After a long time, we have a movie which delivers more than what it promised. It puts it’s stamp on the changing face of Hindi cinema which never had it so good.  Moving away from traditional story telling, Kaminey is structured non-linearly. If you loved Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Ritchie’s Snatch and Lock, Stock and Smoking Barrels, you’ll be blown away by the edgy style that Vishal Bharadwaj has brought to the screens this time round.

The story is about the twins Charlie and Guddu who are like chalk and cheese and steer clear of each other. But fate has other plans and they are both on the run together. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that falls into place and climax is spectacular.

Shahid Kapoor is simply fantabulous as Charlie/ Guddu while Priyanka Chopra does a brilliant job slipping into a role which is so unlike the previous roles she has played. Amol Gupte as the gangsta is convincing.

The song Dhan Te Nan is all about in your face attitude and so is the entire movie. The cast, the story, the direction, the lingo, the dialogues.....smacks of razor sharp attitude. It leaves you reeling long after you've stepped out of the theater.

A must watch!

Sooni Taraporevala's Little Zizou is one of those really charming little stories.

The story revolves around the Parsi community and begins with Art’s take of Russians invading their street. There are quite a few scenes that are touching and tickle your funny bone, like when Xerxes explains to Liana that her mother feels sorry for him and does not love him, Roxy pleading with her mother to sell their hotel and when Boman thinks Zenobia is dating Art.

The protagonist is a little boy Xerxes (Jahan Bativala) whose father Cyrus the Second Khodaji (Sohrab Ardeshir) is a 'bogus humbug' and a spiritual healer who starts a Parsi Liberation movement that annoys their neighbour Boman Presswala (Boman Irani) who runs the newspaper. His brother is Artaxerxes (Imad Shah) who is into fantasy, comics, 747s and Boman’s daughter Zenobia.

Xerxes is at once cheeky, misses his dead mother but doesn’t mind playing that card when he needs to get his way. And he loves Zinedine Zidane. The movie ends as he discovers the truth about his mother’s death.

There are appearances by John Abraham, Cyrus Broacha, Shiamak Davar and Kamal Sidhu. Roxanne Presswala (Zenobia Shroff) is a natural as she chides her family and indulges Xerxes for the bit of affection he is always looking for. Miss Patel (Shernaz Patel) is Khodaji’s Girl Friday aka his personal Cruella DeVille.

There are times when you wonder where the story is going but it is one of those feel good movies that entertains without having to prove anything.

Anurag Kashyap’s Gulaal finally made it to the theaters after a long hold – very little love and lots of power plays and violence. And if you look really hard in between corpses and gulaal, there is a revolution brewing too.

It has it’s high points but the movie is paced too slow and is too loosely woven to be absorbing.

On the upside, the music, the audacious dialogues, locales and the performance by particularly Deepak Dobriyal, Piyush Mishra and Kay Kay Menon, is brilliant. Kashyap uses stage actors and non mainstream actors which makes them more relatable.

Jesse Randhwa plays Anuja, a marijuana smoking teacher who is ragged (?) while Mahi Gill as Madhuri has two songs and a handful of scenes as Duki Banna’s mistress who lets him kick her around.

It kicks off well with the opening scene, with Duki Banna calling for a separate state of Rajputana, powerful and violent and shows the madness of extremism. But some scenes don’t add up, like when Dilip falls apart as his relationship with Kiran is a sham.

Dilip (Raj Singh Choudhary) leaves home to study law and moves in with Ransa (Abhimanyu Shekhar Singh) who goes out of his way to help Dilip when he is ragged. Duki Banna convinces Ransa to stand for the election opposite Kiran (Ayesha Mohan) and then ugly gets uglier. Ransa is killed and Dilip gets caught up in the political machinations. The election is rigged and Dilip becomes the General Secretary.

Kiran with her brother Karan’s encouragement goes out with Dilip and turns him against Duki Banna and she ends up taking over as General Secretary after which she starts working on seducing Duki Banna, who for a powerful revolutionary leader is quite easily seduced, by tears no less.

