Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

*ing: Salman Khan, Sohail Khan, Zhu Zhu, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Om Puri, Shah Rukh Khan Rated: 4/10 It’s unfortunate and sad. But   Tubelight   lives up to its title, not its star. It is a slow, un-gripping drama with no sense of direction whatsoever, or any forward movement. Much like a fused tube light, it works too hard to light up the proceedings, but fails to do so. So linear it is in dimension that despite the star power of Salman Khan, the aerial landscaping of the film by Kabir Khan, some hummable songs and a   Hindi-Chini bhai bhai   theme, fails to capture your interest, let alone your imagination. There’s no fun in the film, absolutely no Sallu  bhai  stuff for which the public throngs to the cinema hall with  sitees  and  taalis  with that first-day-first-show mania. Instead of being that  chavanni uchhaal  superstar, Salman is made to look like one of those glycerine characters in a  saas-bahu ...

Cast: Vikrant Massey, Tillotama Shome, Gulshan Devaiah, Om Puri, Kalki Koechlin, Ranvir Shorey, Tanuja, Jim Sarbh Rated: 5/10 Death in the Gunj is more about life in the back-belly of Jharkhand-West Bengal than about a sinister murder which the title speaks of. Nevertheless, the film surprises you on many fronts, and pleasantly so sometimes. For a murder mystery which you think it is, it is much too old world and languid, merely sharing some happy, some tricky, some complicated, some simple moments of a Bengali family’s New Year eve get-together in a remote village house where the parents have chosen to retire despite the concern of their big city children. Those moments are no doubt real, happening and carefully constructed to bite into the realism of a typical modern Bengali family. There is an extra-marital affair thrown in between a brash Ranvir Shourey and a beautiful western beauty in  Kalki Koechlin. There is a dejected cousin, a run-of-the-mill couple with a pr...