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X Men-Dark Phoenix, Review: X-Men, ex X-Men and X-Women
Every fan knows that the X in X-Men is for Xavier, the teacher-trainer who runs a school for the differently abled (gifted with a power or force other humans do not possess). In Dark Phoenix, there is a lot of play on the ‘word’, if one may call it that, X-Men. There are X-Men, and there are ex X-Men, then there are women members of X-Men who tell Xavier disparagingly that he should consider changing the name to X-Women, in v...
ConnecTechAsia, 03: Eutelsat, KT Sat, NAGRA and Teledyne at ConnecTechASia, Singapore, June 18-20
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ConnecTechAsia 2019, 01: Singapore to host ConnecTechAsia during June 18-20
Bringing together BroadcastAsia, CommunicAsia and NXTAsia across two centrally located venues, the iconic Marina Bay Sands Exhibition Centre and the old favourite, SunTec Singapore, ConnecTechAsia showcases state-of-the-art communication, enterprise, broadcast technologies and innovations. Coupled with a supercharged agenda, with renowned speakers, at ConnecTechAsia Summit, and a host of experiential activities, Conne...
Anahita’s Law, Review: Parsee patriarchy, woes of women and law of the land
Discrimination against women, and children of mixed religion marriages, are not phenomena that stare us in the face, like some of the basic needs of mankind: food, clothing and shelter. It is not even a second tier priority, like electricity, roads and water are. In a country struggling to provide these amenities to its population of 1.6 bn, implementing the fundamental right to practice the religion of your cho...
Rocketman, Review: Messed-up multi-millionaire music-maestro
Film-makers now need to ask themselves whether it makes good sense to churn out bio-pics with regular frequency. Does the genre hold enough promise to deliver quality cinema? In recent times, many of them are guilty of picking eminent personalities from films and music, with common traits, like troubled childhood, inability to handle fame and fortune, sexual mania or alternative sexual behaviour, and drug abuse. The phenomenon is co...
Naughty Gang, Review: Gang apes
We keep hearing at every seminar or conference that with the advances in technology, anybody, just anybody, can make a film. In various Indian film schools too, film-making has been so vehemently de-mystified that every year some 10,000 students pass out and are ready to shoot from the hip, the hip being where they keep their mobile phones. It is a no contest. If a 22-23 year-old fresher can make films, why can’t those who have been around on the fringes,...
Nakkash/The Craftsman, Review: Balancing Dharma with Karma
Carving is a fine art that is dying, like many other man-made enterprises, what with mechanisation and changing tastes. One can see many shops along the Bandra-Mahim Causeway in Mumbai run by hand-carvers, who sell exquisite furniture. And if you take the film Nakkash, described as fiction, to represent the state of this dying art in the holy city of Banaras-Kashi (Varanasi), even the last expert who carved many a mandir (Hindu temple...
Ahaa Re (The Two Lovers/Oh, Look at You), Review: Castle of love on bedrock of food
When you want to make a film about love, lost and found, romance, sublime and selfless, it is a good idea not to include components like villains, fights, item songs, crude comedy, sexual overtones and foul language. So what do you fill your screenplay with? How about conflicts and disparities, of many hues and various proportions? And food? Yes, food. Well if you are a foodie, and a romantic foodie, then why ...
Life in Metaphors-Portraits of Girish Kasaravalli, by O.P. Srivastava: Well framed!
A banker with a passion of cinema, Om Prakash Srivastava hung up his ATM to pursue his dream. In 2012, he attended a course in Film Appreciation at Goa, organised by the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where an ex alumnus and India’s most decorated film-maker, Girish Kasaravalli was taking a master class on film-making. OP was so impressed with the demeanour and erudition of his teacher an...
Brightburn, Review: Stay non-aliened
Comic-book creators took Moses as inspiration and wrote out a character called Superman, who arrives on earth as a baby, in a spaceship, from a planet called Krypton, is adopted by a childless couple, shows super powers and grows up to save the world from crisis after crisis. Soon, Superboy, who grew up to be Superman, became an on screen superhero, and a cult figure from the DC comics stable. He even joined hands with other superheroes on occasion and ba...
Yeh Hai India, Review: NREye
Indians settled abroad are called Non-Resident Indians, or NRIs. Not surprisingly, many of them still nurse feelings of love for the land of their birth, or of their fathers, and the often feel guilty pangs of separation from their motherland. Actor-producer-writer-director Manoj Kumar (real name Harikishen Goswami) made some hard hitting and box-office shattering patriotic films in the 60s and 70s, right till the early 80s, that earned him the epithet of Mr. Bhar...
Aladdin, Review: Aladdindeed
Believe it or not, Aladdin is a one-in-a-thousand-and-one story, part of The Thousand and One Nights (also called The Arabian Nights), stories narrated by a queen called Scheherazade, at bedtime, without revealing the end, to save herself from being killed by her husband, the murderous sadist who kills all his wives the day after he marries each one of them. Disney made an animated version in 1992, and here comes their live action CGI, musical avatar, directed and...
India’s Most Wanted, Review: Mission without ammunition, found wanting
Indian spy thrillers have been on the scene ever since the first film of James from Thames was released in India in the early 1960s. They were broadly divided into categories: rip-offs of 007 and C grade thrillers, with action and a bit of titillation. Remarkably, some of them even managed to incorporate catchy songs into the narrative. In the last two decades, after international terrorism, other than the eternal bo...
Salman and Katrina come to Bharat
Hotel Taj Land’s End, Bandra, is about 500 metres from where Indian superstar Salman Khan resides. It would take him exactly five minutes to walk to the venue, or two minutes on cycle, cycling being among his favourite indulgences. So why did he arrive at 2 pm for the launch of his home production, Bharat’s, title song, when the time on the invitation was indicated first as 11.30 pm and later delayed by half-an-hour? Only he knows. His fans and mo...
