Sanjukta Sharma
LiveMint·Scroll.in
Joker
2019 · Scroll.in · Oct 2019
Joker is a blazing Joaquin Phoenix grinder. It is out-and-out Oscar bait. While satisfying on the acting and technical fronts, the where, why and how of pop culture's most mythologised villain is deeply unsatisfying. Joker could do better than avenging just an impoverished, traumatic childhood.
Tumbbad
2018 · Scroll.in · Oct 2018
Barve and his team of collaborators leave much to interpretation, but Tumbbad, derived from the works of Marathi pulp horror writer Narayan Dharap (he is known for his Stephen King adaptations in Marathi), is a thrilling cinematic experience just as a horror film. For film lovers, the genre-bending is gratifying. It has been a while since a horror film spoke so eloquently about something as primal as greed and remained true to its Indian (Marathi) setting.
Paa
2009 · LiveMint · May 2015
In treatment and characterization, Paa has a certain breeziness and a brand of humour which, although awkward and laboured in parts, tries to remind us that life is worth living even when it sucks. It reaffirms the same positivity canon that many mainstream Hollywood films exploit while depicting disease and death. Francis Ford Coppola's Jack and Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump are just two examples. But despite the good, Paa should just have been Auro's story; it should have been a story more deeply committed to the child—and other children like him—and his unique condition.
Shahid
2013 · LiveMint · May 2015
Shahid is an admirable project, but as a biopic, it is far short of a masterpiece.
Margarita, with a Straw
2015 · LiveMint · May 2015
Bisexuality, emotional courage and the pain of loss are Bose's spindles for the story. The setting is important in as much as it shows how a city allows a person with disability freedom and confidence of mobility. We see that Delhi is far behind New York, but not through dialogues or long-drawn scenes.
2 States
2014 · LiveMint · Dec 2014
With cut-backs to a shrink's couch from where Krish is narrating his life, and peppered with songs, the story takes a long road to the climactic wedding in a beautiful temple under cloudy skies—the most beautiful sequence in the film. The labour and fuss over this cross-state marriage are tedious. From an overblown soap opera, it is unfair to expect better.
PK
2014 · LiveMint · Dec 2014
PK is a dialectic on religion on the big screen, without much of the splendour of cinematic technique. It is rooted to dialogues, scenes and characters, as does Hirani's other films. But the director's biggest feat is the idea, its effortless translation and its politics. Someone in the broad stroke canvas of populist Hindi cinema has finally spoken on behalf of the agnostic. Given the news headlines, how much more relevant could that get?
Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain
2014 · LiveMint · Dec 2014
The climactic scenes of mass hysteria and death have some powerful moments and make you wonder why we don't remind ourselves of this tragedy more often. But apart from the provocative end, Bhopal: A Prayer For Rain is a wasted opportunity.
Happy Ending
2014 · LiveMint · Nov 2014
Govinda steals the show. He obviously relishes the role of the animated, absurd, irreverent ageing Bollywood hero—doubly zany since he is on the comeback trail himself. The scenes in which he appears are unremittingly funny—and possibly the reason Happy Ending was not entirely a waste of time.
Kill Dil
2014 · LiveMint · Nov 2014
Kill/Dil is an amalgam of Hindi film clichés, the most obvious being the orphans, set to uninspired gimmicks. A waste of a Govinda comeback.
Interstellar
2014 · LiveMint · Nov 2014
There's plenty in Interstellar for a geek and much for the passionate movie-goer willing to surrender to a space opera, a magnificent cauldron in which time, love, mortality, parenthood and astrophysics bubble and elegantly spill over.
Rang Rasiya
2014 · LiveMint · Nov 2014
Rang Rasiya is a wasted opportunity for a layered portrait of a colourful and bold figure in Indian art.
Gone Girl
2014 · LiveMint · Oct 2014
Gone Girl has none of the moral ambiguity and depth that these two characters demand. In fact, we see little of them or know little of them. Will she stay gone? Will Nick get the death penalty in Missouri? Towards the climax, I somehow lost interest about the film as a whodunnit, caught as I was, with Fincher's supreme cleverness in crafting a story without telling you much about his two protagonists apparently so gone in their heart and mind.
