Reviews

A sweet film set in Madrid's Chueca district, where two teen boys meet on a date. It's the first ever date for one of them, and hence the name. The first kiss is followed by some good drama, which you'll find out when you see the film.

The film is well wriiten and directed has great cinematography. The two lead actors really suit their parts and the supporting cast of two is pretty good too.

I watched this in Arthshila Ahmedabad as part of the British Council in India "Five Films for Freedom" package and it was easily the best film in the package. Okay, maybe I'm a bit biased because I've been to Madrid's gay district and the film brought a flood of memories.

Since the Criminal series features four countries, comparisons are inevitable and the Spanish version really fares badly against the British, Germand and French versions. The police seem to be a very unpopular lot in Spain, judging by how this series has been written. I got the same feeling watching Money Heist, where the police were depicted more as villains than heroes. In all three episodes of Criminal: Spain, the police officers behave very badly, resorting to some very unethical practices in order to get their way. This creates an uncomfortable situation for the viewer. Who, after all, is the criminal here?

Every year, or at least, every once in a while, Hollywood serves up one of these movies, usually about aliens and space and featuring an unbelivably huge star cast, who, presumably are doing it for a lark.

Last year it was "Don't Look Up," which had among others, Meryl Streep and Leornado DeCaprio. Many years ago, it was "Mars Attacks.", which had Jack Nicholson leading the cast. These Oscar winning actors seem to be telling us not to take them and Hollywood films too seriously. Or maybe not to take the subject of interstellar life to seriously.

The charm of these movies is watching these big actors doing bit roles that make no sense. Asteroid City has Tom Hanks flitting in and out in a role that could habe easily been edited out. It's all very strange, but fascinating in its own way, which is why I can't help but give it a 7.

You're in good hands if you go with David E Kelly. He's created some really entertaining TV series and The Calling ranks among his best. It's got a great ensamble cast, with Michael Mosley, Chris Sullivan, Steven Pasquele and Noel Fisher worth a special mention. The writing is very different, with two separate cases covered in the 8-part first season.

The first case, the more gripping one, is about a missing boy. The second, more complex case, has two sub-parts, one about a bomb threat to a school and the other about a missing woman.

The cinematography is rather interesting, mostly using dim colours to create a sinister atmosphere. The stories are gripping, albeit sordid, and characters are all very interesting.

I stayed up late a few nights because I simply couldn't stop watching this series.

Lie To Me begins well and Season 1 deserves a rating of 10. But I had to give the series a score of 6, so you can do the math and figure out how bad the next two seasons were.

The first season is focused on the idea of face-reading as a way of figuring out whether someone is lying, but that focus is lost the second season onwards and "Lie To Me" quickly becomes a substandard crime drama.

Tim Roth plays Lightman well initially and he is an interesting character. Then, somewhere in the middle of Season 2, he gives the character a whole lot of irritating in-you-face mannersisms that make him quite obnoxious. I guess it was intentional, though I can't figutre out why the producers would want to make the lead character so dislikeable. Must be some wierd market research. They even have Lightman's partner say "you're so irritating" to him a couple of times!

Season one is absolutely edge of your seat stuff, really good. It's full of chases and stunts and two equally matched adversaries pitted against each other I would give it a 10.

But Season 2, alas, is diametrically opposite. It is really really boring. Wheras the first season had a global setting, the second season is set in Washington DC suburbia, where the FBI and CIA agents all seem to live at close quarters, with their kids. They come together at barbeque parties, chat about work. It's a cross between Desperate Housewives and The Americans (both excellent series by the way, but their co-breeding produces something awful).

So I would give Season 2 of Condor a 4 and the average scrore works out to 7. I's advise prospective viewers to watch season one and avoid season two. But don't think everyone's going to follow my adice. Season One is so good that watching Season Two (at least the first few episodes) will be hard to resist.

This movie puts paid to the notion that the OTT platform will produce better Hindi films. With Rajkumar Rao, Huma Quereshi, Radhika Apte in lead roles, I thought this would be a great watch. Alas, I was wrong. From the opening scene where a man is mudered by someone in a factory using a robotic arm that lifts, the film is wierd. It's based on a Japanese novel, where the robotic arm thing might work, but in the Indian setting, the robot is a tacky looking thing without any context. They shouls have staged the murder in a dairy plant instead.

