Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

*ing: Diljit Dosanjh, Taapsee Pannu, Angad Bedi, Siddharth Shukla Rated: 6.5/10 A biopic on a hockey player, who is neither Dhyan Chand, nor Dhanraj Pillay or Sardar Singh, needed a big heart and a bigger conviction. More so, when sporting biopics are just about becoming a genre in the otherwise song and dance drama monopolising Bollywood’s box-office obsessed sagas. So far, we have had big banners around Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Mary Kom in recent memory. Both did well at the box office. Soorma, the amazing story of a rising hockey player, whose life gets felled for more than a year by a stray bullet on a train, is intrinsically emotional and inspiring. Director Shaad Ali has kept the proceedings somewhat errantly under-toned for a story which could have been a compulsive tear-jerker. However, the gentle humour, the subtlety in relationships and the quirky situations that life pastes on the journey to growth have been used well to punctuate the story of man who literally...

*ing : Diljit Dosanjh, Sonakshi Sinha, Karan Johar, Riteish Deshmukh, Lara Dutta, Boman Irani, Rana Daggubati, Sushant Singh Rajput, Aditya Roy Kapur Rated : 1/10 The IIFA could not have a more lame, stupid and kitschy ambassador than this completely nonsensical, pompous movie Welcome to New York. It not only maligns the name of this prestigious awards ceremony but also goes a long way in questioning the mental efficacy of an actor of some repute like Sonakshi Sinha to have accepted such a crazy project even in the silly season of her career. Daljit Dosanjh, too, has by now gathered a modicum of momentum for his acting ambitions in Bollywood so doing this film comes across as a blind date he took up in a fit of insanity. The film, a spoof on Bollywood and its mores, does try to showcase the known eccentricities of known biggies like Karan Johar in and as Karan Johar, the Karan-Arjun OTT recall and a vaguely woven in Ek Villain tale that has been inserted at the IIFA presentat...