Anuj Malhotra
Deccan Chronicle·Asian Age
Most Divergent Takes
- Split (2017)8.0 vs TRM 6.3+1.7
- Race (2016)7.0 vs TRM 6.1+0.9
- Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)6.0 vs TRM 5.1+0.9
- Central Intelligence (2016)5.0 vs TRM 5.6-0.6
- Maggie (2015)5.0 vs TRM 5.6-0.6
Split
2017 · Deccan Chronicle · Feb 2017
Unlike last year's 10 Cloverfield Lane, Split is not given to a discussion of elaborate strategy: its cage is more existential.
XXX: Return of Xander Cage
2017 · Deccan Chronicle · Jan 2017
It is a film borne out of extensive market surveys: in its dismissal of the ideas of nationhood and politics. XXX's latest instalment seems to revitalise the old, seemingly lazy, but sinister excuse: "Relax, it's just a movie!"
Skiptrace
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Sep 2016
Resident in this tired wistfulness is perhaps the next evolution of Chan's cinematic icon.
Nine Lives
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Aug 2016
A crisis of tone permeates much of Nine Lives: it recognises itself as a children's film and yet, most of it is immensely morose.
War Dogs
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Aug 2016
The characters cite Scarface frequently but even more interestingly, each chapter in the film begins with a line of dialogue that will determine and set its tone.
The Secret Life of Pets
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Jul 2016
The greatest accomplishment of the film — as of say, a Baby's Day Out — is their assimilation of the diverse landscapes of the city itself.
The Legend of Tarzan
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Jul 2016
It starts in a quaint, interesting, post-Tarzan manner, almost as if the film were a sequel. The film founds itself on an assumption of its lead character's established presence in popular lore — as such, it spares us the tedium of a linearly delivered origin story, which is rendered, instead, through brief flashbacks.
Central Intelligence
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Jun 2016
The film attempts to employ elements of genre — like most other similar films, including director Rawson Marshall Thurber's superior We're the Millers (2013) do — as a mere background (a circumstance, an environment) for the actual crisis: individuals helping reach each other emotional maturity, but in this case, they end up serving as an unfortunate distraction.
The Angry Birds Movie
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · May 2016
Despite being set across multiple environments: a tropical island, a high mountain, an ocean and later, another, densely populated island-city, the film features no real sense of wonder or adventure — and instead, reduces it to a pursuit of accurate, boring physics, but not very complimentary to the immense probabilities of animation itself.
10 Cloverfield Lane
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Apr 2016
The film's greatest accomplishment — notwithstanding its superfluous, sequel-inducing epilogue — is the remarkable consistency of tone (director Dan Trachtenberg) with which it is constructed. It sustains a slowburn gloom throughout its considerable runtime, through its characters' schemes, their counters, tender filial recollections, the first signs of Stockholm Syndrome, of faith, and then, the discoveries of murder, moments of violence and ultimately, the film's renovation into a new genre.
Race
2016 · Deccan Chronicle · Mar 2016
Hopkins' film is ultimately a successful interpretation of actual historical event. It manages to resist an overstatement of Owens' achievement and instead chooses to abandon its sport-film façade and adopt the stance of a period-film, wherein a significant historical event may yield more than one hero.
Hotel Transylvania 2
2015 · Deccan Chronicle · Nov 2015
The film emerges ultimately as a modern-day moral-parable about a checklist of virtues: acceptance, self-discovery, family, belonging to one's roots and so forth. It is still useful, however, for how it is so typical — its study can reveal a template for how most mainstream animation films are made, always in relation to the other films produced by the same industry.
Sicario
2015 · Asian Age · Oct 2015
Villeneuve directs it with a super heavy-hand: the tone belongs to an occult ceremony: everything is supersober, no one is meant to laugh and all grand proclamations (whether a line of dialogue or the sight of mutilated dead bodies suspended from a bridge) are followed by droney, town-hall music. While this maybe appropriate for the subject, it is also typical of Hollywood movies about individual protagonists who discover the ugliness inherent in a foreign landscape.
Maggie
2015 · Deccan Chronicle · May 2015
...result in an ironical fetishisation of the very genre he is trying to lament, but at least accounts for the relentless atmosphere of death and grief that rests heavily on the film.
While We're Young
2015 · Deccan Chronicle · May 2015
While Adam Driver plays Jamie, the young blowhard well enough, Josh needed an actor who can infuse his being with cruelty, envy and contempt but then render these vices entirely human. Unfortunately, Ben Stiller plays him with a cocksureness that strips away the confusion his character is mired in and makes him appear like a glorious party-pooper, nothing else.