After the totally confusing opning scene, the story moves quickly. In fact, it moved too quickly, giving us no chance to figure out the characters that are introduced in rapid succession. Three directors of this robot company plot to murder the chairman's slutty secretary (Huma Quereshi, with the name Morica Machod. Such a mean dig) who they've all slept with and who is now blackmailing them. This sounds like an interesting enough story when you tell it, but the execution is terrible. Bad screenplay, poorly written dialouge. There's just so much the actors can do, given the material.

This not really film noir by a long stretch. The body count is so high, with a new murder every ten minutes, that it seems like a Rambo film. The one good thing about the movie is its running time of only 2 hours. I watched it through the bitter (very silly) end, just so I could write this review in all fairness. Monica O My Darling has put me off watching Hindi movies and serials on OTT for the next ten years at least.

I'm writing this after watching Season 3 and I just couldn't bring myself to give Pose a higher rating than 7. If I'd rated the show after finishing the second season, it would have given it a 10. But the third reason is such soppy melodrama, with terrible dialouge and consequently, bad acting (some of these characters aren't meant to weep and look silly when they do).

Having said that, Pose is a very interesting series, set in a New York city world people in general are not familiar with. But there are parallels to how the Trans community organises itself in other parts of the world. In Indian cities like Mumbai, for example, the Trans community does have houses headed by a mother, though there's no Ball Room. But they do take care of each other and pool in their resources in order to eat and have a roof over their heads.

One can't help but compare this movie with Pagglait, which also revolves around a funeral and was released around the same time. In fact, it seems like both the movies were shot in the same old house in Lucknow. Alas, Ramprsad ki Tehrvi doesn't quite measure up. It has two many characters and it's really hard to keep track of who is who. Ramprasad (Nasseer in a brief role) dies before the opening credits and the rest of the movie is about how his family comes together for the 13-day funeral ceremony. Ramprasad' has four sons and one daughter and all of them are lovable losers. Then there are the wives and the children. And there's a nasty mamaji, who stinks up the toilet. It's hard to empathise with, let alone like, any of them. The script is very weak and it seems the writer is relying on Indian viewers to recognise these character types and imagine their back stories. But veteran actress Seema Pahwa has brought together quite a stellar cast of actors for her directorial debut and that makes the movie watchable. At the same time, it seems such a waste of talent.

I'm amazed at the acclaim this series has received. Who can enjoy 6 hours of watching kids being tormented and tortured? By the police in the first part, by prison inmates and guards in the forth part and by the system and society in general in the middle parts? Is this what the Germans call Schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from the anguish of others? This may a true story and it probably still happens in some parts of the world, but o make a 6 hour series of it? Hats off to the producers. I've never seen anything like it.

I didn't think much of the trailer, but the movie turned out to be surprisingly good. From the trailer, I thought it would be the usual Tom & Jerry stuff, with poor Tom getting subjected to awful violence that this cartoon is famous for. There is some of that, with Tom falling off buildings, getting electrocuted, having all manner of heavy objects falling on him, but it's only a small part of the film, with a broad wink for the director to say, "yeah, yeah, buy haven't we seen enough of all that?" What works for the movie is a solid story and a great script. The action is set in a high end NY hotel, which makes for a great backdrop to the mayhem. Everyone's getting set to host a major celebrity wedding, an all-American groom with an Indian bride, making way for a hilarious culture clash. The guy wants to impress his in-laws with an Indian wedding, which he has imagined as an extravaganza featuring elephants and peacocks. So there are lots of great cartoon animals, but the human cast, to its credit, don't let them steal the show. Chole Moretz is superb as is Michael Pena, who has the funniest lines. Sitting in the virtually empty cinema, I let go and laughed out loud through much of the movie. In the midst of the pandemic and also the Oscar season, with its glum, heavy duty movies, Tom and Jerry is just what the doctor ordered.

Amitabh Bachchan had me in splits throughout this movie. He's quite hilarious as the 80-going-on-100 Mirza, with his huge magnifying spectacles and propensity for falling down whenever a large sum of money is mentioned (though it's only Rs 5 lakhs, it seems huge to this loser). Ayushman is a perfect foil, aggravating him all the time, but for the most part, he underplays his role, letting Mr Bachchan steal the show. The two quibble away for the first part of the movie, until Mirza files a police complaint (because Ayushman's character moves his bed into the street in the middle of the night!) that sets in motion a series of events that soon has the two small time losers completely out of their depth as the big vultures close in. The quirky characters that constitute the rest of the cast add to the mayhem that ensues. Shrishti Shrivastav as the sister deserves a special mention. The decrepit mansion is a character in the film too and Shoojit Sircar captures it in all its fading glory very well. Thank you Amazon for bringing such a fantastic movie to cheer us up during the lock down.

