Launch vehicle for two star children, “Sakkarakkatti” is a movie without surprises. Kala Prabhu, son of south Indian movie mogul S. Thanu, has created a huge extravaganza painted appropriately on the big-screen canvas with a flourish by cinematographer Andrew. Despite a placid story, casual script and conspicuously absent zing in the tale’s tail, the movie entertains. (more…)

To be fair, putting together saas-bahu sagas and the sensex seems a good concept, but director Shona Urvashi fails to use it effectively in her film. In recent years, Bollywood has been generous to directors who experimented with novel concepts and the audiences too accepted their films. “Saas Bahu Aur Sensex” dares to be different as it tells the story of middle-class housewives playing the stock market. (more…)

Welcome to Shyam Benegal’s world of enchanting social comment. Every character in this village of the damned, the doomed and remarkably redeemed is a stereotype. And yet, miraculously, every character is an individual, eccentric, quirky, blemished and yet so full of vitality vigour and energy that you wonder which came first…life, or life as seen through the eyes of Benegal’s camera of innocence, candour and credibility. (more…)

Mudhal is a multifaceted term that means first and invested capital. The movie justifies both the meanings, for it is the debut for the director and some 98 actors and in a word, simply capital, that it not only denotes a winner but also the southern metropolis. (more…)

Samudra’s “Mallepoorvu” comes as a surprise package for many reasons. The director, known to have made many commercial potboilers earlier, has handled this film in a refreshing manner. But it has too many twists and turns in its narration to sustain the audience’s attention. (more…)

After “Phoonk”, you’d think the possessed woman was a thing of the past. But wait, it’s time for another lady to elevate far beyond her bed in a horizontal high that gives you a crick in the neck. “1920″ is “Phoonk” in Scotland (or whichever foreign scenic spot), where the devil catches hold of the leading lady as she rests her head on the rattling bed, moved back by almost a century. (more…)

The most unreliable thing in life is life itself. This, the protagonist of this sweet little concoction discovers when he wakes up one morning to find that his live-in girlfriend, perfect in manner and devotion, might have to die. A simple premise based on the theory of déjà vu, “Ru-Ba-Ru” derives its slender strength from the conversational tone that the the debutant director brings to the romantic comedy, a genre that remains largely over-used and under-sensitised in Hindi cinema, thanks to the florid dialogues, over-the-top performances and incessant flow of song-dance. (more…)

Greatness, they say, is never thrust on you. You are either born with it. Or you are not. Amitabh Bachchan is at a place today where nothing and everything he does surprises us. The Bachchan saga gets one more twist in the tale as the ageing, cantankerous, flamboyant, eccentric and embittered Shakespearean actor battles old age, unwieldy hair and a receding genius. (more…)

Of all the films on the theme of terrorism, this one takes the ache. Painfully puerile and designed to put you off cinema on counter-terrorism forever, “Hijack” is a clumsy, amateurish take on all those slick airport-disaster Hollywood films like “Airport” and “Flightplan” that you’ve seen over the decades. (more…)