The young, innovative Sagar Ballary, amongst a host of debutant directors, makes his entry this Friday with the comedy “Bheja Fry”. Ballary has teamed up with some of Bollywood’s finest actors, Sarika, Rajat Kapoor, Vinay Pathak and Ranvir Shorey, for his first venture. The film’s plot is simple. It revolves around a rich, arrogant businessman [...]

Cast: Aftab Shivdasani, Dino Morea, Sameer Dattani, Anjori Alag; Director: Vikram Bhatt; Producer: Gordhan Tanwani; Music: Lalit Pandit; Rating: **  Life Mein Kabhie Kabhie is about five college friends who, after graduation, make a Rs 200 bet about who will be the happiest in five years. Each one defines happiness differently, one wants power, other [...]

Film: ‘Shakalaka Boom Boom’; Music Director: Himesh Reshammiya; Singers: Shaan, Sunidhi Chauhan, Himesh Reshammiya, Akriti Kakkar, Kunal Ganjawala; Rating: **1/2 Director Suneel Darshan’s “Shakalaka Boom Boom”, with music by Himesh Reshammiya, is an okay soundtrack. It has just a few good numbers on offer for music lovers. Shaan deserves special mention while Himesh seems a [...]

Film: “Provoked”; Cast: Aishwarya Rai, Naveen Andrews, Miranda Richardson, Robbie Coltrane, Nandita Das; Director: Jagmohan Mundhra; Writer: Carl Austen & Rahila Gupta; Music Director: A.R. Rahman; Ratings: *** In Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors”, the battered wife Paula keeps justifying her bruises by saying she as a habit walks into [...]

Film: “The Namesake”; Cast: Tabu, Irrfan Khan, Kal Penn, Jacinda Barrett; Director: Mira Nair; Rating: **** Sometimes an absence is also a kind of presence. Take “The Namesake”. Irrfan Khan as Professor Ashok Ganguly suddenly dies, leaving what looks like stretches of aching silences in bereft Ashima’s (Tabu) life. And yet, look at life’s ironies [...]

Film: “Delhii Heights”; Cast: Om Puri, Jimmy Shergil, Neha Dhupia, Rohit Roy, Simone Singh, Vivek Shauq and Kamini Khanna; Director: Anand Kumar; Rating: *1/2 We’ve seen small-budget, ‘zara hatke’ films like “Khosla Ka Ghosla” and “Pyaar Ke Side Effects” turn into good entertainers and rake in moolah at the box office. Something similar was expected [...]

Film: “Water”; Cast: Seema Biswas, John Abraham, Lisa Ray, Vinay Pathak, Manorama, Sarala, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Raghuvir Yadav; Director: Deepa Mehta; Rating: **** 1/2 What do you say about a film that hits you hard where it hurts the most; so hard that it takes your breath away. “Water” belongs to that rare category of films [...]

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Upen Patel, Rishi Kapoor, Javed Sheikh (Pakistan), Ritesh Deshmukh; Director: Vipul Shah; Music: Himesh Reshammiya; Lyrics: Javed Akhtar; Rating: **  If the first 40 minutes were anywhere close to the last 30, the audience would have been saying, ‘Namaste Vipul’. Sadly, the film fails to hold interest. Director Vipul Shah [...]

Film: ‘Just Married’; Cast: Fardeen Khan, Esha Deol, Satish Shah, Kirron Kher, Raj Zutshi, Tarina Patel, Sadiya Siddiqui and Mukul Dev; Director: Meghna Gulzar; Rating: ** 1/2 “Does it have to be about sex only?” Esha Deol, playing a newly wed in an arranged marriage that ostensibly seems to be coming apart at the seams, [...]

Film: “Hat Trick”; Cast: Nana Patekar, Danny Denzongpa, Paresh Rawal, Kunal Kapoor, Rimi Sen; Director: Milan Luthria; Rating: *** 1/2 If you are looking for that one film that takes you completely by surprise this year, then look no further. “Hat Trick” has been wrongly projected as a cricket film. The truth is that it’s [...]