Mother has a special bond with her son and will go all out to defend him, even at the expense of her marriage, even though she knows in her heart that he's a bad person. Sounds familiar? It's a theme that's been played out in many movies over the years, including We Need to Talk About Kevin and a recent movie about a killer kid from outer space, whose name I forget. Here the kid is from a war torn country in Africa, which is not far from outer space since the setting for this movie is suburban America. As the Oedipus Complex plays out, the tensions rise and all in all, the movie becomes quite watchable. Naomi Watts, who plays the mother, is one of my favorite actors and I watched this movie for her sake. I wasn't disappointed. The actor who played the son was mostly annoying, with his fake charm and was just about bearable when he dropped it.

How do you write a story about coming out in a small town joint Indian family? On one extreme it could be told as a tragic drama. At the other extreme it could be a over the top comedy. The makers of this movie have opted for the later, and made it an outrageous comedy, bordering on a farce. Though the situations are very unlikely to put it mildly, it actually works. Though some gay people might just be disappointed by the cavalier approach to the coming out to the sensitive parents situation.

The movie does away with boy-meets-boy and dives straight into the coming out process. The two men are already a couple at the start and are caught kissing by the father within the first 15 minutes. What follows is pure unrelenting mayhem. The acting by all the players is great. Ayushman as usual is charming and very watchable, but Jeetu is even better. The film is pretty bold with the kissing, which happens in the most public of spaces, like at a wedding. The only reason I haven't given it ten stars is because the director hasn't been able to keep up the manic pace the movie starts with. Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhaan could have done with some better editing. There are extraneous sub-plots parts that are a bit tedious. But the music is great and the movies is a fun watch.

The film's about a mechanic-guy coming out to his red neck friends, but really, all the actors seemed to be gay. I mean, not gay in the film, but gay in real life. They manage to "act" convincingly rough and crude for the first ten minutes of the film, but as soon as we get to the part where they're supposed to be more sympathetic towards their friend's coming out issues, their innate camp shows (they're not great actors). The effect is quite hilarious and makes the movie funny and enjoyable.

You might think the history of the black LGBT people in Toronto might be too narrow a subject to hold the interest of a large audience, but of course, you'd be wrong. There's something for everyone here. This film was shown at the Kashish Queer Film Festival in Mumbai, India, and I felt the audience empathized with the real people on the screen. The friendships, comraderie of the early years, when it was just enough to have a place you could safely hang out with other gays, to the AIDS era and finally, the pride marches of today. The director takes his time, going off the central theme sometimes to explore related areas. Like the segment on the draw of religion for some of the black LGBT crowd in Toronto. All this makes for a very comprehensive documentary and a model for others who might make documentaries on the evolution of LGBT movements in other parts of the world.

Telling a war story in a short film is pretty ambitious. Most people haven't even heard of Bering Strait, located between Alaska and Russia, where this film is set. Be that as it may, the film still works. The surreptitious love affair that takes place in the barracks has a heat that seems capable of melting all the ice around. The film is beautifully shot and atmospheric. The story should be fleshed out and made into a full length feature film.

A dark, erotic movie on how difficult it can be to find love (and sex) while just being yourself in the gay world. Elliot is attractive in a manly way and he could get lovers, if only he didn't have a penchant for green lipstick and rouge. On Grinder, he puts a picture of himself without make-up, but when the guy shows up at his apartment, Elliot is in drag. After that, things take a strange turn. This movie was shown at the Kashish Queer Film Festival in Mumbai, India, in June 2019.

It's really hard to figure out what's going on in this film. In the first place, how are we to know the protagonist is trans? I sat through the film thinking maybe she was lesbian. I watched this film at the Kashish Queer Film Festival in Mumbai in June 2019 and I must say it was one of the worst films in the competition section, the artsy black & white notwithstanding.

This film is an embarrassment. Shown in the students shorts section at the Kashish Queer Film Festival in Mumbai, it compared really badly with the sophisticated fare from other countries. The story, such as it is, is about two local bullies harassing and then strangling a helpless gay man. Where on earth did the writer get his inspiration from? The director probably sees it as some sort of film noir, but he's just totally homophobic. Hope Whistling Woods students pull their socks up and produce better fare in the future.