Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

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, ...