Angrezi Medium, Review: Crazy Tedium Three years ago, Maddock Films gave us a slice-of-life entertainer called Hindi Medium. ‘Medium’ here referred to the language, the medium of instruction in school education. It was just passably humorous yet proved more popular than expected, garnering a few awards as well. A follow-up went into development soon afterwards, repeating its lead actor Irrfan Khan. Though still to recover completely, Irrfan is back in Maddock’s Angrezi (Engl...

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...

Halkaa, Review: Doing it in the open! Precisely the presumption of the makers of the film. Precisely the bane of filmgoers and film-critics. Furthering the cause of Swachh Bharat (Clean India), a central government campaign to promote, among other things, building of toilets in millions of Indian village homes, the film had to be subtle and extremely well-crafted to work. Sadly, it is neither. That it is made by much decorated director Nila Madhab Panda makes it a bitter pill to swallow. Hal...

Blue Mountains, Review by Siraj Syed: Colourless Molehills Used as a metaphor for distance, apparently unattainable goals, the Blue Mountains of the title prove as elusive and illusory as the real ones the makers project on screen. Lots of colour, lots of singing, lots of dancing, lots of melodrama, and lots of snow do not help Blue Mountains attain any height. Instead, we find ourselves in a cave, at best, or, rather, a gorge. Som (Yatharth Rastogi), a hill-town boy, and part of a gang of f...

MAMI inaugural screening: 104-minute wait for 104-minute film Organisers of the Jio MAMI’s 18th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) with STAR chose actress Konkona Sen-Sharma’s directorial debut film, A Death in the Gunj as the opening film. In a continually perplexing schedule, the opening film, for the last couple of years, is not screened on the opening day, and not even at the inaugural venue. This year, the inauguration ceremony was held at the restored Opera House cinema. Located at...

Gour Hari Dastaan/The Freedom File, Review: His-story Described in the press as a Kafkaesque black comedy when it was launched in 2011, Gour Hari Dastaan is based on a true story, of Gour Hari Das (now 85), with some Kafkaesque undertones, but very little or no black comedy. It cannot afford to be a comedy, let alone a black one, since it deals with the sensitive subject of the neglect and disregard suffered by those who participated in the struggle to rid India of British colonial rule. Brit...