People shoot each other left, right and center and it becomes a question of who is playing who. In the end, the madness continues.

Vikram K Kumar's 13B did what a horror movie needs to do – gave goosebumps at every turn in the first half. It is shot in monochrome and the background score puts a chill into the mundane.

But as it moves into flashback mode and an agitated Madhavan tries to save his family, there are too many twists and the story starts losing credibility.  The story is all over the place and the eerie quality created right at the start is soon forgotten.

An abnormally happy joint family (do they even exist these days?), move into a posh apartment numbered 13B.  The milk curdles daily; Manu’s (Madhavan) pics taken on his camphone inside the apartment are always distorted; they can’t drive a nail in the puja room; the elevator never works only for Manu forcing him to take the stairs (terrifying indeed!!!); the neighbour’s dog refuses to enter their apartment and the television automatically switches to channel 13 at 13:00 hours to a program that is exclusively aired for their family.

Though the women in the house are ga-ga over the show Sab Khairiyat Hai, it is only Manu who realizes that their life is dictated by that show.  He drags into this supernatural mess, his police officer friend Shiva and starts putting together the pieces. A gory massacre of a family; a murderer still out free while the family’s mentally ill brother (Deepak Dobriyal) is accused of the crime; a spurned lover and the television’s part in the crime is what they uncover.

The blindman and the rest of the cast’s roles were trivial while Madhavan was the only one with something to do in the movie.

Give it a miss. Doesn’t captivate.

It was contrived, unfunny and a sad excuse for a movie.

One would think after his performances in Munnabhai and Waisa Bhi Hota Hai, Arshad Warsi would be at liberty to be more picky about the roles.

John (Ashish Choudhary), Sidh (Arshad Warsi) and Amit (Yash Tonk) are best buddies. John loves Natasha (Aarti Chhabria) but can't tell her that. When she goes on a world tour, he's heartbroken and meets Sheetal (Udita Goswami) and soon turns into a henpecked boyfriend. Sheetal with the help of Ricky Ponting keeps Sidh and Amit away from John.

AK47 (Shakti Kapoor) is the bad guy while Chameli aka Julie (Shweta Menon) is a prostitute who helps Sidh and Amit.

How they get John out of Sheetal's clutches and back into Natasha's is what the movie is about. Their efforts are ridiculous and well, just ridiculous.

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra wasn’t kidding when he said he has tried to recapture the magic of Chandni Chowk.

The movie was more about him revisiting the narrow bylanes of Chandni Chowk and the colourful characters who call it their home, while the story is almost an afterthought. It's only in the second part of the movie that a plot starts taking shape.

He has cleverly used the Monkey Man mayhem that shook the nation (we are a nation that shakes for just about anything) a couple of years ago to bring to the fore the real issue of communal violence.

Abhishek Bacchan’s cool dude act grates the nerves and you get the feeling he promoting a Motorola cell phone which he waves around all the time. Sonam Kapoor looks adorable, hats off to whoever designed her look for the movie.

Pran Chopra, Om Puri, Waheeda Rehman, Amitabh Bacchan, Rishi Kapoor are the other stars along with MTV VJ Cyrus Sahukar as a womanizing photographer, Vijay Raaz as a meanie cop and Range De Basanti’s Atul Kulkarni as a cowering fella who finds his voice.

Roshan (Abhishek Bacchan), who is the product of a Hindu-Muslim marriage, takes grandma (Waheeda Rehman) home as she wants to die there. He is left amused and bemused by the cacophony of Delhi 6 – jalebis, pigeons (that fly prettily but never shit on your head), cows, qawwali, the Ram Leela and the eventual showdown with an almost Rang De Basanti ending.

The movie’s a visual treat and Mehra has added a nice touch in the way he has juxtaposed the Ram Leela and later brought in the supposed madman who holds a mirror to everyone’s face.

Bottomline, there is a monkey within all of us.

A timepass movie. No more, no less.

The first part of the movie was a little over the top in some comic scenes and a bit of a drag. The movie moved to a tolerable status just before the intermission and onwards.