Happy New Year
2014 · LiveMint · Oct 2014
Happy New Year is like a Bollywood Night in Dubai on loop, with a few stale heist tropes thrown in. Some of Farah Khan's tricks to propel her story are painfully old-fashioned, one being the villain discreetly mixing a pill in to the drink of the good guy so he becomes unconscious. So much staleness, packed in to a running time of 3 hours, is revolting even to the brain-dead stupor that we, fans of Hindi movies, sometimes habitually get into, just for the sake of time-pass entertainment.
Ekkees Toppon Ki Salaami
2014 · LiveMint · Oct 2014
...despite the best of intentions, Ekkees Toppon Ki Salaami is a tiresome film and at least half an hour longer than it should have been.
Haider
2014 · LiveMint · Oct 2014
Haider is an immensely effective reimagination of Shakespeare—and the film's biggest triumph is that the provincial, in this case Kashmir and the characters defined by its reality, shine in a universal and timeless tragedy.
Chaarfutiya Chhokare
2014 · LiveMint · Sep 2014
The noble intention of the film is undoubtable. In execution and storytelling it is a mess. The Hindi "social issue" melodrama usually has the stamp of a maker whom mainstream star-driven Bollywood has dyed purple, and with all that conditioning, and there is an attempt to break out and make a meaningful film.
Khoobsurat
2014 · LiveMint · Sep 2014
Shashanka Ghosh's Khoosurat is an all-round disaster. It reminds me all over again how confident a film-maker Hrishikesh Mukherjee was, and how sympathetic he was to his characters.
Mary Kom
2014 · LiveMint · Sep 2014
All I cared about till the end was how the woman was ducking, weaving, bouncing and punching, without knowing much about the sport's nuances. So despite all the Northeast claptrap and the thoughtless film-making, Priyanka Chopra makes Mary Kom worth watching.
Raja Natwarlal
2014 · LiveMint · Aug 2014
Raja Natwarlal is unimaginative pulp; it begins and ends on a lukewarm note.
Katiyabaaz
2014 · LiveMint · Aug 2014
Kanpur's power crisis in a film that awkwardly straddles fiction and documentary. It is heartening to see documentaries release on the big screen, and Katiyabaaz is the clever new avatar of this genre that turns the mundane and the extraordinary in reality into marketable and watchable cinema.
Kick
2014 · LiveMint · Jul 2014
It's a really long Salman Khan act—he's the messiah, the crazy 'dil se' man. Just don't count it as cinema...
Begin Again
2014 · LiveMint · Jul 2014
The writing has some awkward turns. Some dialogues and scenes stretch the sugary all-is-well credo too far, which do not stop Begin Again from being an immensely enjoyable musical. The original music by Gregg Alexander is intoxicating Mitchellian graft.
Ek Villain
2014 · LiveMint · Jun 2014
Ek Villain is an ugly ode to misogyny. On the other hand, it is an opportunity wasted for a spectacularly violent film free of middle-class dross.
Filmistaan
2014 · Jun 2014
Scenes are elaborate without being flabby, and the humour in the dialogues and situations—never rising above the literal, but sharp—keep the film breezy. Imagine a utopia which is neither India nor Pakistan, where a whole village laughs and cries watching Hindi films under the desert moon, and despite being hostage to religion-driven fanaticism, the hero uses a film camera to win hearts.
The World Before Her
2014 · Jun 2014
The reward of watching such non-fiction on the big screen, or the magnification of unspoken intimacy and shared history, is a discomfiting thrill. That's the response Nisha Pahuja's The World Before Her extracted from me. In the best tradition of American documentary film-making, which allows subjects to speak for themselves and the viewer to absorb what she or he wants, Pahuja's film about Ruhi, a beauty-contest aspirant from a middle-class family in Jaipur and Prachi, an opponent of that aspiration, is not as much an eye-opener as it is an example of clever, narrative non-fiction.
