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Column: Diamonds Are Forever
A column written to celebrate James Bond finally finding himself one helluva woman. ~ “I frequently wince at the word ‘cougar’ because of the way it has been appropriated by the media—like a polite,...
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Review: Karan Malhotra’s Brothers
If the number of crucifixes in a film signify how pious it is, Brothers must have been shot in the Vatican. The characters — a Fernandes family from Mumbai — are Catholics, it is established early on,...
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Column: That Sholay coin-toss and the role of chance in storytelling
It is temptingly easy to dismiss the cinematic coin-toss as a bit of chicanery, just another convenient plotting trope. Characters go down one road when they so easily could have strolled down another,...
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Review: Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Has there ever been a name as American as Armie Hammer? It is a cartoonish name with inbuilt stars and stripes, the sort of name that insists on a father named Jack and a son called Sledge, a name that...
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Review: Anees Bazmee’s Welcome Back
It’s hard to call Welcome Back a new Anees Bazmee film when it has its foot so firmly entrenched in all things old. A raggedy bunch of ever-cool veteran actors — Nana Patekar, Anil Kapoor, Paresh...
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Review: Nikhil Advani’s Hero
Kids today know what a gym is. They know how to flex their biceps so their tattoos ripple just right, and how to stand on sunny dockyards and forcefully throw lengths or rope up and down, as if playing...
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Review: Nikhil Advani’s Katti Batti
Movies, like lovers, have their own personalities. There are some that you fall for instantly, some you keep gazing at despite yourself, some that grow on you, and some who are never quite right. There...
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Review: Madhur Bhandarkar’s Calendar Girls
Halfway through Calendar Girls, the new film by Madhur Bhandarkar, a young actress is shooting a film when she’s sidetracked by the revelation that some superstar is shooting nearby. She bolts,...
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Review: Chimbudeven’s Puli
By the time Sridevi shows up in the massive-budget fantasy epic Puli, its few charms have worn off and the iconic actress appears like an empress who’s shown up at an unimaginative costume party....
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Review: Ridley Scott’s The Martian
How long can a modern-day space romp go without breaking out the Bowie? In keeping with pop-scored movies like Guardians Of The Galaxy, it has now become merely a matter of time before movies that have...
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Review: Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar
The scariest part of Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar is when it makes us laugh. A tightly-coiled procedural made with such dryness that it seems, in parts, documentarian — resembling a reenactment more than a...
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Review: Prabhudeva’s Singh Is Bliing
It’s as if Akshay Kumar is daring us to like him. The man has genuine acting chops, drips with screen presence, is significantly fitter than his contemporaries, and has the kind of reassuringly goofy...
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Review: Sanjay Gupta’s Jazbaa
In many ways, Jazbaa is the Irrfan Khan acid test. Not that Irrfan needs to be tested, of course. He is a superlative actor in the middle of an incredible run of form, and as we have seen from his...
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Review: Luv Ranjan’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2
Let’s start by setting the record straight: misogyny is not the problem here. Sure, misogyny is certainly a giant (and growing) problem, but the beliefs of the filmmaker should never get in the way of...
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Review: Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak
Guillermo Del Toro would make a spectacular mortician. There is so much the Mexican master does with the dead — and not just dead people, but dead feelings, dead times, dead writers, dead styles… It is...
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Ten most excellent movies about time travel
Which is the greatest movie about time travel? That may be one of the most rhetorical questions in cinema, as it causes the brain to flood instantly with images — of lightning bolts and Chuck Berry...
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Review: Vikas Bahl’s Shaandaar
There is such a thing as too much sugar. The very idea of cinema as confection is a fine one, for we could all occasionally use a soothing lozenge as an opiate, and some films are meant to shine with...
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Review: Prawaal Raman’s Main Aur Charles
The first word used to describe Charles Sobhraj in Prawaal Raman’s Main Aur Charles is ‘hypnotic.’ This would be fine — even obvious — were Raman to kick things off with a pair of bikini-clad girls...
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Review: Kanu Behl’s Titli
There’s a world of difference between red and maroon. You might not expect him to know that distinction, but Vikram does. A security guard at a mall who moonlights as a carjacker, Vikram is furious at...
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Tribute: Raising a bowler hat to Saeed Jaffrey
The first time I saw Saeed Jaffrey I refused to believe he was an actor. Shekhar Kapoor’s Masoom released when I was two years old, and soon became one of the few Hindi film VHS tapes in our house, one...
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