It started with a cheeky letter asking for a loan. Whether Billu was just a simple man or a smart alec wasn’t clearly defined. After all the characters in the village Budhbudhe were introduced it too abruptly shifted to some spaceship kinda setting and SRK was introduced as the star Sahir Khan with an item number one.

Billu (Irrfan Khan) is a hairdresser (trying to be politically correct) in the sleepy village Budhbudhe. His business is in a bad state owing to the entry of Modern Madan. He is the butt of all jokes, his wife (Lara Dutta) is dissatisfied and the kids have a smart mouth. But life goes on until Sahir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan) and his entourage comes to the village for a shoot.

Don’t understand why the people greet the movie star by throwing papers at him and was surprised to see that the  roads in the village were so much better and nicely tarred than the ones here in the city.

News spreads that Sahir (who wears really flashy jackets) is Billu’s buddy and he is put on a pedestal and when his attempts at meeting with Sahir goes nowhere, he is derided. Then we have the men crying - Billu for the humiliation and Sahir reminiscing about his good old friend.

Then Billu goes back on the pedestal yet again and both friends have a very emotional reunion. Bring out the hankies!!

SRK goes one step further and takes a dig at the whole Khan wars when pushed by the obnoxious Dubeyji.

It’s an okay watch if you have some company and food at hand as the movie doesn’t really absorb you too deeply.

Director and writer Anurag Kashyap has done a brilliant job and the movie is more than just another remake of Devdas. 

Besides some kickass dialogues, the movie also has some great music and visuals that go on to create just the right atmosphere – the open fields, the lacy mannequin filled boudoir of a prostitute or Dev’s stoned moments. It also brings in three men in suit who watch Dev’s destruction. The choreography of Pardesi and Emosanal Atyachaar is mind blowing.

For starters, Paro and Dev are Punjabis and their story is set in rural Punjab and Delhi as opposed to Bengalis.  Paro takes a backseat,  you see Dev for what he is and  Chanda gets her due.

Dev (Abhay Deol) is a regular spoilt brat having a good time in London while keeping in touch with his childhood friend Paro. He wants a look at her nude and she complies which is all the motivation he needs to ditch London for some making out back in India.

Paro (Mahi Gill) has no qualms about showing her wild sexuality as she cycles across fields with a mattress coz her love Dev wants to get laid rather bad. But when he tries to brand her with the scarlet letter, she calls a spade a spade and moves on.

The woman who steals the show is Chanda (Kalki Koetchlin) as her story unfolds from a precocious teen Lenny who turns into a pariah owing to a MMS scandal (ring a bell?) and then turns to prostitution and drugs as Chanda. Her character has it’s quirks like a compulsive juggling and origami.

Dev spirals out of control on drugs and booze till he meets the pimp Chunni who gets him more booze, drugs and Chanda.

His chemistry with Chanda from their exchange of repartees in her boudoir to sharing their woes with each other is one of the best parts of the movie. Like when she tells him her story while painting a sad clown face or the scene in the sauna where he gives her a much needed hug and tells her it is okay.

Our boy still can’t think beyond Paro. He runs over some people in his BMW (ring a bell?) and daddy dies (read funds cut off), takes to looting payphones and narrowly misses death which suddenly does what even Chanda’s love couldn’t – gets him thinking straight.

And then the movie ends on a happy note....so cheers for those who love happy endings!

Another Akhtar works her magic.

Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance is a very ‘real’ and objective look at the two-faced film industry - the sweat, connections, talent and mostly luck if you are an outsider. And the unwavering belief that they will make it big. Eventually.

The cast’s fabulous as each one fits quite nicely into their characters.

Rishi Kapoor is the larger than life, jovial director Romy Rolly and Juhi Chawla’s his chirpy wife Minty with a strong faith in God, gems and numbers. Sanjay Kapoor is Ranjit Rolly making his directorial debut.

