Film: “Nishabd”; Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Jiah Khan, Revathy, Nasser, Shraddha; Director: Ram Gopal Varma; Rating: **** Finally there’s just the man and his looming loneliness. He could end it right now. But he chooses to live on, so that he could live with the memories of lost love for a bit longer. Ram Gopal Varma’s [...]

Film: Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd” Cast: Shabana Azmi, Boman Irani, Abhay Deol, Minisha Lamba, Ranveer Shorey, Diya Mirza, Sandhya Mridul, Vikram Chatwal, Amisha Patel, Karan Kapoor, Kay Kay Menon, Raima Sen; Director: Reema Kagti; Rating: ** So all right. This isn’t your perfect guide to a successful marriage. But the honeymooning couples here make you [...]

Film: “Black Friday”; Cast: Aditya Srivastava, Pavan Malhotra and Kay Kay Menon; Director: Anurag Kashyap; Rating: **** “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” – an observation by Mahatma Gandhi – is how Anurag Kashyap’s masterpiece “Black Friday”, based on S. Hussein Zaidi’s book of the same name, starts. The film brings [...]

Film: “Salaam-e-Ishq”; Cast: Anil Kapoor, Juhi Chawla, Salman Khan, Priyanka Chopra, John Abraham, Vidya Balan, Govinda, Shanon Eshrechowitz, Akshaye Khanna, Ayesha Takia, Sohail Khan, Isha Koppiker; Direction: Nikhil Advani; Rating: *** “Yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti!” Never thought I’d ever hear Hindi cinema’s most clichéd line, and that too in a film that turns all [...]

Film: “Risk”; Cast: Vinod Khanna, Randeep Hooda, Zakir Hussain, Yashpal Sharma, Seema Biswas, Tanushree Dutta; Director: Vishram Sawant; Rating: * 1/2 Randeep Hooda’s scowl steels the show. And I do mean steel. There’s a bedrock of hardened cynicism in the way Hooda portrays the ‘encounter specialist’ Suryakant Satam who outwardly seems so stoic, you wonder [...]

Film: “Sarhad Paar”; Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Tabu, Mahima Chaudhary, Chandrachur Singh, Akash Khurana; Director: Raman Kumar You gaze at Tabu – that wonderful actress, who has constantly been short-changed by filmmakers barring a few who have tried to capture her essence, and succeeded in just touching the lapel of her talent. In director Raman Kumar’s [...]

Film: “1971″; Cast: Manoj Bajpai, Ravi Kishan, Chittaranjan Giri, Manav Kaul, Kumud Mishra, Deepak Dobriyal; Director: Amrit Sagar; Ratings: ** War films are hard to make. More so in India where budgets are often as constrained as the director’s vision. Director Amrit Sagar manages to make “1971″ look filled-out and believable, not just at the [...]

Film: “Guru”; Director: Mani Ratnam; Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, R. Madhavan, Vidya Balan, Mithun Chakraborty, Sachin Khedekar and Manoj Joshi; Rating: ***1/2 When Mani Ratnam decides to convey something through his films, he usually does it deftly and effectively and with “Guru” once again he succeeds in raising the artistic standards. In “Guru” Ratnam [...]

Film: “Anwar”; Actors: Manisha Koirala, Siddharth Koirala, Nauheed Cyrusi, Hiten Tejwani; Director: Manish Jha; Rating: ** 1/2 Lucknow – volatile, culturally rich, temperamental, poetic, dichotomous, ironical … somehow writer-director Manish Jha captures all of this with brutal force in this deeply flawed yet moving tale of love and politics. “Anwar” picks up a welter of [...]

Film: “Red”; Cast: Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley, Amrita Arora, Sushant Singh; Director: Vikram Bhatt; Rating: * She’s a widow, though not the weeping kind. He needs a change of heart, though not in the way you would expect him to. Aftab Shivdasani, muscles pumped up, tattoo on forearm and scowl in place, plays a man [...]