Tiku Weds Sheru: A ‘Senior’ artiste weds a ‘Junior artiste’ By all accounts, Nawazuddin Siddiqui is a senior artiste. He ranks on the high rung and is 49 years old. That he started as a junior artiste is now stuff that legends are made of. Avneet Kaur is said to be 21, though I find that hard to believe (17-18 is more like it), did a couple of film roles and a couple of cameos. By comparison, in terms of age and experience, she is a ‘junior’ artiste. In th...

Heropanti 2: Tiger does not roar, but croons, courtesy A.R. Rahman Young, macho, human weapon and dazzling dancer Tiger Shroff has sung a song in his latest film, Heropanti 2, titles Miss Hairaan. Is that taking you by surprise and making you hairan? It shouldn’t, because this is not the first time that Tiger has ventured into musical territory. Jai Hemant ‘Tiger’ Shroff has lent his voice to a handful of tracks, including Casanova and Vande Mataram, which got very popular a...

Housefull 4, Review: Emptiness to the fore In the age of the multiplex, a sign saying that a particular show is House-Full, meaning all the tickets have been sold in advance, is about as rare as discoveries of the abominable snowman. Producer Sajid Nadiadwala is a grandson who carries on the business his grand-father started, and even calls his company Nadiadwala Grandson, complete with an animated logo featuring an old man and a young child. Housefull 4 is Sajid’s fourth foray with the...

Photograph, Review: Ode dear If only vignettes and mosaics could add up to a good script, Photograph would look refreshingly different. If improvised dialogue and incomplete scenes could substitute for a coherent narrative, Photograph would find its place in the album of memorable cinema. Forlornly, though, Ritesh Batra’s Photograph unpeels itself like the layers of an onion, offering emptiness at the end of the exercise, instead of discovery and resonance. Arriving with a sumptuous tr...

(Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Sanya Malhotra, Ritesh Batra, © Lindsay Bellinger 2019)   By LINDSAY R. BELLINGER   Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra have an understated chemistry on-screen in Ritesh Batra's Photograph, without any unnecessary sentimentality that could have made this film feel a bit kitschy. Batra's script has so much heart it's very hard not to walk out of this film without some sense of self-reflection and wonderment.    (Naw...

Manto, Review: Man to man, rediscovering the Urdu writer, who died a pauper, at 42 Before the film, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) displayed categorises the language of the film as Hindi/Urdu. Saadat Hasan Manto wrote short stories and films in Urdu and there is some Hindi in the film, mainly spoken by others. Among the most controversial of Urdu writers, Manto has been the subject of rediscovery over the last decade or so for reasons unknown. Whatever the reasons, Nandita Das...

Prof. Waman Kendre and Nawazuddin Siddiqui Curtain falls on NSD’s historic Theatre Olympics after 16-day Mumbai marathon Staggered across 17 cities, National School of Drama’s 8th Theatre Olympics came to an end after 16 continuous days of performances, seminars, master classes, interactions and street theatre shows. A glittering closing ceremony was held at the Kamgar Maidan, Elphinstone Road, Central Mumbai, not very far from the venues of the Olympics themselves. Among the lu...

Siraj Syed reviews Lion: Soaring emotions, roaring cinema Lion is the tale of mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, separation and unification, brimming with humanity, and yet not fighting shy of tilting the camera down, to capture the grim realities of crime and perversion in a cruel and miserable world. All those who frown upon technology as the bane of the 21st century, here’s a glorious tribute to the great service it can and is meant to render, and does, as evidenced in the film....

Siraj Syed reviews Raees: Contentious content, alias “Don’t call me Battery” Ra.One did it. Don 2 had done it. Raees, wherein he plays a Don once more, adds to his raeesy. Superstar ShahRukh Khan must be a happy man these days, heading in the right direction, hitting the road to Hitsville.Touted as the block-buster of the year, Raees, about a small-time bootlegger who wrangles his way to the top and becomes not only raees (Urdu for ‘rich’) but filthy rich, has no...

Siraj Syed reviews Haraamkhor: Harmful to the core Haraamkhor: A derisive term, having its roots in Persian (Farsi) and widely used in present-day Urdu and Hindi. Haraamkhor literally means one who feeds on ill-begotten food, haraam meaning immoral, or not kosher, the antonym of halaal, right and approved. Khor refers to eater, or consumer, from the Persian verb khordan, to eat. Some prefer to spell the word beginning with a qh, to distinguish from the kh sound, which is less guttural and not...

Golf is not very popular in India. Neither is ice hockey. Cricket is. So you cannot blame Sohail Khan for making these basic changes to the plot of the Adam Sandler film of yesteryear, Happy Gilmore (1996). Sandler was a failed ice-hockey player who gets holed big in golf. It’s 2016. Enter Nawazuddin Siddiqui, a failed male underwear street-vendor who can hit sixers at will, and carries over his tennis ball cricket prowess to the golf course. Freaky? What else? And yes, his name is Ali. ...

MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, V Long festivals and so many films to watch, besides the regular weekly releases to see and review—not unexpectedly, festival diaries go into several parts, and even get interrupted by another festival that follows on the heels of the earlier one. MFF17 was followed by IFFI. But there still so much to day about MFF, so here’s one more instalment of the Diary. Thithi is a two-hour long Kannada film set in rural Karnataka. It has earned rave rev...

IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary V Continuing short reviews of films, seen at the 46th International Film Festival of India. (See Festival Diary I, II, II and IV for more coverage) Father (Babai): Germany/Kosovo/Republic of Macedonia: Visar Morina Leaving the narrative open and blending real-time and flash-forward cost the otherwise praiseworthy film the wider appreciation it deserved. Just one seamless insertion had many viewers wondering what happened. Was it all a dream? Or was just that s...

IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, III Diary pages have got juggled, inadvertently, so, though numbered III, this page should have been IV. Please excuse the oversight and treat this as IV. Although posted earlier, IV is actually III. Austerity is the name of the game, mismanagement is the characteristic and continuing hostility towards media, and, in some cases, delegates too, are factors that dominate IFFI Goa 2015. A circus called the Film Bazaar, organised by the National Film Development Co...

IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, II To be held from November 20th to 30 2015 in Panaji, Goa, Goa, the 46th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) will showcase movies across several sections, including World Cinema, Indian Panorama, Country Focus, International Competition, Retrospectives, Tributes, First Cut, Workshops, Master Classes,  and more. IFFI is organised by the Directorate of Film Festivals, Information and Broadcasting Ministry, Government of India, in association with the...

Badlapur—Don’t Miss the Beginning, Review: Some things are missing Funny line for a name. It is okay as a tag-line, but to make it part of the name? Did somebody object to the title Badlapur, and was the tag-line merged into the title to overcome that objection? Last December, a film titled Badlapur Boys was released in India, so there sure is some confusion. That one took its name from a fictional village in North India, and was about the game of kabaddi. Here, the name comes fro...