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.
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Films reviewed on this Page
Kaantaye Kaantaye (1)
Parineeta (1)
Ulajh (1)
Gyaarah Gyaarah (1)
The Test S03 (1)
Manikbabur Megh (1)
Wild Wild Punjab (1)
Barzakh (1)
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Kaantaye Kaantaye
Shamayita Chakraborty
OTT Play
Saswata Chatterjee’s web series is too long
Kaantaye Kaantaye is a one-time watch for those who don’t know the story. You can give it a miss if you are an Agatha Christie fan
After their daughter died in a car crash, advocate PK Basu (Saswata Chatterjee) and his wife Rani (Ananya Chatterjee) go to North Bengal to recover from their grief. They visit their family friends Sujata (Ayoshi Talukdar) and Kaushik (Somraj Maity) who open a homestay there. A series of murders take place in Kolkata and North Bengal. As a number of characters get stranded in the homestay, PK Basu catches the culprit.
Parineeta
Shamayita Chakraborty
OTT Play
Gourav Chakrabarty and Debchandrima Singha Roy present unadulterated old-school romance
Aditi Roy has created an engaging unadulterated love story with Gourav Chakrabarty and Debchandrima Singha Roy with Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Parineeta
Neighbour duo Lolita (Debchandrima Singha Roy) and Shekhar (Gourav Chakrabarty) have unending claim on each other. Despite a marriage in haste, they parted ways because of Shekhar’s prejudices and Lolita’s pride. In Parineeta, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s classic takes a makeover in Aditi Roy’s series on Hoichoi.
Ulajh
Shilajit Mitra
The Hindu
Janhvi Kapoor is caught in an inept thriller
This film about an imperiled IFS officer in London suffers from convoluted writing and misguided ambitions
What sort of a spy movie is Sudhanshu Saria’s Ulajh? It begins as a Raazi (2018) in pantsuits: patriotic female protagonist, driven by loyalty and legacy, enlists to serve her country on foreign turf. Indo-Pak diplomatic relations, as fraught and fragile as they were in 1971, inform the narrative stakes. Both films hail from Junglee Pictures, and the editor, in each case, is Nitin Baid. If that weren’t enough, the new film even has a song with ‘watan’ in its title — plastered, ineffectually, over the opening credits and thereby fast forgotten.
Gyaarah Gyaarah
Shilajit Mitra
The Hindu
Middling crime thriller bids its time
Raghav Juyal, Dhairya Karwa and Kritika Kamra try their best in this unrewarding series with a promising core
Gyaarah Gyaarah, out on ZEE5 and adapted from the Korean series Signal, is a time-warping thriller of the dour, soulless kind. Tumbling across timelines, director Umesh Bist always makes sure to hold his audience’s hand. Bland letters appear on screen to indicate the precise date, year, location. Lest we lose our bearings, the pop-culture references are even more plain: Dil for 1990, Kapoor & Sons for 2016. This is a fairly unimaginative way to summon a period, to evoke a mood. It’s unlike the scene in Back to the Future where Doc in the 1950s exclaims to Marty, who’s traveled back from the 80s, “Ronald Reagan! The actor?! Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?”
The Test S03
Srinivasa Ramanujam
The Hindu
Short, engaging peek into cricketing drama
IPL 2024 is over, but here’s a chance for you to watch how the Australian cricket team went about tackling the WTC final against India and The Ashes against England
Around halfway of the second episode of the latest season of The Test, drama erupts. English batter Jonny Bairstow ducks a bouncer, the ball goes to the keeper and the batter walks out of the crease. Pretty much a normal thing that happens during a Test match, you’d think. But there’s tense music in the background, almost like you know something is going to happen.
Manikbabur Megh
Shamayita Chakraborty
OTT Play
Abhinandan Banerjee and Chandan Sen present a magical love song through their cinema
Chandan Sen’s Manikbabur Megh is clearly a disruption in the current space of the Bengali cinema. It is nothing that one wants to watch and yet it is everything that we cherish on the screen.
Manikbabu (Chandan Sen) lives a lonely life. He is first chased and then romanced by a whiff of cloud that only he can see. What do we see when we look at the sky? Manikbabu sees a whiff of cloud that refuses to leave him. He decides to embrace that celestial piece of cloud in his life. This lonely man and his quirky environment – his noisy ceiling fan, his rooftop greenhouse, the hanging lizard in the bathroom, the pile of files on his office table, and so on – tell a lot of hitherto bottled-up stories. The film is a collage of those chronicles.
Wild Wild Punjab
Shilajit Mitra
The Hindu
Puerile buddy comedy is not wild enough
The Netflix film starring Varun Sharma, Sunny Singh and others is a blur of ham-fisted hi-jinks and inane humour
It was evident, even before Varun Sharma clambered onto the roof of a car, unfastened his fly and shot out a tall projectile of piss, that Wild Wild Punjab was not a serious film. But is it even that wild? The aforementioned scene is probably the looniest thing that happens — a nod, perhaps, to Fukrey 3, which had an entire pee-based plotline dedicated to Sharma. The rest of Simarpreet Singh’s film is oddly strained and docile, a blur of ham-fisted hi-jinks and inane one-liners. “Respect, dude,” someone tells Sharma’s character, a compliment I cannot extend to the film.
Barzakh
Shilajit Mitra
The Hindu
Fawad Khan grounds a bewitching, overblown saga
Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed star in this feverishly artful series by British-Pakistani director Asim Abbasi
“The past is not dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. Everything in Barzakh — images, ideas, sounds — responds to that famously Faulknerian sentiment. The title refers to a kind of limbo, an earthly purgatory, where the dead move amidst the living. The six-part series has been shot in the ravishing Hunza Valley, in Northern Pakistan, and is drenched in a despairing, deciduous beauty. Characters converse in pseudo-spiritualistic fragments and heartsick hokum (and also do shrooms). Mountains, as usual, hold the key to everything. Watching the series, I found myself nervously wondering if, across the border, the director Imtiaz Ali was paying attention. What if he feels a little bested, and takes it up as a challenge?