• In the end, rather than being about the heavy religious stuff, it is about universal human drama. As a father and son reconcile, it is near heart-breaking. As an old man and his grandaughter sneak out for bhang, it tells you that the most devout have mischief in them. Bhutiani gives death its due dignity, and yet retains its objectivity and subtlety. It makes you laugh, and cry, and think and question. It’s what good cinema and storytelling are meant to do.

  • …the problem is fundamental: the writing is shoddy and unoriginal. And by the time it wades into certain true events, it is left with too little time and meaning. Raees perhaps works only as an SRK showcase. But we’ve seen many of those already.

  • Kapoor plays a character that’s rather familiar: a mash-up of roles, from the youth coming of age in Wake up Sid to the deviants in Rockstar and Tamasha. Sharma carries on in the same vein as her character from Dil Dhadakne Do.
    And by the time Johar throws in his final twist, he’s turned his no-mance into a soppy story and is just squeezing for the last drop of melodrama.

  • …it has flavour, a seed of a good idea even, something mega-budget films often lack. But like our Dilli Laundas Eleven, it lacks planning and execution.

  • Young Johnson has shades of a young Rocky, pestering him the way he’d once pestered Mickey (late Burgess Meredith) to train him. He asks about the outcome of his third fight with Apollo (which Rocky III ends with). The overall story, too, fits the underdog-versus-champion template.

  • Experiments are good. Hindi cinema certainly has room for more. But you run the risk of things blowing up in your face. That’s what this one does.

  • Burnt , in the end, isn’t burnt at all; it’s far from cooked. It tells no endearing story. And whatever it does tell doesn’t awe. A food critic says of Smith’s first cook in London: It fails to shock. She might as well have been writing about the film.

  • If you’re the sort of horror junkie who feeds on Hollywood and Japanese versions (Japan is to horror what Italy is to pizza), don’t expect to see something you haven’t seen before. But by Bollywood standards, this film easily outdoes most of what passes for horror.

    As pizzas go, this is Peppy Paneer. Far from authentic, but still enjoyable, as long as it’s well made.

  • As social experiments go, this one tests patience rather than intelligence. It takes every ounce of the former not to take the cue from Ashok’s audience at the outset and leave.

  • Good films require innovation; bad ones are usually recipe-based. And the really terrible ones? Those are recipes gone horribly wrong. What the makers of The Xposé will have you believe is cinema is actually punch lines, and lots (and by lots, we mean nearly a dozen) of songs roughly chopped up and mashed together.

    Add a poker-faced, nasal-toned lead actor, and you have what can only be a Himesh Reshammiya creation.

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