Shubhra Gupta
Top Rated Films
Shubhra Gupta's Film Reviews
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Game is a good Bollywood example of a bad Hollywood film
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‘Yeh Faasley’ has an intriguing premise. The connection between a father and a motherless daughter is usually made stronger because there is just the two of them, and that’s what it seems when Devinder Devilal Dua ( Kher) is first shown rapping companionably with daughter Arunima ( Desai).
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A range of interesting supplementary acts distract us from the lead pair whose rocky path to the `mandap’ we are meant to follow with interest.
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‘Saat Khoon Maaf’ succeeds in engaging you at every point. Given a choice, darrrlings, I will take a Vishal Bhardwaj film with all its flaws everytime, because it is a cinematic experience in the true sense of the word : this film gives us a story, characters, and an urge to ask that age-old question– and then what happened?
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The writing is smart, the lines are life-like, the characters feel right. The supporting cast is especially good, keeping things moving when the rest threaten to stop in their tracks.
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The title instantly conjures up a welcome robustness. That phrase is not so much invective as part of the slangy, easy-speak DNA of so many– an affectionate, ironic, all-encompassing metaphor for life and how it’s such a bitch.
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But ‘Turning 30’ soon turns from a warm, welcome peek into that girl’s life, a girl we are prepared to like, into a series of clichés. It’s almost like the script went looking for every single line that goes with the territory and stacks them up, one after another.
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‘No One Killed Jessica’ manages to sustain interest as it makes itself way towards the climactic moment when the culprit, despite the best efforts of his politician father and his fawning courtiers, is nabbed.
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A strangely uneven film. Its beginning feels amateurishly put together ; as it heads onwards, though, it finds an easy, flowing rhythm with just the occasional stutter.
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The challenge in a film like this, which entwines mobsters and `mehboobas’, is to make it all new, because of the past classics which have soared with the same dramatis personae. Milan Luthria rises only partially to it : he starts off well, and carries on as he means to, but then falls into the trap of the familiar. `Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai’ doesn’t match up to that spectacular scene where the city lies below, in all its glittery splendour, never quite becoming the great retro chic gangster flick that it sets out to be.