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, ...