Movie Reviews

             Russian model Sasha Luss is Anna – an intelligent, highly skilled, lethal assassin. The KGB employs Anna under the mentorship of Olga (Helen Mirren). Hired by a modelling agency, Anna has the perfect cover as she stacks up kills, working closely with her comrade Alex (Luke Evans). But as is the case with spy-thrillers, everything is not as it seems. To reveal any more of the plot would take away the element of surprise, and while that’s generally avoided in assessing a film, it’s a plot device that ‘Anna’ relies heavily upon. Unfortunately, this becomes detrimental.  Luc Besson has made a career out of female-centric films in the past, and he does well to establish Anna as a determined killer. Sasha Luss has ample moments to showcase her acting and fighting skills and is convincing enough in both areas, although the role demands a far more experienced and nuanced performance. Being paired with Helen Mirren certainly helps the newcomer, especially as the veteran actr

                 ‘Positively do not open,’ reads the warning sign etched in bold capital letters on the sacred closet, holding the evil doll Annabelle. You don’t need to be a horror fan to know that somehow, the exact opposite will happen. Clearly, unpredictability is not among the strong points of Annabelle Comes Home. However, for a debutant, director and writer Gary Dauberman delivers quite handsomely in dishing out many delicious jump scares at a consistent pace. At the heart of it is his excellent camera control and the strategy to generate constant scares. The film opens with the daredevil duo Ed and Lorraine bringing the doll home. They lock it up in their basement, along with a host of other creepy memorabilia from their infamous cases. The room is packed with ghostly goodies waiting to be fiddled with for all hell to break loose. Meanwhile, their daughter Judy is having a hard time with school bullies because of what her parents do for a living. This part is sensitively

                 Molly (Tessa Thompson) encounters the MIB as a young girl and becomes obsessed with finding the secret organisation. She’s written off as crazy for believing in aliens, but her persistence leads her to the doorstep of the US headquarters. Impressed by her tenacity, department head Agent O (Emma Thompson) gives Molly a chance to prove herself, dubbing her Agent M, and putting her on probation. M is packed off to London, where she meets the heroic Agent H, who saved the world along with the London head High T (Liam Neeson) using only their wits. Agents H & M are assigned a seemingly low-key mission, but everything goes haywire, leaving the fate of the planet in their hands. While this plot sounds pretty much like every other MIB film so far, this continuation of the franchise appeared to be a lot more promising with the charismatic and currently popular Chris Hemsworth, paired with the equally affable Tessa Thompson. The actors have previously worked together w

          When Ayan Ranjan (Ayushmann Khurana), a city bred IPS officer is given charge of the Lalgaon Police Station in the heartland of India, he realizes soon enough that he will have to tackle far more than meets the eye. At one point early in the film, he exasperatedly tells his wife Aditi (Isha Talwar) on the phone, “It’s like the wild wild West.” Having studied in Delhi’s St. Stephens and lived in Europe prior to this, Ayan is clearly at odds with the mindsets that accost him right from the word go at Lalgaon. Even as he is grappling with the strong presence of caste discrimination and societal inequalities looming over, he stumbles upon the news of three girls employed in a local factory who have gone missing for the last two days. His colleagues, Bhramdutt and Jatav (Manoj Pahwa and Kumud Mishra) tell him in all probability the girls will turn up. But the next morning, when two of them are found hanging from a tree, it confirms that something has gone horribly wrong.  H

          Meet Kabir Singh – the kind of boyfriend, who is aggressive, obsessive and would go to any extreme for his girl. He is all in, or nothing at all. As a senior and a topper in one of Delhi’s most reputed medical institutes, he wields immense power. Thanks to his lethal anger issues, there are few who would want to mess with him. By his own admission, he becomes a rebel with a cause as soon as he sees his junior in college Preeti (Kiara Advani). For him, it is love at first sight. But this is far from a meet cute romance, with mush gush and the regular romantic toppings. It immediately gives Kabir’s unsettled and self-destructive streak a reason to manifest. Thus, begins the real journey of his character into the deep dark abyss of chasing the love of his life. Shahid’s performance lets the character get away with a lot of vices like womanizing, drug addiction, alcoholism and brash male toxicity. For some, his actions and recklessness might seem problematic, but that is e

