Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning, Review: Tom Cruises through air, water, ice and land; dies twice, lives thrice 1,000? You are nowhere near. 10,000? You are getting warmer. 100,000? That, I guess, is very, very, close. It must have taken at least 100,000 persons to put together this humungous spectacle called Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning, going by the end credits roll. I am making a wild guess, since it was not possible to count the names, which went on rolling for several m...

The Legend of Ochi, Review: Conversations with a baby monster Whenever Hollywood films take-up a subject that is steeped in folklore, mythology, talking animals, birds, creatures or monsters, it creates a universe for them. In other, similar films, the creature is neither a hero or villain among his own ilk. Then there is the choice between full-fledged animation, or a combination of Animation and VFX. The Legend of Ochi is one film where the monster is neither glorified nor vilified. Instead...

Another Simple Favor, Review: Hope, Charity, Faith and the other ‘f’ word forever An author who writes reality fiction and has a huge following on her ‘Moms’ social platform; she spills the beans on a gym instructor at a school, who films his children in the buff; he shoots and kills himself; she also provides material in her next book on a woman who, she says, murdered her sister; she sleeps with her half-brother; she has an obese black woman as an publishing agent wh...

Mahayogi-Highway 1 to Happiness, Review:  An imioned monologue for universal peace and tolerance There are films and there are films. Some are routine, masala, formulaic films, and there are path-breaking, experimental films, off the beaten track. There are also films that can barely be called films. These are genre-defying (which is the experimental part) and grammar-denying (which is the indulgent part). Mahayogi-Highway 1 to Heaven (English) is one such film. 90% of the film is a ...

Principal photography starts today on the feature drama H Is For Hawk, it was announced today by Protagonist Pictures’ CCO George Hamilton. The film stars two-time Emmy and Golden Globe winner Claire Foy (“The Crown,” 2024 BAFTA nominee for All of Us Strangers, Women Talking) and BAFTA and Academy Award nominee Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin, In Bruges, Paddington 2)   Protagonist Pictures already secured a slew of international deals, including Lionsgate, wh...

Citadel Honey Bunny Trailer launch: Leaping into the past, via the present and the future Wait and watch. November 7, 2024 is the date. The third? chapter in the series. With credentials that span India and the USA, and is set in Mumbai, shot in locales like Bhayandar. No set-pieces for Raj and D.K., who believe in the wild outdoors. It comes on the heels of the Italian edition, and covers the ‘generation gap’ in the Indian segment (read on). The heady mix of James Bond and Jane B...

DISNEYLAND PARIS September 2024   by Emmanuel Itier “The Magic Kingdom” is indeed the perfect name for “Disneyland Paris” ( https://www.disneylandparis.com/en-usd/ ). From the first minutes we reached out to our destination via the bullet train TGV we were transported, at once, into an enchanting land unlocking the child within and ready for the adventures of a lifetime. And adventures we had through the many and various Disney theme sections of the two parks: Di...

Amaze on and on and on: Matka King, Dupahiya, Snakes and Ladders, Matka King and The Rana Connection In the third part of my report, here’s the lowdown on four more shows that Amazon has lined-up, in various languages. Matka King (Hindi) In this fictional tale set in 1960s Mumbai, an enterprising cotton trader who craves legitimacy and respect, starts a new gambling game, dubbed ‘Matka’, which takes the city by storm and democratises a terrain previously reserved for the...

Amaze on and on: Citadel: Honey Bunny (Hindi) Raj and D.K. The duo that always pay! They take-over Citadel from and name their series Honey Bunny. “We believe in giving titles that are in sharp contrast to the content of the show. (Well, what else would you say about The Family Man and Guns and Gulabs, for example?”). Honey and Bunny, co-incidentally, happen to be the names of the leading pair, Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu, in the series. This is Varun Dhawan’s stre...

Amaze on Prime video: PLOTT A LOTT GOTT Inviting us at 12 noon for lunch at a 5-star hotel was unusual. The practice is to invite you at 12 or 12.30 pm, and serve you lunch at any time between 3 and 5 pm. Oh, the price you pay for being a journalist! Proceedings begin at around 2 pm, and last for about 1- ½ --2 hours. Lunch dare not be served before the proceedings begin, or while they are on, because savvy organisers believe that starved journalists would wait, while ‘lunched&rs...

This spring, for the first time in almost a decade, comedy icon Jack Black returns to his role as Po, the world’s most unlikely kung fu master, with a hilarious, butt-kicking new chapter in DreamWorks Animation’s beloved action-comedy franchise: Kung Fu Panda 4.      After three death-defying adventures defeating world-class villains with his unmatched courage and mad martial arts skills, Po, the Dragon Warrior (Golden Globe nominee Jack Black), is call...

