Prithvi Festival 2019: Untitled 1, Review--Poison, its forms, uses and doses As a Big Brother is Watching state, the concept was explored by George Orwell in 1948. He called it ‘1984’, by merely reversing the last two digits of the year he wrote the book in, and placing it 36 years into the future. Playwright Annie Zaidi sets Untitled1 in the present, or the very near future, with the same concept: An authoritarian state that wants to control what people say, hear, watch, write, r...

Baazaar, Review: Insighter trading Allahabad (now renamed Prayagraj) boy Rizwan Ahmed idolises stock market wolf Shakun Kothari and aims to become a billionaire tycoon like his hero. Baazaar then moves on to detail how unscrupulous and manipulative, even corrupt, Kothari is, and how all this impacts the small-town boy who has a sister to marry, and to live up to the expectations of an honest father who has just retired. Get ready for an insight into the world of stocks and shares, insider tra...

Soorma, Review: Bio-pick Diljit Dosanjh pours his heart into a dream role, and director Shaad Ali inspires the cast to turn a real-life, touching tale of a star hockey player into a rivetting bio-pic. Even if the writers have deviated from incidents and facts (we call it cinematic licence), it all jells together into a highly convincing drama that survives a 132-minute run and stays with you for even after a full 24 hours and more. Soorma (not to be confused with surma, which is applied in t...

Newton, Review: Gravity of the situation Had he been alive in the modern period, the British scientist would have bagged multiple Nobel prizes for his pioneering work in Physics. As it happens, the film of the same name, not a biopic of Sir Isaac, rather about an idealist in the Indian bureaucracy, has been eliminated from the race for the Oscars. A million or more Newtonians are feeling heart-broken that a film that they considered a breakthrough, and the best film made in India in recent t...