Bollywood Reviews

By now, we are all aware that Anubhav Sinha’s Thappad has its turning point in a despicable act of impulse. A young man slaps his wife. As it rightly turns out, the film is not singularly about a slap that provokes a woman to ask her way out of the […]

India is not yet ready for a Call Me By Your Name where queer folks would express love with gay abandon. But the country has also walked past the grotesque Dostana phase which shamelessly treated the LGBTQIA community as second-hand citizens. We are certainly over the insensitivity of Chanthupottu and […]

What happens when a filmmaker becomes vastly distant from the ways of the world? We witnessed this phenomenon hit Aditya Chopra hard when he attempted to showcase things that he perceived to be the actual issues of today’s youth in his 2016 caper Befikre. The stakes are even higher for […]

According to Mohit Suri’s Malang, this world is a bad, bad place to be in. The planet is grim, stylish and also filled with good-looking, mysterious people. The leads, as is the trend, are not shown to have family ties but are having the time of their lives in Goa’s […]

Director Nitin Kakkar’s Jawaani Jaaneman offers a distinctive scenario as far as man-woman relationships in Hindi films are concerned. It reimagines numerous stereotypical romantic comedy junctures – the meet-cute, the misunderstandings, the commitment phobia, the guilt trips and even a hurried ride to the station before she leaves forever. It’s […]

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Likewise, when Bollywood gives you historical dramas, subtract the history out of it. In both cases, the benefit is yours. Director Om Raut’s Tanhaji: The Unsung Hero is based on the valorous life of Maratha king Shivaji Bhonsle’s loyal military chief Tanaji Malusare. […]

The new decade has just kicked off and it sets me thinking. How did the regular Hindi film heroine behave or appear at the beginning of the millennium? Their eyelashes fluttered, their flowing hair swayed in the direction of the wind, their makeup was compact and the danced like fairies. […]

The 2010s called for a major narrative change as far as Hindi cinema is concerned. Besides having a good number of small, content-based films finding major box office acceptance, the decade also witnessed the paying public reject mediocrity to an unseen extent. The decade saw the emergence of a series […]