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 [...]

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 [...]