Editor's Reviews
In-depth reviews by our experts 🔮
Little Fockers
"An unusual band of ensemble with an E. The last place I would expect to get a collab out of Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. I don't think I have ever seen Di Niro shriek like a little toddler. Say what you will about this franchise, the dinner scenes always pack punches. I also have never seen Jessica Alba this chipper. At this point, they must realize they were overcooking this film series. It got stale very quickly. I'm sure they took this from a Modern Family episode just one year back."
Lethal Weapon 4
"Riggs cuts the proverbial Gordian Knot while having a staring contest with Jet Li while facing the agile power of martial arts he himself has been showing off for the entire franchise, as at this point even Mel Gibson understood he was too old for that sh**. By Lethal Weapon's standards, this was as woke as it could have been possible for the time. Sweet ending. End of an era."
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
"I like-a da merchandise. I am so glad that McKay explored Brick's part of the plot more and that dinner scene was hilarious. Oddly enough, there is a great deal of parallels here with Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. And the fact that the owner was an Australian, they weren't even trying to be subtle about the whole thing. "I didn't ask for these powers. I was given them."- words to live by for if journalism were a superpower."
The Mastermind
"It's like forever waiting for the shoe to drop and when it drops, the sound was more of a thud rather than a bam. But, its echo fills up for the next hour until it recedes into silence, and then out of nowhere the other shoe drops. I could see it going in ten different ways by Hollywood's formula. So uncharacteristic. Josh O'Connor has been killing it lately. If it was a Bollywood flick, poor Tommy's forearm would have a tattoo that reads- "My Father Is A Thief"."
Strange Days
"Bigelow. Turn of the Millennium. Chaos in the streets. Cyberpunk dystopia. Neon Lights. Crammed crime-infested cities. Police state. Rodney King. Leather-clad Ralph Fiennes with fancy ties. Badass Angela Bassett. Remarkable Tom Sizemore. Death Metal. Punk Rock. Seedy. Grunge. Overused whodunnit. Thinly stretched plot. Unnecessarily lengthy runtime."
Mother Mary
"Anne Hathaway gets anointed, measured and battle-ready for her swan song as a celebrity possessed. Mother Mary posits through mesmerizing visuals unresolved issues, closure and the curse of being a celebrity putting on a show till there remains no sense of a 'self'. David Lowery and his fixation of circles, halos and regal garments. Crisis of Identity on the Eros Stage. 2026's summoning, possession, ascension and exorcism film is here."
Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult
"This part's got no chill."
Event Horizon
"Futuristic set design. Outdated concept. Nothing mind-blowing to add."
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
"Beauty and The HorrificIf Ready or Not was a show and instead of going down its usual route of "The Most Dangerous Game", had it gone into The Adams Family-The House of Usher (I couldn't pin down one) meets Suspiria territory with eerily intense jarring score in the backdrop of a Flannagan-style spooky atmosphere. Spread pretty thin upto the edges, Something Very Bad Is Going To HappenIt's a hard V curve. Things started really intriguing and then took a straight nosedive and finally, the finale got a little bit interesting. If not for that last episode which could be considered as the domestic of this century involving a Rachel inside one locked room, this show would have lost one lucky star. Fox traps for destiny in what seems like a weekend sleepover girls' night. It's a school project full of make-believe rules and games and family trees. The show keeps adding new rules and new games well in the middle of the plot which was a vibe killer but it attempts to lock in for the clutch at the end. Something about visiting their in-laws which render white people catatonic and hence, I guess, so many similar themed movies, shows and novels. In my culture, you throw in some dowry, change surname along with your domicile and bear some children and no fuss no muss the in-laws will open their arms wide as long as one knows their place, inside the matchbox or cinder block."
Fuze
"I can see a pattern emerging here. Sam Worthington with his heists and Aaron Taylor-Johnson with his compunction for anything that might explode. While constructing a makeover of what seems to be a mishmash of The Bank Job and Man on A Ledge (yeah! I know) inside the hollowed-out shell of The Hurt Locker. Too many moving pieces that fly off the handle. A director the calibre of David Mackenzie has also ever so slowly been falling into another pattern, the kind Australian director Justin Kurzel once found himself in while gulping the Hollywood Kool-Aid slop; which means just like Kurzel did in recent past Mackenzie also has a fair chance of bouncing right back."
