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Recent Reviews by Ishita Sengupta
Independent Film Critic

Ishita Sengupta is an independent film critic and culture writer with a keen focus on nonfiction work. Her writing is informed with gender, pop culture and politics and it has appeared in publications like The Indian Express, The Hindu Frontline, OTTplay among others.

Films reviewed on this Page

Baby John
All We Imagine as Light
Freedom at Midnight
Singham Again
Jigra

Baby John
The Worst Film Of The Year

With Baby John, Varun Dhawan joins the long line of male actors transitioning to action stars who willingly hack and chop. He does the same but with an abject insincerity that gleams from the screen.

Like all bad films, Kalees’ Baby John gets worse by the second. But like a special kind of bad film, the progression happens in leaps and bounds. If the first fifteen minutes are infuriating, half an hour later the film makes you question your life’s choices. By the time the first half closes, you are having an existential meltdown and as the end credits roll, your orientation to reality has altered. Was that real? Was he real? Is any of this real or are we stuck in a parallel universe of Atlee’s imagination where everything on screen unravels as a duller version of his stylistic choices?

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All 11 reviews of Baby John here

All We Imagine as Light (written for OTT Play)
A Moving Ode To Mumbai & Sisterhood

Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light is one of those life-altering gems that is transcendental and a moving memoir of mundane, transformative and a crushing reiteration of community sustenance.

Three women, monsoon and a severe city. If Payal Kapadia’s iridescent All We Imagine as Light was a novel, there would be dried flowers stuck between its pages. Since it is a film, the intangible feeling is imbued with visual tactility. It is present in the way Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a middle-aged woman, holds a totem of cold technology within the warmth of her embrace. It is embossed on the face of Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a woman in the middle of a crisis, as she listens to a fiery political speech about reclaiming what is hers. And it drips from the text messages a young Anu (Divya Prabha) sends to her lover: “I am sending you kisses through the clouds so that when it rains my kisses touch your lips.” Kapadia’s film is suffused with such ache that if you extend your hand you can touch it.

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All 7 reviews of All We Imagine as Light here

Freedom at Midnight (written for OTT Play)
Nikhil Advani’s Pre-Independence Drama Is Immensely Watchable

Freedom at Midnight is about the historicity of 1947 conveyed through the lives of those who curated the history.

With Freedom at Midnight, Nikhil Advani continues looking at big cultural moments through the microscopic gaze of an insider. Across the two seasons of his breakout show Mumbai Diaries, the filmmaker portrayed pressing social crises through the labour of medical practitioners attending to the casualties. This shift in slant sidestepped the showiness prone to cinematic excess and allowed for a more intimate rendering of public events, transforming, therefore, the narrative around them. In his latest long-form work, Advani turns his gaze to the wide spectrum of India’s independence and reiterates his style of focusing on the bureaucratic bottleneck, telling the story therefore of the people living inside towering buildings and not on the street. Freedom at Midnight is about the historicity of 1947 conveyed through the lives of those who curated the history.

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All 11 reviews of Freedom at Midnight here

Singham Again
A Modern-Day, Cop-Addled Reimagination Of The Ramayana

Of all the improbable things in Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again, like a car flying over a helicopter, like the same car landing without a scratch, like gifted actors dialling down their craft to match the trite script, like six people writing that script, like Ajay Devgn mistaking walking for acting, like the film mistaking walking for acting, the one that sticks out the most is Shetty assembling half the Hindi film industry (an exaggeration but you get the drift) to combat Arjun Kapoor.

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All 17 reviews of Singham Again here

Jigra
Alia Bhatt In & As The Angry Young Woman

In Vasan Bala’s Jigra (Courage) Alia Bhatt is Amitabh Bachchan. The suggestion seems both foolish and foolhardy, not least because both actors have disparate, almost contrasting, physicalities. They act differently, they react differently. And more crucially, a punch lands on them differently. If Bachchan in his youth stumbled upon being hit, then Bhatt crumples like a paper bag. If the former’s daunting presence intimidates the frame then the latter’s diminutive silhouette makes space for others. Alia Bhatt is nothing like Amitabh Bachchan yet Bala insists that she is, for she has the jigra.

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All 18 reviews of Jigra here