投稿者: Mike McCahill
After hit takes on Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Romeo and Juliet adaptation sees dead-eyed lovers drag one another to gutter and graveIt must be Misbegotten Adaptations week. This Hindi gangland epic’s credentials are impeccable: dire…
Pioneering director with a vital role in India’s ‘parallel cinema’ movement who used his films to explore difficult issuesThe Indian film-maker Shyam Benegal, who has died aged 90, was a pillar of the “parallel cinema” movement, the informal grouping o…
Pioneering director with a vital role in India’s ‘parallel cinema’ movement who used his films to explore difficult issuesThe Indian film-maker Shyam Benegal, who has died aged 90, was a pillar of the “parallel cinema” movement, the informal grouping o…
The big Diwali release is the latest entry in Rohit Shetty’s ‘Cop Universe’, once again featuring Devgn as the purveyor of supposed nation-saving coolOpening with a special shoutout to the Jammu & Kashmir police, this is the fifth entry in the so-c…
Janhvi Kapoor plays a medical student with the prospect of a pro career in the game, with Rajkummar Rao as the husband who coaches herHindi cinema has thus far spent 2024 in retreat, its commercial failures compounded by a successful run of south India…
Pushkar-Gayatri’s reboot of their 2017 hit improves on the original thanks to two zingy lead performances from Saif Ali Khan and Hrithik RoshanVikram Vedha was a Tamil hit in 2017, a twisty, semi-subversive thriller in which a bad-ass Chennai cop and …
Bollywood’s answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a star-studded special effects extravaganza with Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt as convincing romantic leadsAmid a woeful 2022 so far, this almost feels like Hindi mainstream cinema’s last roll of th…
Director Advait Chandan is too literal in his adaptation of the 90s classic but finds a warmth and political honesty the original lacksBollywood megastar Aamir Khan’s “Hanks-ish likability” is tested to the limit by his new project with his Secret Sup…
Grown adults behave like horny kids in this ill-judged comedy, meant to start discussion about contraception in IndiaThe eyebrow-raising title is intentional: Satramm Ramani’s comedy has been fashioned after 2017’s Toilet: A Love Story and 2018’s Pad M…
Karan Johar-produced film about Vikram Batra, who died in the 1999 India-Pakistan conflict, promotes him as a model citizen – with model looks to bootHot on the heels of Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, last year’s biopic of one of the hardier combatant…
Why use the door, Salman? Bollywood megastar goes back to basics, pummelling everything in sight including narrative cohesionWhat was originally scheduled as India’s big Eid blockbuster for May 2020 is opening a year later in cinemas everywhere but Ind…
Dhawan casts his son Varun in the role made famous in 1995 by Govinda, but little effort has been made to acknowledge the quarter-century sinceIt’s a tale of two Bollywoods this Christmas. Over at Netflix, Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, repre…
Anurag Kashyap kidnaps the daughter of Anil Kapoor in a mock-doc thriller that skewers India’s showbiz sceneAfter an undistinguished pandemic year, Indian cinema closes out 2020 with a postmodern surprise, at once nifty and nasty. Shot under the radar,…
Bad-apple politicians put the squeeze on a hapless secretary in this tired pile of vengeful ghost mayhem Censorship may have been an issue in the past, but it’s striking how few horror films Indian commercial cinema has produced relative to those from …
Vidya Balan puts in a blazing performance as the eponymous Indian maths genius in Anu Menon’s characterful feminist life storyIn recent years, the Hindi film mainstream has become more proactive about telling the stories of notable women. This new one …