Top Rated Films
Deepanjana Pal's Film Reviews
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Katiyabaaz is a beautifully-shot documentary that tells Kanpur’s story with great sensitivity and wit. The years spent on the project have allowed the directors to film some fantastic sequences, like the violence that erupts on the streets one night when a large part of the city loses electricity. Small-town India at its electric, despairing best…
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By the time The Giver ends, you can completely relate to why the Elders didn’t want the Communities to have any memory. We’d definitely be happier if we could forget The Giver had been made.
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The point of The Hundred-Foot Journey is to give the viewer a tasting menu that covers everything from heartwarming home cooking to molecular gastronomy (which according to this film is just strange-looking, soulless food rather than the crazy, magical experience that the cuisine actually offers when it’s done expertly). However, without Mirren and Puri to keep things fresh, The Hundred-Foot Journey ends up feeling like a banquet made of leftovers that’s going on for entirely too long.
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Akshay’s film is mind-numbingly stupid, full of cliches…It says a lot about how starved for real entertainment this country is when Entertainment, with its stale jokes and stupidity, gets a laugh.
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The problem with Lucy is that Besson’s suggestion that the unlocked intellect will turn us into superheroes doesn’t feel entirely credible. The science he lays out in the film and what happens to Lucy feel a little out of sync. You could perhaps still, with a pinch of CPH4, believe Lucy can control everything from gravity to another person’s musculature. However, when electric cables start shooting out of her and she travels back in time to touch digits with an ape like in Creation of Adam, it becomes difficult to take the film seriously.
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While Hercules isn’t unwatchable, it is disappointing because an action spectacle like this one has no business being boring. You’re better off imagining what adventures could await Hercules and Singham if they did actually join biceps.
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A perfect little gem in an imperfect world…
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Zero paisa vasool in Salman Khan’s spectacularly dull film…
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For most part, Humpty Sharma ki Dulhania is a fun, but bland and forgettable film. Its real failure is that this tribute to DDLJ doesn’t have any characters or moments that stay with you. In its time, DDLJ was filled with clichés too, but it packaged them in situations that made them endearing, memorable and new. Humpty Sharma ki Dulhania, to quote one of the film’s better lines, is a “100% original fake” and you can’t help wondering, for all its laughs, why anyone bothered to make this film when re-runs of DDLJ exist.
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…lacks the directorial vision that would have translated the sweet, geeky charm of the book. The lines that read smoothly sound clumsy when spoken. The fault doesn’t lie in the words. The most un-normal of dialogues and conversations can become magical, but it takes a talented director and a superb cast to make the weird wonderful. Unfortunately, The Fault in Our Stars isn’t so lucky.