Suraj Pe Mangal Bhari, Review: Heavy load to carry It is difficult to decide what was more burdensome: sitting through the film or reviewing it for the benefit of unsuspecting prospective audiences. There is just too much happening, a lot of it without logic, over the two hours 19 minutes that Suraj Pe Mangal Bhari spans. In the hands of a competent editor, the two hours would end in the bin and the 19 minutes would then make an interesting TV episode. This is one of the films wherein an item...

A maker with a penchant for addressing social and sociological malaises tries his hand at the intra-nation village/small town to big city trans-migration issue in India, as seen through three different angles, by inhabitants of a Mumbai chawl (shanty/slum). Though Bhonsle is largely realistic cinema, Devashish Makhija, nevertheless, bends his treatment occasionally, to use tropes to move the story forward. The result is an above average film that has enough merit to be watchable on its own, bu...

Red carpet personalities attending the Diorama International Film Festival, New Delhi, 2019 15 January 2019: Sudhir Mishra, Neetu Chandra, David Dhawan, Boney Kapoor, Chitrangada Singh, Anubhav Sinha, Rumi Jaffrey, Ambassador Of Spain, Rafael Kapelinski 16 January 2019: Dariush Mehrjui, Giogio Franchini, Alka Yagnik, Philip Cheah, Rituparna Sengupta, Rumi Jaffrey, Mozhgan Taraneh, Actor, Iran, Rafael Kapelinski, Sanjay P Chahuhan, Rahul Mitra, Shaad Ali, Ajit Andhare, Utpal Acharya, A...

Gali Guleiyan (In the Shadows), Review: Shadow boxing in labyrinthe thin A year after being shown at Busan and the Mumbai International Film Festival, Gali Guleiyan emerges from the shadows and arrives at cinema halls in India. A psycho-supernatural drama, it falters on both levels and offers only confusion as the intelligible narrative. Performances are of a high order, and so are the music score and cinematography, but how one wishes they were put to better use. In the walled city of Old D...

Satyameva Jayate, Review: Blood-letting, blood curdling, blood-bath with pyre power Milap Milan Zaveri declared in a press interview a week ago that he will never make a sex comedy again, after the disastrous Mastizaade. “I would like to make films which have drama, action and heroism. I want to make heroic films.” The first station on this journey towards his goal is Satyameva Jayate (Only Truth Be Victorious), a heroic film, or, more accurately, another vigilante pot-boiler with...

Siraj Syed’s IFFI 2016 diary VIII, Open Forum IV: Courses for horses or horses for courses? Both, really. We are in the age of customised platforms for film viewing finding best-match, multiple-matches and staggered exhibition alternatives for films. A magnum opus like Bahubali (Indian mythological blockbuster franchise) needs a massive, four-digit spanning simultaneous, theatrical release while a Lunch Box (the mouse that roared a couple of years ago), though critically raved, would be...

Budhia Singh—Born to Run, alias Duronto, Review: Marathon gone Running is good for health. Making films on running and runners is not a bad ploy for a production house to get a run for their money, or money for your run. Milking the genre without substantial innovation might not be such good idea, though, and the box-office run might be as short-lived as, or, in fact, much shorter than, the apparently aborted career of India’s child wonder, Budhia Singh. Based on a true story, Bu...