nothing else to write about this un-funny film which gets a tad interesting when it gets serious and that’...

Transformers: The Last Knight Cast : Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, Anthony Hopkins Rated:   6.5/10 Here comes a high-octane, iron cluttered robot orgy which will ride the crest of popularity y the unabridged power of its franchise. It’s the big movie of the week, what with none other being of any worth, or even coherence. Transformers, The Last knight,   the fifth one in a row from veteran director Micheal Bay’s fantasia world of shape changing sleek cars, coming after three-year break, has all the trappings of a machine film drawing its mirth from the lovable Autobots and the baddie Decepticons. Of course, the red and blue Optimus is there in all his glory, once he emerges from the spell of the Decepticon queen trying to kill planet Earth once and for all. He is cool, he is friendly, he is powerful and he is engaging, much like the other editions. This time the action goes back into the crusader days of English history what with knights and...

Cast:  Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jon Bernthal, Eiza González, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx Rated:  4/10 This seems to be the silly week for movies, what with no good one releasing from Bollywood and Hollywood pushing the trash to Third World markets like urban India. That’s where  Baby Driver  comes in, banking on the salability of big names this side of the northern hemisphere even though those names — Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx — are mere sidekicks in the show about heists and the amazing driving abilities of a cherubic teenager. As Spacey plans perfect robberies in banks, post offices and even moving cash vans, he blackmails the baby driver into giving the “crew” a ride in and out of the crime scene. First, he does it willingly to make some money for his wheel-chair ridden, deaf and dumb grandfather and then gets coerced into the action by a ruthless Spacey. Much of the film makes no sense and the sequencing is of little consequence too. J...