Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

*ing:  Vinay Pathak, Manoj Pahwa, Dolly Ahluwalia, Seema Bhargava Rated : 5/10 Small budget movies like this one have started dotting an expanding Bollywood with their small stories, gentle humour, serious issues and contemporary themes. Khajoor Pe Atka, unfolding on the shoulders of talented actors Manoj Pahwa and Vinay Pathak, is a take on a usual middle-class family full of pulls and pushes but extreme concern and togetherness on the face of it. A brother is dying and all are called. But when the khandan gets together, rather reluctantly, a lot happens that should not. But such is life and the director does well to show it up without saving any punches. There is bromance but with unsaid property concerns in between; there is sisterly love amid the brothers’ wives but not without unhealthy competition, jealousy; there is even boredom around waiting endlessly for a patient who is refusing to die; a saga around healthcare bills and the difficult decision of pulling the plug...

*ing:  David Attenborough Rated : 8/10 BBC can seldom be faulted for their Nature series and Blue... is up there on the ladder of excellence. Narrated by Sir Richard Attenborough, atop a ship all set to explore the ocean waters and their deep from the Tropics to the Poles, the theatrical release of this upcoming TV series is interesting on many counts, including bring the harbourer of the trend of documentaries making it to cinema halls. To see this episodic series in one go as a one-and-a-half-hour movie may seem too stretched but the uninterrupted experience of brilliant camera work, a compelling narrative and amazing sights and sounds of a marine world we are yet to fully explore or know the depth of, is much like a tugging thriller. With summer holidays having begun, such docu-films should go houseful due to their high knowledge quotient which is stunningly unfolded. The underwater photography is amazing and the way fish life is explained makes this one resemble a thr...

*ing : Sumeet Vyas, Mantra, Sonnalli Seygall Rated : 4/10 Unless written and directed brilliantly, attempted comedies on urgent subjects, like a hijack in this film, either fall flat or pick up much too slowly or go way off the mark. High Jack, full of potential of a humorous film in the midst of a mismanaged hijack by novices, suffers from all the three loopholes and, thus, fails to make an impact. A non-star film, with vaguely familiar faces in the lead, High Jack starts and ends with a high that never happens and a low that never lets go. A failed DJ high in debt is carrying a drug consignment for money to save his father’s clinic  but gets stuck on the hijacked Goa to Delhi flight of an airline which is bankrupt and all set to close after this last run. Disgruntled employees hijack the plane with no experience of such acts and fall into a chaotic mess which was supposed to keep the viewer interest alive in the hall but by the time the travellers go high, the film is...

*ing:  Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, TJ Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, Jack Kesy Rated : 7/10 Flippant, funny and wantonly unapologetic about F-words and anatomy talk, Deadpool Ryan Reynolds is here in Take 2 to splatter laughs and blood in equal measure. Yes, he is funny, yes he has his signature pock marks and yes he makes a mockery of serious filmmaking — but then that’s why he is Deadpool, the anti superman who refuses to die even when he is blown to pieces, both emotionally and physically. Here with an ‘A’ certificate, Deadpool is in rogue mood —making fun of Wolverine, making fun of Canada, his friends Chromo and X-men, his foes and even his own situation. Having lost his girlfriend to a desperado, that too in the midst of super romantic progeny and baby naming talk, Deadpool tries to end his life but just can’t die. So when he falls into the “mutant children being tortured” situation, he becomes a reluctant saviour, t...

*ing : Alia Bhatt, Vicky Kaushal, Rajit Kapur, Shishir Sharma, Jaideep Ahlawat, Ashwath Bhatt, Amruta Khanvilkar, Soni Razdan Rated : 8/10 Meghna Gulzar makes a wholesome comeback with this no-nonsense gritty spy thriller which dotes on its Spartan surrounds, a virtually true tag and an absolutely real-time performance put in by Alia Bhatt. Spy thrillers always have a pull all their own, but this one is vibrantly resonant with real-time happenings that we all know about as part of our contemporary history. Set in the 1971 Bangladesh’s war of independence and adapted from Lt Commander (Retd) Harinder S Sikka’s novel Calling Sehmat, Alia (Sehmat) is sent in as a Kashmiri Muslim-Sikh girl with a family legacy for spying in Pakistan to further the cause of Indian Intelligence. It is refreshing to see an Indian Muslim from the Kashmir Valley talking of the right vatan in right earnestness, that too convincingly through a brief but happening role played out by Rajit Kapoor. But...

*ing : Tony Leung, Bai Baihe, Jing Boran, Li Yuchun, Tony Yang Rated : 5/10 The exams have just finished so this children’s adventure film is rightly timed, even though a tad underrated as far as animated-human sagas go. The monster, a six-limbed cute puppy which resembles a rounded carrot with big watery eyes and an impish look, is as cute as his human parents who come with high family hang-ups which compel then to go for a hunt of their adopted monster child whom they had given up apparently for its own benefit. There is a lot of mumbo jumbo in this dubbed Chinese film but the bigness of anything Chinese comes across in its landscape, aerial shots of green cliffs and milky rivers through which the story passes. The film is a neither here nor there children’s film which does not flesh out on anything in particular — be it the plot, the story, the dialogues, the action or the humour. And yet, for a lean week, everything fits into each other in this low-brow monster hunt...

*ing: Amitabh Bachchan, Rishi Kapoor, Jimit Trivedi Rated: 7/10 Both Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor are obviously having a wanton blast in this one; Amitabh in his continued journey into roles curated for him, and Rishi ensconced in the glory and success of his eventful second innings. Together on screen after 27 years, the two veterans parent the film by young director Umesh Shukla, as a 102-year-zesty father and his stuck-up, hung-up 75-year-old son living two very separate and yet entwined lives in an old-world bungalow that you would die to own. Shukla does well to balance the innate pathos and humour of the situation in the film through a revved up screenplay adapted from the famous Gujarati play of the same name. Both the veterans are impeccable, Rishi more so as a bemoaning father and raging son. However, the uniqueness of the situation on which the film has been constructed needed more humour than it splashes. Not that it, in any way, is sad, slow or ennui-ri...

*ing: Rajkummar Rao, Happy Ranajit, Rajesh Tailang, Rupinder Nagra, Keval Arora, Timothy Ryan Hickernell, Kallirroi Tziafeta, Harmeet Singh Sawhney Rated: 5/10 Omar Sheikh, the terrorist who was behind 26/11 and the man who cunningly brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war, you would think would be someone who would stoke passions to such an extent that a cut and dry film on him would sound and look misplaced. Omerta , a loose biopic of this Pakistan-based top terrorist who was one of the three men freed in a hijack deal during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s regime, gives an uncomfortably placid account of how an LSE aspirant from an upmarket London household gets into the terror network, trains in PoK and unleashes big-time events in India and Pakistan, thereby giving America a bed of thorns. But why he chooses India as his target when he should have been on a Bosnian chant is one of the things Hansal Mehta fails to explain, alongside an undercooked childhood story an...