Hawaa Hawaai
2014 · LiveMint · May 2014
Hawaa Hawaai needed some sparseness and quiet, but even with all the noise, you will love Arjun and his friends, and cheer them on. In dramatic pitch, Hawaa Hawaai is much more brassy than Stanley Ka Dabba, Gupte's first film as director, also about an underprivileged child affirming life. The emphasis on melodrama lends the film a soap-operatic quality it doesn't need, because the story has a linear, classic underdog graph, leading up to a climactic race—a Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, but with a socialist engagement with poverty and its trappings.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
2014 · LiveMint · May 2014
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a love story and the most tender among superhero love stories. That Marc Webb has directed a sequel of a reboot of the friendly neighbourhood superhero means he is taking on the original artist's imagination. The result is lucrative perhaps, but not that amazing.
Dekh Tamasha Dekh
2014 · LiveMint · Apr 2014
Like every other genre of films besides romance and action, political satire is a scarce commodity in Hindi cinema. Khan makes one without alienating any kind of audience. Far from being preachy; its politics is utterly engaging.
Noah
2014 · LiveMint · Mar 2014
Noah is superbly inventive, but much too overwrought. Aronofsky's experiment has the kind of seriousness and nerve that makes watching it necessary as well as tedious.
Lakshmi
2014 · LiveMint · Mar 2014
A film with heart and piety, Lakshmi suffers because of its cloying literality. Watching it is like reading reams of journalistic writing on child trafficking or watching an NGO documentary lauding their own good work.
Bewakoofiyaan
2014 · LiveMint · Mar 2014
...ends on the banal note that no matter the vicissitudes, love is all you need. What then was the point of all the humdrum but overwrought conflicts leading up to that realization? They did not tell me anything about the characters. The characters did not evolve or transform, but merely went back to where they were and lived happily ever after.
Queen
2014 · LiveMint · Mar 2014
Queen is an ebullient, enjoyable film, its feminist points squirelled into the film's margins. It's the breeziest film you can imagine about a person's transformation in a short span, and Ranuat is winningly responsible for it.
August: Osage County
2014 · LiveMint · Mar 2014
Wells' translation is not gratifying because he does not explore the elasticity and scope of cinema—telling much more than he shows. The film's narrow intensity does not make it profound either.
Dallas Buyers Club
2014 · LiveMint · Mar 2014
Ultimately, however, Dallas Buyers Club rides on the McConaughey force. Who would have imagined that an actor best known shirtless, hewn in middle America, always the fetching, bedraggled son of the soil in romcoms, would immerse in a character that demands so much to execute yet have no gratifyingly happy climax?
Highway
2014 · LiveMint · Feb 2014
Imtiaz Ali's Highway is about escape. It is a dreamlike film, complete with achingly beautiful Himalayan landscapes and vast, unpopulated, dusty expanses. At the centre is a pair of utterly unlikely soulmates—a spunky, rosy-cheeked girl of wealth from South Delhi and her captor, a Haryanvi rogue extortionist.
Her
2014 · LiveMint · Feb 2014
As cinema, it falls short of greatness because of Jonze's strange ambiguity about his protagonist's world; the verbose writing ultimately does not say or show anything substantial about the future Jonze projects.
Saving Mr. Banks
2014 · LiveMint · Feb 2014
The bitter author, portrayed as a lonely spinster who hides deep insecurities from childhood, reduces the life of P.L. Travers to a stereotype that the climax can liberate with happy tears. It's highly unlikely that the movie would have been a catharsis for the author in 1964, when the film came out and became a global sensation. Barring a few scenes, Saving Mr Banks is dull. What else would a glorified corporate film be?
Hasee Toh Phasee
2014 · LiveMint · Feb 2014
Director Vinil Mathew's debut feature film, Hasee Toh Phasee, is a smart and winning feint of that formula. It is an extremely likable balance between light and shade, the sadness in his beautiful lead woman sitting happily alongside her smiles. The sugar is pleasingly granular.