             Agent Sai Srinivasa Athreya  is a brilliantly executed, no nonsense film which makes it clear from get-go about the kind of story it wants to tell. This is not the kind of film that will pander to a commercial audience, nor is it the kind of film which will allow itself to be diluted with unnecessary tropes. There will be no feel-good moments to make your chest untighten when the gristly core of the story shows it face nor there any relief at the end to make it seem that everything is right in the world. This is exactly why  Agent Sai Srinivasa Athreya  is the kind of film that needs to be seen with a story that needs to be told. Agent Athreya (Naveen Polishetty) is a detective grieving his dead mother and running a detective agency called FBI (you will want to watch the film to know why it’s named as such) from a vegetable market in Nellore. In the confines of peeling wall paint and flickering bulbs, Agent Athreya and his assistant Sneha (Sruthi) solve cases that ar

       Raju (Chetan Maddineni) is an engineering student who is obsessed with academics and cares for nothing else. He is admired for being that way by his father, played by Naresh and the college principle, played by Posani Krishna Murali. Sruthi (Kashish Vohra) joins as a new entrant in the college and falls for his innocence, in the process of changing his attitude and being his friend. But that one-sided crush lands in a soup when Raju doesn't understand the relation she seeks and looks for solely academic benefits from her. For the first time Raju faces failure when he gets rejected for a position in a company, due to the lack of exposure outside academics. How he manages to normalise his life and succeed in that transformation forms the crux of the story. Though the film is an official remake of the Kannada flick which released with the same title, it fails at every point in order to convince the audience with its message of how important it is for the parents and educa

       Voter  is a film that aims to make the janata of India open their eyes to the power they hold in their hands. Be it the power to cast the right vote or to rercall it when unsatisfied with their elected leader, the film aims to make it clear that it is with the inked finger that the power lies. Had the film released before elections, maybe it would’ve been more relevant. But with the concept of re-call, it holds true now too. Except, the film is stretched so much even in its short run-time that things begin to get extremely repetitive. There’s only two numbers in the film but even those two begin to feel like too much.  Gautam (Vishnu Manchu) is an NRI techie his colleagues and boss seem impressed with in the one scene he gets with them. He visits India to cast his vote, harass, stalk and grope a stranger all while singing how he’s ‘6 Feet Tall’. Said stranger Bhavana’s (Surbhi) only fault and misfortune is that she happened to ask his help when police cordon off a road to

Saravanan (Vettri, whose performance is much better here than in his debut, 8 Thotakkal, but still has room for improvement), the protagonist of Jiivi is definitely one of the interesting lead characters we have seen in Tamil cinema in the last few years. He is someone who has dropped out of school because he believes practical education is knowledge. He’s also curious. He is the kind of guy who reads a lot of books and prefers to watch an infotainment channel even while his roommate, Mani (Karunakaran, effective) wants to watch late-night shows where doctors offer sex advice. He is someone who doesn’t worry too much about morality. When they decide to steal from their landlady, a woman with an invalid husband and a visually challenged daughter, Mani asks him if he isn’t worried about God observing their actions, he retorts, “Naama kashtapadumpodhu paathuttu dhaana irundhaaru?” He doesn’t even flinch when the neighbour whom they have made the fall guy for their crime approache

In Sindhubaadh, Vijay Sethupathi plays a role that is closer to that of a mass hero, but stops just short of being one. His Thiru is a thief who picks pockets and steals from the affluent, with help from his protégé Super (Surya Vijay Sethupathi, who makes a confident debut in an enjoyable role of a sidekick). He is a little hard of hearing, a quirk that Arun Kumar employs to good comic effect. The scenes between Thiru and Super are easily the film’s highlight, with their easy-going camaraderie endearing us to these characters. Their scenes with George Maryan, who plays Thiru’s uncle, bring a chuckle, especially the stories that they tell him as the other’s past. A chance encounter with Venba (Anjali), a contract labourer in Malaysia, who had come to her native on leave, makes Thiru fall in love with her. He starts wooing her, and seeing that he is good at heart, she starts reciprocating much against the wishes of her family. But soon, she leaves for Malaysia, and the next ti

