Made in Heaven, Season 2: "Marriages are made in heaven, so are thunder and lightning" Although the quote comes from Clint Eastwood, you can say it again, for this is Season 2. And unlike most marriages in real life, on OTT you get a second chance, to revisit heaven. After a successful Season 1 (2019), the team from Excel Media and Entertainment, and Tiger Baby Films, is back, with Season 2. Many characters are retained, and a few are added, to make these marriages work, I presume, ...

Vikram Vedha, Review: Gang gang, bang bang There are only a handful of characters in Vikram Vedha who do not wield guns, swords or any ‘weapon’ they can lay their hands on. Almost all of them die. And what about those who do wield guns and makeshift weapons? They meet their fate too, except for…Rarely has a film let loose a such a fusillade of bullets, from all sorts of hand-guns as well as AK47s, as in this film. And rarely have we seen so many corpses tumble left, right a...

Medium Spicy, Review: Only medium, not spicy This had to be a new take on love. In its promotion, the makers of the film Medium Spicy (in Marathi language) quoted from William Shakespeare’s all-time love classic, Romeo and Juliet, “Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake – it is everything except what it is!” – Act 1 Scene 1. The movie begins with a reunion party of former catering college students, where liquor ...

10th Jagran Film Festival, Mumbai-I: Sweet and sour, like the candy of the sponsor Accreditation as a media-person was not a problem, this year, probably due to the intervention of the Principal Correspondent of Jagran, Ms. Smita Srivastava. Jagran is a media major, and this was the tenth Jagran Film Festival (JFF) they held across India, culminating at Mumbai. It was a short festival, lasting just four days, with screenings and sessions at the four auditoria of Cinépolis (once known a...

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...

Baazaar, Review: Insighter trading Allahabad (now renamed Prayagraj) boy Rizwan Ahmed idolises stock market wolf Shakun Kothari and aims to become a billionaire tycoon like his hero. Baazaar then moves on to detail how unscrupulous and manipulative, even corrupt, Kothari is, and how all this impacts the small-town boy who has a sister to marry, and to live up to the expectations of an honest father who has just retired. Get ready for an insight into the world of stocks and shares, insider tra...

FICCI Frames 18, VI: Master Class by master director R. Balki Ace ad film maker turned ace feature film director, R. Balki, chatted with senior TV journalist Anuradha Sengupta in a Master Class on the broad convention theme of Re-Imagining India’s Media & Entertainment Sector, at FICCI Frames 18, on the second working day of the three-day international convention. Balki has made two of his most successful films with India’s longest reigning superstar, Amitabh Bachchan, in the ...

Siraj Syed on 18th MFF: Godless, Madly, Red Turtle meets Barakah Far from catching up on film viewing shortfall, I could see fewer films in the second half of the 18th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) with STAR. It was a deadly combination of several factors: Tickets sold out, no luck with walk-ins, inability to wake up early, traffic jams and unavoidably long travel times, the desire to attend two or three non-screening events, the choice of some films over others shown at the same or alm...

Parched, Review by Siraj Syed: Rani & Lajjo & Bijli & Thelma & Louise’s Rihaee Get this right. Parched is not a remake. It is a nod to the soul of the 1988 film, Rihaee (Liberation, directed by Aruna Rajé), and a tribute to one of the most discussed climaxes in cinematic history: Hollywood’s Thelma and Louise, a 1991 milestone by Ridley Scott. One film old director Leena Yadav sets her tale in Rajasthan, enlists a youngish cast and a predominantly foreign cr...

Badlapur—Don’t Miss the Beginning, Review: Some things are missing Funny line for a name. It is okay as a tag-line, but to make it part of the name? Did somebody object to the title Badlapur, and was the tag-line merged into the title to overcome that objection? Last December, a film titled Badlapur Boys was released in India, so there sure is some confusion. That one took its name from a fictional village in North India, and was about the game of kabaddi. Here, the name comes fro...