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Member Reviews

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough. Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

You can also browse reviews using our alphabetical index of films reviewed

Films reviewed on this Page

Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video (4)
CTRL (1)
Joker (3)
Raat Jawaan Hai (1)
Manvat Murders (1)

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Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video
Sanyukta Thakare
Mashable India
Rajkummar Rao, Triptii Dimri’s Parody Can’t Be Saved From Itself

Burn it so we can have a better chance as covering this concept

Rajkummar Rao and Triptii Dimri’s latest release Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video is a social comedy that focuses on the length of the story more than logic. With a shorter, more crisp story the film would have managed to give the very serious and important message it wishes to. The film is a cautionary tale in the 1990s but the fear is very relevant and still prevalent given the growing use of AI, instead of finding a way to incorporate the fear throughout, the story focuses a bit too much on the comedy punch lines and hopes a long monologue will make up for the rest. But it doesn’t.

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Read all 9 reviews of Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video here

CTRL
Rohan Naahar
The Indian Express
Ananya Panday plays the world’s most clueless social media influencer in Vikramaditya Motwane’s wildly uneven Netflix movie

Vikramaditya Motwane and Ananya Panday's considerable talents are wasted in CTRL, a thriller that takes a fresh approach to making stale observations about the world we live in.

Normally, one of the most frustrating things that a movie can do is to abandon its characters and become too consumed by the plot. Our mainstream cinema has always struggled with this, and things have only become worse in the streaming era. It is said that show runners, in particular, can get away with anything on digital platforms as long as there is a murder in the first episode. Well, someone most certainly dies at the end of the first act in CTRL, the new film from Vikramaditya Motwane — his first feature since AK vs AK in 2020.

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Read all 13 reviews of CTRL here

Joker
Rohan Naahar
The Indian Express
Todd Phillips would rather set fire to his own franchise than let the wrong people take inspiration from it; is Vanga watching?

A perverse punchline to a joke that has been played on all of us, Todd Phillips' Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, is bolder, bigger, and altogether braver than the first film.

You’d think that the world was a less paranoid place five years ago, when the collective trauma of the pandemic hadn’t clobbered us on the head with a comically large mallet. But remember when governments were put on high alert before the release of a comic book movie about a murderous clown? Prepared for the riots that the supposedly incendiary film might incite, teams of police were stationed outside certain screenings of Todd Phillips’ Joker — a movie that was viewed by alarmists as a sort of dog whistle for basement-dwelling incels.

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Read all 4 reviews of Joker here

Joker
Shomini Sen
Wion
Is Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga's Film a Worthy Sequel?
Read all 4 reviews of Joker here

Joker
Shomini Sen
Wion
Lady Gaga is underutilised in a boring, uninspiring sequel

Written by Todd Philips and Scott Silver, Joker: Folie à Deux is a sequel to the 2019 film Joker. The American psychological musical drama has Joaquin Phoenix returning as the troubled DC villain Joker, a role that earned him an Oscar in 2019. Giving him company in part 2 is Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, a fellow inmate that Arthur meets at the asylum and who matches his crazy with her set of crazy.

There is a moment early in Todd Philips’ latest film Joker: Folie à Deux featuring the leads Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga that summarises the film well. It is the first courtroom scene in the film and Phoenix’s Joker is desperately looking at the door waiting for Lee or Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) to walk into the court. Joker or Arthur Flec is on trial for killing six people including a popular chat show host live on television. While the tension in the room is palpable, Arthur keeps looking at the door. Lee enters and the two lovers exchange a smile. As Lee settles in, Arthur looks at her and pretends to stifle a yawn- referring to how boring the legal proceedings and the room is. The moment accurately captures the mood of the film.

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Read all 4 reviews of Joker here

Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video
Renuka Vyavahare
The Times of India
Tiring pursuit of a sex tape

Newlyweds Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) and Vidya (Triptii Dimri), decide to record their honeymoon video for self pleasure and gratification. Chaos ensues when the CD gets stolen.

Set in the late 90’s, the pre-Instagram era, when ‘get ready with me’ reels were non-existent, privacy had a different meaning. Without having the platform to post their private life anywhere, couples voluntarily recording their intimate moments was still a rare phenomenon. So on paper, the film’s script sounds promising. What happens when this private video belonging to a middle-class couple from Rishikesh goes missing? What are the repercussions and can they retrieve it?

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Read all 9 reviews of Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video here

Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video
Bharathi Pradhan
Lehren.com
Chor Bizarre

A newly married couple faces a crisis when their private video CD goes missing, jeopardizing their relationship and reputation. The narrative tracks their frantic and tumultuous quest to retrieve the CD, filled with unexpected challenges and surprises at every turn.

The promo promised entertainment around the missing CD of a video shot by a couple on its first night. Written and directed by Raaj Shaandilyaa, the promo stirred a strong pre-release buzz. The sense of fun does spill into the first few scenes as glib-talking mehndiwala Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) stages a scene at the engagement of his girlfriend Vidya (Triptii Dimri). It ends the way Vicky and Vidya had planned it with her lawyer-fiancé walking off in a huff and the man who applied mehndi at functions, stepping in to marry his girl.

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Read all 9 reviews of Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video here

Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video
Sukanya Verma
rediff.com
Stree, Lies & Videotape

Between tons of sexual innuendo and Kapil Sharma brand of slapstick gags characterised in loud caricatures, moronic behaviour, flimsy wigs and cartoonish rhythm, Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video's jarring notions of exuberance have nothing novel to offer.

Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video has the eagerness of a standup comic. It is the sort of movie that feels obliged to make a joke before a sentence, between a sentence and after a sentence. Problem is the humour is not just pedestrian, it’s also plain unfunny. It’s a joke, Manjot Singh in a cameo points out early on in Director Raaj Shaandilyaa’s first comedy outside the Dream Girl franchise, as though embarrassingly aware of how unamusing the whole shtick is.

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Read all 9 reviews of Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video here

Raat Jawaan Hai
Rahul Desai
The Hollywood Reporter India
A Heartening Update on the Modern Buddy Movie

The feel-goodness of Raat Jawaan Hai is an organic product of its environment, but it has no neat resolutions or reckonings. Unlike in most young-adult stories, no conflict is curated; not everything is a lifequake.

Raat Jawaan Hai unfolds as an uncharacteristically warm and vibrant answer to a question popular Hindi cinema is too streamlined to ask: what happens after the end credits of the quintessential buddy comedy have rolled? Call it “Little Things for young parents” or “Dil Chahta Hai for reluctant adults”, but the fact that Raat Jawaan Hai fuses two seemingly exclusive genres of life — the friendship triangle and the marital drama — is, in itself, a minor triumph.

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Read all 5 reviews of Raat Jawaan Hai here

Manvat Murders
Mihir Bhanage
The Times of India
Promises a lot, delivers less

Manvat Murders is gripping in parts as it retells the story of a horrific saga.

In the early 1970s, a series of murders left the residents of Manvat terrorized, and people of Maharashtra in shock. A small town in Parbhani district, Manvat saw people, mostly women, being killed over a span of about two years with a black magic ritualistic motive, as the cops would later find out. Ashish Bende’s series attempts to take a deep dive into the case through the eyes of late cop Ramakant Kulkarni’s lens. Manvat Murders is based on Kulkarni’s book Footprints on the Sand of Time, which documented his high-profile cases, including the Manvat case which he was assigned.

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Read all 3 reviews of Manvat Murders here