The Great Indian Family, Review: Pandit pop’s bhajan singing son is a Muslim What a roundabout route it has taken to emerge as The Great Indian Family! It began with the 2010 British film The Infidel, starring Omid Djalili (the D is silent), directed by Josh Appignanesi and a cast that included South Asian sounding names like Archie Panjabi, Saamiya Nasir, James Krishna Floyd, Nabi Nasir, Mina Anwar, Amit Shah, Uzma, Ravin J. Ganatra and Niraj Naik. Five years later, we had an Indian ad...

Mili, Review: Chilly A remake it is. And an ideal vehicle to draw boundless sympathy from audiences for the lead actress, Janhvi Kapoor. For who would not root for a girl locked in a freezer chamber and subjected to temperatures of -12 degrees to -18 degrees Celsius? What if hypothermia sets in, and she freezes to death? No chance. Mili is producer Boney Kapoor’s mini Titanic tale, minus the boy, and killing her would be like committing suicide. So, once the premise of a girl battling s...

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...

Housefull 4, Review: Emptiness to the fore In the age of the multiplex, a sign saying that a particular show is House-Full, meaning all the tickets have been sold in advance, is about as rare as discoveries of the abominable snowman. Producer Sajid Nadiadwala is a grandson who carries on the business his grand-father started, and even calls his company Nadiadwala Grandson, complete with an animated logo featuring an old man and a young child. Housefull 4 is Sajid’s fourth foray with the...

Family of Thakurganj, Review: Nannu, Munnu and nothing New, New Referencing dozens of mafia/gangster movies made in India and the West, Family of Thakurganj glorifies crime for the major part, gets into a conscientious hiccup and sermonising after the midway mark, and ends-up offering ‘crime kills crime’ as a solution against the rot of corruption that has set in the entire fabric of the Indian police/law/politics nexus. Except for a couple of twists in the plot, there is little t...

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...

Kashi—In Search of Ganga, Review: Searchomania and Schizophrenia Suspense thriller it could be. It is not. Search for a sibling it could be. It is not. A film that takes the audience for a royal ride, it is. A classic case of the script and the direction tying up the story in knots, and then, not knowing how to unravel the Gordian knotty, only getting naughty and clever by half. Lucknow-based journalist Devina meets Kaashi in Kaashi (another name for Varanasi or Banaras) and takes an ...

Mulk, Review: Half-baked attempt at addressing a burning national issue Right in the beginning, the makers tell you that the film is inspired by real-life incidents, as reported in Indian media, and that they have no intention of suggesting that some acts of some persons are representative of the entire community. Mulk addresses the burning issue of terrorism and tries to convey the triple messages that perpetrators of terror should not be identified on the basis of their religion, that terr...

Khajoor Pe Atke, Review: Free fall and die hard Ventilator, a Marathi film produced by Hindi actress Priyanka Chopra, became the toast of Maharashtra in late 2016. The story of a family, whose eldest and most beloved member goes into a coma and is put on a medical ventilator a few days before the Ganesh Chaturthi festival celebrations, it won eight major awards. A year-and-a-half later, actor Harsh Chhaya releases Khajoor Pe Atke, his version of a ventilator story. Sadly, while the idiomatic ...

Nanu ki Jaanu, Review: It’s a nu nu What can you make of this mishmash that is as puerile as its title? Whatever you make, it’s all a nu nu, or no no, to spell it right. Misguided, miswritten, misdirected and misacted, the film revels in flouting the basic tenets of mise en scène. If the Tamil/Telugu original of this remake was worth remaking, the makers of Nanu Ki Jaanu have done it great injustice, beginning with changing the profession of the protagonist from a violinist...