Argylle, Review: Spyurious stuff Don’t even try. To make sense of this one. It’s a tribute to James Bond, Jason Bourne, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon. That is what the makers want you to believe. Well, it’s one tribute the ‘quartet’ can do without. There is a cat in the film, getting a fair amount of footage. Maybe that’s a tribute to Solomon, the cat of the Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who appears in several 007 films, a white, blue-eyed Turkish Angora. In...

The 81st Golden Globes are back this Sunday on a new network CBS with some new , always known as the best “party” of the season.  The first televised Award Show of the season, for many years their picks seemed somewhat consistent with the Academy.  Who will win?   Christopher Nolan made almost $1bn in box office and brought audiences back to theaters, as did "Barbie," but that didn’t help Tom Cruise last year with his box-office wonder Mission ...

On Saturday, October 21st, La Femme International Film Festival screened ‘Tibetan Hearts’, a true story of star-crossed lovers in the Tibetan Plateau. The romantic leads fall in love despite the rivalry between their sheep-herding families.  LAFIFF took place at the Regal Cinemas in LA Live, located in downtown Los Angeles. Now in its 19th year, it is a festival with a special focus on promoting and ing films directed, produced, and written by female filmmaker...

Cast: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Peter Dinklage, Hunter Schafer, Josh Andrés Rivera, Jason Schwartzman, and Viola Davis Directed by: Francis Lawrence Screenplay by: Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt Based on the Novel by: Suzanne Collins Produced by: Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Francis Lawrence Executive Producers: Suzanne Collins, Mika Saito, Jim Miller, Tim Palen   Synopsis:  Experience the story of THE HUNGER GA...

‘‘Barbie’’ directed by Greta Gerwig film review © Lalit Rao (FIPRESCI) 10.08.2023   Audiences and critics will ‘‘Barbie’’ for a long time as a light-hearted film that came at a time when the entire world was going gaga over big films such as Oppenheimer and MI-dead reckoning part one. It is said that most children play with toys in their childhood. However, there are also a lot of people who never got to play with toys especi...

Christopher Nolan's film ''Oppenheimer'' (2023) is a heady mix of espionage, history, politics and suspense !!!! A film review by © film critic Mr.Lalit Rao (FIPRESCI) Oppenheimer is a different type of a biopic. It doesn’t aim to glorify the protagonist’s achievements. It has taken a neutral stance in which care has been taken to delineate both Oppenheimer’s achievements and weaknesses. While watching this film, viewers learn why Oppenheimer&rsquo...

To Catch a Killer, Review: Mass murderer vs FBI veteran and rookie policewoman It’s a tame title, considering the killer puts down 29 individuals in the first round of his carnage. The other title, Misanthrope, is vague. It’s not nail-biting stuff, rather a thinking man’s whodunit, with occasional movements towards the edge of the seat. Mounted on a great scale, it is unable to escape the familiar tropes: Good officer being bullied, taking the rookie under his wing, a couple...

Fast X, Review: Vin some, lose some Weapons and vehicles are the twin jet propellers on which Fast X rides. Weapons come in all potencies and sizes, including IT software/hardware and a (nuclear?) bomb that could blow up a whole city. Vehicles too, come in all shapes, sizes and models, including a container and a mini-aeroplane. All these are transported across continents, with the ease of greased lightning. There are two more twin jet-propellers that help the film cruise along, and these are...

Citadel, Review: When James meets, Jane it’s a Bond Two franchises have set the benchmark as far as spy thrillers go. No marks for guessing that these are James Bond and Mission Impossible. It’s been a mind-boggling 61 years since the first James Bond film was released. Ethan Hunt, of Mission Impossible, first appeared on screen in 1996, 27 years ago. And neither seems to have called it a day. Both have a male protagonist, who performs mind-boggling stunts and survives against al...

Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Cinema Speculation’: Autobiography? Encyclopaedia? Critiques?...Keep Speculating! Confined by time (1968-1981) and restricted to select genres, like revenge, gory violence, exploitation and blaxploitation, Quentin Tarantino’s 392-page hard-cover Hachette publication is a voyage of discovery that is not for the feeble-hearted or the purist. In baseball and cricketing terminology, he hits the ball all over the park. Though he was born in 1963, the (r...

Triangle of Sadness: An American Marxist and a Russian Capitalist on a $250 m yacht As movies go, there are several advantages of being different. Genre films have been beaten to death and critics, not to mention discerning audiences, are dying to watch something different. There are those who are different by virtue of original ideas, while others are different for the sake of being different. Let’s begin with the title: in the first few minutes of the film, you are told that it is som...

Puss in Boots-The Last Wish, Review: It’s not yet the time to hang up your boots A cat-sized cat in boots, with a cat-sized sword, taking on mighty villains and evading arrest by a Sherriff and his posse, is surely the stuff that fairy tales are made of. Just to remind you, there is a title card and a line on the posters that tells you, “This is a fairy tale”. That, technically, refers to the visual style of narrative employed by the film, which is very story-book in nature....