Is God Is
""God don't want nothin' but blood."Unsettling, funny, and both callous and overwhelming at the same time. Why did this one remind me of Coen Bros? The Twinning Reaction from an adorable to a terrifying proportion and an outstanding Kara Young as outstanding as her choice of weapon. I'll probably be hearing the screams, smelling burnt toast for the rest of the week alongside that 'Sunshine Sunshine' trailing off inside my mind.... The sound design and background score in this was a wild ride."
In the Grey
"Thought bubbles on PowerPoint ain't exposition, mate!! Once it catches momentum, In The Grey rains down both the so-called American might and hardware with speed and style, no doubt the trademarks of Guy Ritchie, but why has his every movie in the last decade or so, more or less, been felt like recycled and repackaged materials straight out of his last movie? The score is there, the panache is there but it's no Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels nor is it Snatch, it's not even at par with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. It's like since his heyday, the more budget was available for his projects, Ritchie has been spending more and more on ostentatious flexing and compulsive showboating and less on carving out one of those swindlers-getting-swindled plots, let alone a well-designed caper. It's been 10 years too late to go back to the basics for my Guy. Granted his latest is quite better than his abysmal record of the last four or five movies, but still up to no parallel to his late 90s or early 2000s exploits."
Spider
"Does Cronenberg have a clause in his contract for his performers that says- 'Don't ask, just act'? Whatever fractured state of the Lynchian psyche is going on here, it sure made me scratch my head once or twice. Very stream of consciousness in a delusional personality sort of way. Is it me or is there a muted version of this one in Beau Is Afraid?"
Hokum
"Decent enough horror bites more than it can chew in this escape room device that's crammed with multiple lanes that couldn't be followed through due to its indecisiveness to pick one. Comedians have been having a field day lately with serious acting. Steve Carell, Adam Sandler, Emma Thompson, Kristen Wiig, Ali Wong, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Coolidge, Bill Hader along with Adam Scott here and the whole lot of them."
Heel
"One can't tame a beast when it's not a beast. If Anthony Burgess was any chipper than his usual self, he would have written this version of his seminal Clockwork Orange. Or maybe the overall point was a metaphor about us humans' obsession of owning pets. Very mixed messaging about several things. Andrea Riseborough sure does know how to pick 'em. And Stephen Graham's routine continuation of his contemplation of the concept of masculinity, addiction and their ripple effects."
Novocaine
"Hughie howls, afflicted with a disease as real as only Dr. House could treat it, in what began as a run-of-the-mill slice of life kinda movie which turned real fast into full on Guns Akimbo. Wait! Does this mean Jack Quaid is now a potential candidate for Wolverine? Novocaine isn't exactly a blast but it's not a dud either. I have seen worse."
Broadcast News
"History of how the fourth estate got refurbished into an entertainment centre; Romcom style. It's confounding even downright disconcerting to watch how subtle a romcom used to be that too in a high pressured setting just two years before When Harry Met Sally got released. I don't know what Tarantino's 20s were like but for the last week or so I have been watching the 80s movies and I am having a ball. This one in particular is the belle of that ball. I have never witnessed this specific color on Holly Hunter; the bubbly buoyant kind."
Over Your Dead Body
"Gone Girl gone algorithmic. Turns out only Lily could handle Marshall and if Samara Weaving's filmography is any indication, doubting her gun clutching skills might be the stupidest thing anybody would do. It's astonishing how she keeps getting herself into such horrendous scenarios. As far as Olyphant and Juliette go, we have seen Scream 2, Die Hard 4 and Natural Born Killers and Yellowjackets. Taking a page from Tarantino playbook and adding it to the fantasy of, and I'm guessing here, what must be going inside the minds of American couples susceptible to divorce, this one is oddly funny in a knockabout comedic way with juvenile humor."