Meenakshi Rao's Bollywood and Hollywood movie reviews

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...

*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 ...

Star voiceovers : Salman Khan, Javed Akhtar, Raveena Tandon, Vinay Pathak, Makrand Deshpande, Saurabh Shukla, Chunky Pandey, Kunal Khemu Rated : 5/10 The animation scores by twisting the story into a modern kind of world with which today’s children will relate. It makes you laugh a lot with very “today” jokes on the kindergarten world. It speaks of technology, it speaks of Google, it also speaks of a whole lot of CGIs that come in handy for the baby Hanuman to fly around the geographical boundaries of the Earth and pick up experiences which slowly and steadily chip away his childlike fears of the unknown. After all, he is Hanuman and is there to save Sita from Ravana, only that is one thing he does not do in this one. Here he is a child, taken away by a tornado, deposited in a faraway jungle with his lizard  chachi  and is groomed by a self-interested Garud. The stories behind all the familiar characters from Ramayana are hugely different but engaging. Only th...

Staring:  Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Harshaali Malhotra, Om Puri, Sharat Saxena Rated:  6/10 Here comes aman ki asha, Sallu bhai style. Actually not really, really Sallu style but definitely aman ki asha all the way. And  Bajrangi Bhaijaan  (Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi) just in case you are looking for synonyms for Hanumanji) smiles though this cross-border film on a dream that has lived alongside the depressing reality of India, Pakistan relations. Now, as we all know, our Sallu Bhai has been on a trot with NGO kind of movies. From  Jai Ho to Kick  and now  Bajrangi Bhaijaan  — the beleaguered star has been churning out movies which are away from the chawanni chhaap stamp of success that has Sallu Bhai wringing in the cash registers, as always. But un-Sallu does not really mean a bad film, it only means a different one from Salman Khan. In this one, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and his two-bit role as a Pakistani TV journo is a...