Member Reviews

In romantic comedies, more often than not, everything boils down to choices. Do the hero/heroine choose to love the right person? Does that person love them back at the right time? Do parents choose to accept the love stories of their children? Does the couple still manage to choose love over every other distraction coming their way? And the most important question of them all… Does the writer of the film choose the right hero/heroine’s friend? We have seen Santhanam play this role to perfection in multiple films. And in Dhanush’s Nilavukku Enmel Ennadi Kobam, this thankless job is done by Mathew Thomas, who plays Rajesh, the rather generic friend with a generic name with an all-round generic disposition that gets constantly subverted thanks to his electrifying performance.

Till a few years ago, one really had to struggle to pick out a flaw, personal or professional, in the police officers in Malayalam cinema. Right now, it would be hard to find an on-screen police officer without some baggage from the past, which gets almost as much focus as the investigation that the officer is pursuing. The picture is no different in Jithu Ashraf’s debut film Officer On Duty, but for a change, circle inspector Harishankar (Kunchacko Boban)‘s troubled history does not seem forced but something which organically gels in with the rest of the plot. The man comes across as borderline repulsive in his introduction scene, barking at his subordinates and violently attacking women suspects, so much so that we are more intrigued by the officer’s behaviour and are curious about his past than the minor crime regarding a fake gold chain that he is after. The screenplay works its magic in upsetting our initial assumptions, regarding both the protagonist and the case that he is pursuing.

Reacher is many things. Ex-US Army. Tall. Large. Loner. Drifter. But he’s no grifter: he means what he says, even if sometimes he comes off as pedantic. But when he tells wealthy rug merchant Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall) that wherever he, Reacher, goes, trouble seems to find him, he is just stating facts. In a sedate university town of Maine, trouble once again finds our favourite former military cop, and Season 3 of the eight-part show called, simply, and aptly, ‘Reacher’, is off and away. This one is based on Lee Child’s seventh bestseller ‘Persuader’, developed for TV by Nick Santora, and written by Scott Sullivan. Good cops, bad guys, shoot-outs, car crashes, sudden kills, the staple elements of the best-selling author’s page-turners, all show up.

The film has a catchy title. You go in with a bit of hope, given that director Mudassar Aziz’s previous ‘Khel Khel Mein’ had a few nice moments, but that one was a remake. Here it has been written by the director, and you encounter, over two-and-a-half hours, tropes, flat scenes, and characters who come and go. Which is a pity because the lead characters appear to have taken their jobs seriously. It is no surprise that the two ladies playing romantic rivals, Bhumi Pednekar as Prabhleen Dhillon, and Rakul Preeti Singh as Antara Khanna, make you look. Plus, and this is a surprise, Arjun Kapoor as Ankur Chaddha isn’t half bad as the hapless guy stuck between the two loves of his life. They just needed a better film.

It speaks to the relaxed control of Sabar Bonda how animals freely roam the frame and steal our attention. An optimistic goat breaks away from the herd and approaches two humans eating their lunch; it’s shooed away unceremoniously. A cat draws our gaze as it walks across the screen before it’s spooked by yelling and runs off. As Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) talks to his friend Balya (Suraaj Suman), he glances at a nearby buffalo that’s lifted its tail and done its business. Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Marathi film, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this month, is set in a village in Maharashtra. It’s close enough to Mumbai that Anand can take a bus there to perform his father’s last rites in his ancestral village. But it’s also a world removed, a place, in the local imagination at least, of opportunity and permissiveness, herbal shampoos and special friends.

In the opening moments of Arati Kadav’s Mrs, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the film as a gentle love story borne out of the great Indian arranged marriage. In Delhi, Richa (a standout Sanya Malhotra), a dancer, meets Diwakar (Nishant Dahiya), an educated gynaecologist and her prospective match for the first time. They exchange glances and share smiles and then end up holding hands on a date at a neighbourhood restaurant. She lets him know that she’s crazy about cassata and he tells her that he’s a fan of “simple, home-cooked food.” Two cuts later, they’re married. It’s as happy as happiness can get.

Pop cultural references in a film often give a hint of the particular demographic the makers are aiming the film at. In Arun D.Jose’s Bromance, the references that fly thick and fast, almost as an easy stand-in for thoughtful dialogue writing, are from recent films. Just like his first two films, Jo & Jo and 18+, Arun attempts to create a movie targeted at the youth from a super thin storyline. But, unlike his previous outings, he goes for a much more fast-paced narrative that partly succeeds in covering up for the weaknesses in the plotting. There is the impeccable comic timing of Sangeeth Prathap, who continues in his Premalu vein to pep up even dull scenes. Written by Thomas P. Sebastian and Raveesh Nath, Bromance takes off with Binto (Mathew Thomas), setting out to find his elder brother Shinto (Shyam Mohan), who had gone missing.

When Bruce Banner—The Hulk—is looking for a cure for his unusual rage transformation, he seeks help from maverick scientist Samuel Sterns. Their collaboration faces resistance from General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who is hell-bent on stopping Banner because the giant, angry, green Hulk is dating the general’s daughter, Betty. Ross also wants to harness the gamma tech to his own advantage to create an adequate foil for The Hulk. The resultant creation, dubbed the Abomination, clashes with The Hulk, leading to the destruction of Harlem and a permanent scar on Ross’ reputation. This summary of the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk, which starred Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, Tim Blake Nelson as Samuel Sterns, Liv Tyler as Betty Ross, and William Hurt as General Ross, is crucial to understanding Captain America: Brave New World.

Arati Kadav’s Mrs. – an official remake of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) – is a technically sound film. It opens with a montage of delicacies being cooked in an average Indian kitchen. Editor Prerna Saigal cuts the meticulous preparation of each dish with a carefully choreographed piece, drawing our attention to the ‘dance’ most women have to endure inside a household, to keep it on its axis. Scored by Sagar Desai featuring sounds from everyday life (like squeaky, rusted gate offering rhythm to the track), the montage works well. But it can’t quite conjure the rhythm of Baby’s original film, which editor Francis Louis establishes in the never-ending loop of domestic labour thrust upon women. Especially inside a kitchen. Kadav, who broke out with imaginative Sci-Fi films (The Astronaut and His Parrot) using wide-eyed imagination to compensate for oppressive budgets, also constructs her latest venture with a similar amount of distance. The food photography is immaculate, the kitchen and the home look like they were built on a soundstage. Unlike Baby’s film, where both the kitchen as well as the home felt lived-in. When Richa (Sanya Malhotra) has to immerse her hand into a clogged sink to weed out the sediments at its bottom, it doesn’t feel as viscerally icky as Nimisha Vijayan’s character having to hand-pick the chewed-out bones thrown by her father-in-law and the husband, in the original film.