Recent Reviews by Uday Bhatia
Mint Lounge
Uday Bhatia is Film Editor with Mint Lounge in Mumbai. He was previously with Time Out Delhi and The Sunday Guardian. His work has appeared in GQ, The Caravan, Indian Quarterly and other publications.
Films reviewed on this Page
Self-Potrait as a Coffee-Pot
Freedom at Midnight
Citadel: Honey Bunny
Do Patti
The Real Superstar
Jigra
CTRL
Self-Potrait as a Coffee-Pot
Chaos and creation in the studio
This series of video essays is a brilliant dissection of William Kentridge’s artistic practice and a lively covid diary
A portly white-haired man walks into the frame and, even before he’s sat, addresses the camera with some urgency. “Before he arrives, there are some things I just want to say. It’s about the nature of the structure of, and the destructure, and the non-structure of what we see." He lists the disparate thoughts running through his head: a green cake he once ate in Naples, the fish pie he must take out of the freezer, a line from Mayakovsky, digging in The Great Escape and as a young boy on the beach, a row of coffins for mass burial, the impending birth of his granddaughter
Freedom at Midnight
Independence, warts and all
‘Freedom at Midnight’ is flawed in too many ways to deliver on its promise of showing an untold history of India on the brink of independence.
It’s 1946, Partition is starting to look like a real possibility, and the Congress High Command isn’t a happy place. The visiting Akali leaders are militant, Nehru is getting worked up, and Patel’s biscuit, which he isn’t paying attention to, is getting soggy. At the exact moment Nehru asks the Akalis what they want, half of it disintegrates and falls into the tea. The next shot is Jinnah in his garden, snipping a rose stem.
All 11 reviews of Freedom at Midnight here
Citadel: Honey Bunny
The dulling of Raj & DK
The Indian spin-off of ‘Citadel’, starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Varun Dhawan, is a lacklustre affair, with show-runners Raj & DK missing their usual spark
Sometimes you get what you want, but it’s not what you need. Since 2018, Raj & DK have been on a creative streak. It began with Stree, a horror-comedy sleeper hit they wrote and produced. The following year, their first series, The Family Man, premiered on Amazon Prime; they show-ran and co-directed it over two seasons (a third is in the works). This was followed by two more shows, Farzi (on Amazon)—my favourite of their long-form work—and Guns & Gulaabs (on Netflix). With each success, the possibility that Hollywood would come calling seemed likelier.
All 10 reviews of Citadel: Honey Bunny here
Do Patti
Two for sorrow
A tepid thriller, starring Kajol and Kriti Sanon, from a writer who needs to branch out
Do Patti begins with scattered shots of paragliding gone wrong and a stakeout on a bridge, followed by a woman in a police station telling the cops her husband tried to kill her. Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba, released in August, also has a stakeout on a bridge, and its first scene is a woman in a police station telling the cops her husband is going to kill her. Both films are written by Kanika Dhillon, both are Netflix releases. Did no one think it was a problem that the films start the exact same way?
All 17 reviews of Do Patti here
The Real Superstar
Lost in the Twilight Zone with Amitabh Bachchan
Cédric Dupire’s ‘The Real Superstar’ spans the actor’s epochal career but is an atypical tribute
Aman in red suede pants and jacket walks down a deserted road at night. Another man in a sky blue jacket over a black shirt races across a bridge as gunfire explodes around him. Yet another, in a deep blue shirt knotted at the waist, staggers out of a warehouse and is immediately carried off by a delirious crowd chanting his name.
Jigra
The Great Escape
Alia Bhatt leads a terrific cast in Vasan Bala's emotionally charged jailbreak film
Satya has been running from window to window in the anteroom of a maximum security prison. She’s desperate to see her brother before closing time, but there are forms to fill, procedures to follow. Finally, she ends up at the door to the visiting area, wheezing, frantic. The guard does her a kindness, says she isn’t late and will be let in soon. Satya catches her breath, but can’t wipe the worry off. “Do I look sad?” she asks the guard as she’s about to enter. “Little sad,” he replies in Malay-accented English. She puts on a strained smile. “Now?” The guard shakes his head. “Very sad, lah.”
All 18 reviews of Jigra here
CTRL
Ananya Panday drives paranoid thriller
Vikramaditya Motwane's film about creeping AI is also a paranoid thriller for an increasingly digital India
Well into CTRL, we know the film’s protagonist only as Nella. While it’s certainly an Ananya Panday character name (past ones have been Tia, Tanya, Ahana and Bella), I did wonder if it was given by her Delhi Punjabi parents. But then we hear her father’s voice from offscreen calling: “Nalini”. And a little piece clicked into place: an assumed name, a username, a handle, in a film about unstable online identities.