Hollywood has been successful in turning games into films, and Game Over is a novel attempt by a director in Kollywood. But unlike the Hollywood films, Ashwin Saravanan doesn’t base his story on the arcade game Pac-Man, but uses it just to take the story forward. The film opens with a woman being brutally murdered and news reports showing how this is just the beginning of a horrifying serial murders. We are then introduced to Swapna, an avid gamer who is also afraid of the dark. Her nyctophobia is first triggered by a personal tragedy that happened just a year ago, and unable to come to terms with it, she shuts herself to the world, to her parents, and stays with her caretaker, Kalamma. The only thing that keeps her going is her love for gaming, and the one thing she wants to do is beat her own score in Pac-Man. But her life changes after she finds out that the ink that was used to make the tattoo on her wrist contains a stranger girl’s ash, and that her dark past has come b

Thumbaa has a message that is relevant in these times of man-nature conflict – the need for man to co-exist with the wild. It conveys this through the adventure of three wide-eyed young people. Two of them, Hari (Darshan, whose performs is never convincing) and Umapathy (Dheena, an assured comic performance) are painters who have come to Top Slip for a painting job. The third one is Varsha (a chirpy Keerthi Pandian), who comes to the place hoping to take photographs of a tiger. Meanwhile, Thumbaa, a tiger, has crossed over to this side of the mountain range from Kerala with its cub, and a gang of poachers, led by the forest officer, are plotting to capture it. The main USP of Thumbaa is that the animals are all computer-generated and in this aspect, the film succeeds to an extent. Thumbaa, the tiger’s features are well realised, though the animators fail at lending its image the weight. So, there are times when it looks like a soft toy rather than a real animal. A monkey, na

 With dubbed films, the first few minutes are the most important. If a film can hold our attention and not make the aspect of seeing characters speaking a different language on screen (from what we are hearing) feel odd in these few moments, there is a high chance of the film working for us. Pakkiri, the Tamil-dubbed version of The Extraordinary Journey Of The Fakir, manages this feat quite effortlessly. While the fact that these portions are set in Mumbai helps, much of the credit should go to the two Ds – Dhanush and dialogues. Even if we know deep down that he is speaking his lines in English, we are used to hearing Dhanush speaking in Tamil that we are not put off by the lack of lip-sync. And the dialogues ensure that the lip movement of the actors isnt too out of sync. Varsha Bharath, the creative consultant for the Tamil version, and Jayaram Sankaran and Vikrem Vybav, Tamil script writers have done a good job. The narrative device involves Rajakumaraguru Lakshmipathy

                     While some biopics are history lessons, some are lessons of humanity. Biopics like 'Naan Petta Makan' are for the empathetic.  Directed by Saji S Palamel, 'Naan Petta Makan' hero Abhimanyu is simpleton from a village named Vattavada, with simple means. He's a do-gooder who knows no caste or discrimination. His lives by the values of perseverance and knows that education is the way ahead. 'Naan Petta Makan' is the coming-of-age story of this boy whose dreams get squashed at the hands of fascism. 'Naan Petta Makan' is a mirror at the face of fascism and the politics that brews around it. Saji S Palamel is a good storyteller. In what could only be the signs of a good filmmaker, Saji succeeds in making us feel for the protagonist than see him. Yes, casting Minon as Abhimanyu was nothing short of brilliance. As was casting Joy Mathew as Nelson Christo, the living communist martyr. They are the heart and soul of the cinema. Sreen

                  Giving birth to a film is no cakewalk, let alone bringing forth a movie about filmmaking. And evidently, director Salim Ahamed had enough arduous experiences during the process that inspired him to line them up to make a film. And getting a peek into this backstage madness can give one a real idea about the kind of passion and determination involved in it, despite the stress. After years of search for a producer, Isaak Ibrahem decides to produce his maiden directorial. Things aren't easy, but he isn't without any support either. The film gets selected as India's official entry for the Oscars. Great news, but what next? There are no larger than life characters, heroism or punch lines in this film, which traces Isaak's dreams and progresses in a realistic fashion. His struggles are often gingerly executed and one easily gets a closer look at the various layers beneath Isaak's laughs. It dexterously shows how success can change equations, how t