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Review: David Fincher’s Gone Girl
One of the few things more inscrutable than the mind of a woman — more complex, harder to unspool, if you will — is the collective mind of a couple. Not just the joint decision-making, shaped via...
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Review: R Balki’s Cheeni Kum
Tabu has balls. Cheeni Kum could have been just another romance between an arrogant old perfectionist and a smitten waif, but the woman here has spirit. She rides the patriarch into a corner,...
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Review: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar
Christopher Nolan doesn’t like three-dimensional cinema. This is a curious compunction for a maker of blockbusters, a director whose releases have become events in themselves, especially at a time when...
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Review: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood
Remember how it felt, as a kid, when cousins visited in the summer? When an aunt’s children show up for a few vacation weeks and you hang with them and let them into your life and your room, when...
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Review: Prabhudeva’s Action Jackson
“AJ,” the girl gasps into her cellphone, breathlessly and furtively while gangsters surround her, “Some people are after me.” Efficient to the last word, her man wastes no time in getting to the point:...
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Review: KS Ravikumar’s Lingaa
You can tell just how vintage a film aspires to be by the films it steals from. KS Ravikumar’s Lingaa may be set in today for the most part, but as an opening heist — borrowed moronically yet loyally...
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Review: Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots
In Rajkumar Hirani’s latest film, a character steps to a blackboard and chalks up, for the benefit of a befuddled engineering college classroomful of students, the word ‘Farhanitrate,’ daring them to...
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Review: Rajkumar Hirani’s PK
How must it feel to look at life through really wide eyes? Cynicism is always easier than sincerity, and few filmmakers can nail the latter quite as consummately as Rajkumar Hirani, an old-school...
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Review: Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly
The cop wants to know how caller ID can display the picture of the person calling. It is a nightmarish situation, with your daughter kidnapped, your wife unaware, and you panicking in a police station,...
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The 10 best actors in Hindi cinema, 2014
2014 was a great year for our actors, and a lot of them did exceptionally well. Restricting this annual fixture to a list of ten was harder than it is in most years, and the credit for that goes to...
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The 10 best actresses in Hindi cinema, 2014
Take a bow, ladies. It is truly a thrilling and liberating time to be an (established) actress in Hindi cinema, a time when risks are smiled upon and when roles are pushing various envelopes. The ten...
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Review: Amit Sharma’s Tevar
Yawn. Tevar — yet another of those mindless South remakes we’ve been indulging in so faithfully ever since Aamir Khan showed us the way in Ghajini — is a tiring slog, devoid of personality, riding...
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Oscar Review: The Imitation Game
Remember the first time you heard the last Pink Floyd album? No, not that recent bit of noodley-guitar nonsense, but The Division Bell, twenty years ago? I was thirteen and instantly heartbroken,...
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Review: R Balki’s Shamitabh
This just in: Amitabh Bachchan, an actor some of you might have heard of, has a pretty good voice. What? Not exactly breaking news? Yet director R Balki seems newly aware of that revelation, and, it...
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Review: Sriram Raghavan’s Badlapur
Let the right one sin. Right, of course, depends entirely on where we’re standing. Is this character in the right, or is he merely stage-right? Or should we be standing here instead, where we can see...
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Review: Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash
“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job,” says Terrence Fletcher, the black-clad perfectionist conductor driving his orchestra insane with his demands. Fletcher wants...
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Why the 2015 Oscars are worth celebrating
The good guys won. Actually, it was bigger than that. I’ve annually whinged about and berated the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shortsightedness and predictability in columns like these...
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Review: Sharat Katariya’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha
There’s a lot to be said for the nineties, and Kumar Sanu doesn’t make the list. Not only is it hard to look past the impossibly nasal voice, he’s also a singer who flourished at a time when Hindi film...
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Review: Birdman, by Alejandro G Iñárritu
What do we talk about when we talk about Birdman? It’s hard to know where to begin, for this is a film that makes us gasp, a breathless, rapturous, stream-of-consciousness fever dream, a film which...
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Review: Navdeep Singh’s NH10
Bad things happen in NH10. That statement is both warning and promise: because Navdeep Singh’s new film is a tough film to stomach, a frightening and disturbing beast, and because it should be just...
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