Kavita Kaushik in a Pajama Party without pajamas
Pajama Party is a quaint, albeit oddball, title for a play about women empowerment. It was premièred at the thoroughly renovated, grand, regal Royal Opera House, in South Mumbai, on Saturday, 18 May 2019. And I had the privilege of being offered a seat in the first row, which I prudently turned down, to opt for a more vantage point in the third row. The play is in Hinglish and marks the stage debut of TV actresses Kavita Kaushik (CID, FIR,...
John Wick 3-Parabellum, Review: Wicktory is yours
Break neck, break arm, break leg, and break everything action, in all forms of martial, some pre-martial and some post partial arts, glass and furniture, horses galloping, cars and bikes strewn all over the place, one unstoppable man-machine that’s a treat for action lovers, whether Wicked fans or non-wicked. A good example of the benefits reaped by turning to the creator-writer, (co) director and star who put together the first and seco...
A Dog’s Journey, Review: Dogfather
However incredible this may sound, Hollywood has made a film in the traditions of Wadia, Devar and Bokadia, Indian film-makers who dealt with themes involving animals, their exploits, their torture at the hands of human beasts and their faithfulness to their owner and his/her family. A Dog’s Journey is not so much about canine exploits as it is about a dog’s faithfulness, with generous aid from the almighty, who has been falsely accused of ...
De De Pyaar De, Review: Differential calculus
Some films begin on a positive note, start developing into potential winners, and then squander it all away, with inane, inept, insane, insipid, inchoate, infeasible, indifferent, inexcusable, incongruous and inconsequential writing. Most likely inspired by a play, American or Indianised, or a Hollywood romantic comedy, De De Pyaar De (Give Me, Give Me Your Love) begins with a newish take on the age-old plank of Daddy Long Legs (1955) and Lamhe (1...
Student of the Year-2, Review: Kya baddi kya baddi
Kya baddi Karan Johar, what was the earth-shaking supersonic idea that made you cash in on the ‘The biggest franchise of Bollywood’ (imdb’s words, not mine) and redraw the Archie-Betty-Veronica isosceles triangle for the umpteenth time, after you yourself had milked it silica gel dry exactly 20 years ago, as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (185 minutes), and launch a pomp-romp-stomp-clomp-chomp-whomp called Student of the Year 2 (mercifu...
UglyDolls, Review: I’mperfect
Toys and dolls are inanimate objects, to which we sometimes add motion and flight, using technology. Yet, why do children, and sometimes adults, get so attached to them? Though there exist pet animals, birds and water-borne life that can be, and are often, adopted and accommodated in homes, the attraction that draws young minds, more girls than boys, to dolls, of all shapes, sizes and functions, is a force to reckon with. Most likely, the child owners of su...
Setters, Review: Questionable answers
Job-oriented education has been a hot topic in India, where unemployment figures and poverty levels are very high. Corruption begins when a child is admitted to the kinder-garten class, with the help of a handsome bribe, euphemistically called ‘donation’. The spiral often continues till the graduation level, where the focus shifts to obtaining leaked examination papers, getting proxy candidates to appear on behalf of weak students, feeding liv...
After, Review: Noah’s arch
Teens to twenties romances do not come to us as just pure teenage romances, which can get terribly boring. There was Love Story, with cancer as the villain, and there was Goodbye Columbus, which had a devil-may-care heroine who invites her boy-friend to live with her family and seduces him with pre-marital sex. Also in the same milieu was When Harry Met Sally, which was drawn around the premise that men and women cannot just be friends. After has a girl brough...
Tarpan, Review: Pride and prejudice
To draw even minimal audiences, films like Tarpan need three boosters: positive reviews, film festivals exposure and word-of-mouth publicity. They pick up dark subjects, rooted in current ground reality, write them for the screen in the realistic mode, stick as far as possible to factual references as against a fictional narrative, cast unknown or at least relatively unknown actors who would nevertheless deliver, retain a technical team that can put-togethe...
Avengers, Endgame: Thanostradamus
As star casts go, Avengers: Endgame runs up a mind-boggling score. Like in theatrical performances, where all characters come on to the stage after the performance to take a bow, Endgame brings them all on screen, even resurrecting the dead, in a show of ultimate strength, before their nemesis is vanquished. Just as it takes two lives to conquer the dark force, the dark force itself needs to be conquered not once but twice. It is ingenious writing, to lay out...
Kalank, Review: Masochistic miasma
Everything in Kalank (blemish, stigma) is grand, both in content and in form. Sets and décor, riches and poverty, locales and vehicles, make-up and costumes, dances and fights, colours and luminance, all are designed to make your jaw drop in awe. All this opulence is merely the canvas on which a heart-wrenching tragedy is painted, around the time of India’s partition, with the entire ensemble cast at the receiving end of a woeful operatic wail, ...
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About Siraj Syed
 Syed Siraj
(Siraj Associates)
Siraj Syed is a film-critic since 1970 and a Former President of the Freelance Film Journalists' Combine of India.
He is the India Correspondent of FilmFestivals.com and a member of FIPRESCI, the international Federation of Film Critics, Munich, Germany
Siraj Syed has contributed over 1,015 articles on cinema, international film festivals, conventions, exhibitions, etc., most recently, at IFFI (Goa), MIFF (Mumbai), MFF/MAMI (Mumbai) and CommunicAsia (Singapore). He often edits film festival daily bulletins.
He is also an actor and a dubbing artiste. Further, he has been teaching media, acting and dubbing at over 30 institutes in India and Singapore, since 1984.
Bandra West, Mumbai India View my profileSend me a message
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