12 Years a Slave
2014 · LiveMint · Jan 2014
12 Years a Slave is a nightmare, and McQueen intends it to be so. Racism has never before appeared so intimately terrifying on screen. It is a modern classic.
Miss Lovely
2014 · LiveMint · Jan 2014
...a cinematic feast—its release is a great start to the year in Indian independent film-making.
American Hustle
2014 · LiveMint · Jan 2014
It has the conceit of a gangster film—an aggression that's thrown outward, one-liners and dialogue-heavy scenes, and plenty of slow motion shots. But it is essentially an intimate story about lost love and identity, and that's what you remember it for. Without actually showing the dejection of 1970s' New York, Russell tells us all about it—through his characters, and with hilarity and mock seriousness.
Inside Llewyn Davis
2014 · LiveMint · Jan 2014
The sardonic art of Ethan and Joel Coen, so scornful of their own surly and defeated characters, never has had much room for emotional depth...Inside Llewyn Davis is their saddest and most poetic story ever. The recognizable narrative style—wide sweeping frames with just one crucial thing or person moving somewhere in the frame, moving to overcharged close-ups—is complemented by the mood-inducing cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel.
Dedh Ishqiya
2014 · LiveMint · Jan 2014
When I am despirited by the crassly sexist ethos that governs Hindi films today, Ishqiya is one of the films I like to think of. Here too, like the first, Chaubey keeps his light, humorous touch intact without failing to smuggle in the class and gender politics crucial to the story.
Bombay Talkies
2013 · LiveMint · Dec 2013
...after you have left the theatre, it is not gratification you feel, but the short-lived aftertaste of a music video or a good commercial. It eulogizes Bollywood, sure, but in a Bollywood-crazy nation it is like preaching to the converted. Surely there is more to the desire, madness, ugliness and fantasy in Hindi cinema, and to the millions who work here. If you wait to watch the terrible promotional video at the end of the film, satrring all our stars, you will most likely forget the best of Bombay Talkies.
Bullett Raja
2013 · LiveMint · Nov 2013
Dhulia's new film Bullet Raja strays far from the work he has built so far. It is a wishy-washy mix of two brazen hinterland heroes' misadventures, a revenge drama, and a soap-opera style, hackneyed depiction of Uttar Pradesh politics. Dhulia's dialogues are insipid, and the humour, perhaps intended to be madcap, borders on the imbecile. The lead characters, Raja (Saif Ali Khan) and Rudra (Jimmy Shergill) are mere vehicles to keep a muddled narrative afloat. They have no signature quirk, as pulp heroes would demand.
Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela
2013 · LiveMint · Nov 2013
Goliyon ki Rasleela Ram-Leela (the new title is perhaps the worst thing about the film) is an all out celebration of cinematic excess. Forget the tragedy, the Kutch landscape, its costumes, colours, expanses and details, are stuff of visual magic.
Krrish 3
2013 · LiveMint · Nov 2013
...is neither Amar Chitra Katha nor Marvel. The Indian superhero stays in an artless, old-fashioned limbo.
Mickey Virus
2013 · LiveMint · Oct 2013
Quite evidently, it is a film made on the premise that the hacker has novelty in Bollywood. It may be, for the technologically-challenged or the IQ-challenged. Without any authentic ring to it, and with artless performances and a predictable story, the last thing I could do, while sitting through its more than 2 hours of running time, was suspend disbelief.
Amour
2013 · LiveMint · Oct 2013
Don't miss this acutely original, heartbreaking film.
Elysium
2013 · LiveMint · Sep 2013
This is a simplified and 21st century version of John Milton's Paradise Lost, wrapped in a very attractive pop sensibility.
Dabba (The Lunchbox)
2013 · LiveMint · Sep 2013
While being an immensely enjoyable and competent film, the universality of The Lunchbox tends to exclude its setting's all-important provinciality.
Grown Ups 2
2013 · LiveMint · Sep 2013
This film exists as Sandler's another jab at box-office success—which has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of writing or performance.
Shuddh Desi Romance
2013 · LiveMint · Sep 2013
A dopey B-town love story. It's best thing is the kitschy art direction