Dimple Kapadia is Nina, the star mother who is tough, over protective, throws starry tantrums and will let nothing get in the way of her daughter’s success. Isha Sharvani is Nikki, the star daughter and very princessy.  Hrithik Roshan is Safar Khan, the star.

Vikram (Farhan Akhtar) is a theater actor from Delhi who is in Mumbai looking for a big break. Sona (Konkana Sen) is a naïve wannabe actress who lands small roles while waiting for producer (and lover) Satish Choudhry to cast her as a second lead.

Vikram believes in himself and not luck (spouts some philosophical stuff ‘bout that) but ironically it is luck that lands him the lead role in Nikki Walia’s (Isha Sharvani) debut movie.

He works his charm on the mother-daughter and soon has them both vying for his attention. He has more women than he can handle when girlfriend Sona lands up on the sets. 

Sona, on the other hand, after all the hard work, does not become a star on the big screen but does win a fridge.

Success gets heady and that’s when Shah Rukh Khan makes an appearance and gives Vikram some ‘advice’.

On the other hand, our girl Sona has something better up her sleeve.

The movie has a sprinkling of stars – Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Javed Akhtar, John Abraham, Shabana Azmi, Akshaye Khanna, Ranbir Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor, Karan Johar et al.

If you liked Dil Chahta Hai and Rock On, you’ll love this. And it is nothing like OSO.

Mohit Suri’s Raaz – The Mystery Continues isn’t a sequel as the title suggests. It’s a horror flick with a difference… it has a moral!? You hear it loud and clear whether you want to or not.

It starts off at a remote temple in an eerily lovely locale by the seaside with an Adam’s Family’s butler look alike. And then switches to the glam Naditha sashaying down  a ramp when she is not madly in love with her boyfriend Yash who hosts  a reality show called AndhVishwas.

Until Prithivi an artist enters the picture with an ominous warning. Prithivi rids her of her demons and she rids him of his beer.

In the meanwhile, the bhoot gets busy as Suri builds up the scare factor…lights flicker, doors bang, blood and other gory stuff add to the effect.  The movie’s climax is shot against a backdrop of the painting of  The Last Supper that is minus Jesus.

Kangana Ranaut as Nanditha is impressive as she shrieks, levitates, gives some unoriginal  gaalis to Maharishi Somebody-Or-The-Other and is taken over by the naughty bhoot.  It helps that she is skimpily dressed….adds to the visual appeal.

Adyayan Suman as Yash steals the smooches from right under Emraan Hashmi’s nose. One of those love to hate characters.

Emraan Hashmi as Prithvi broods and dresses like a punk when he is not painting Nanditha’s fate. And ya, the music’s good. Not a surprise with Hashmi’s movies.

Jackie Shroff makes an appearance too, a brief one.

The movie’s worth a watch as we don’t see too many of this genre.

The movie opened to a spectacular view of The Great Wall of China where the warrior Liu Shengh dies fighting. It went downhill from there.

Siddu (Akshay Kumar) chops veggies at Chandni Chowk desperately hoping for a life of grandeur as his Dada (Mithun Chakraborty) tells him that his destiny is in his hands. Siddu meets the Feng-Shastra guru Chopstick (Ranvir Shorey) on his quest for overnight fame & riches. Two Chinese men and Chopstick who wants a free ride to China convince him he is the re-incarnated war hero and they take off to China to fight the tyrant Hojo. Sakhi (Deepika Padukone) is in China looking for her long lost twin Meow Meow.  There’s utter chaos as their paths meet.

Akshay Kumar’s funnies hit the right note occasionally while he was in his element during the later scenes where his skills as a martial arts expert came into focus. Mithun Chakraborty, though with limited scenes, was great. Deepika Padukone as Meow Meow in a catwoman-ish outfit was sleek, feline and gorgeous if nothing else. Ranvir Shorey’s halo-ed and horn-ed conscience apart, he was utterly wasted as he spent most of the movie looking miserable.

The first part of the movie is overdone in the name of comedy. The second part is well paced out punctuated with laughs, tears and kung fu. The movie had it’s good moments, no doubt. Maybe, it was mostly the hype that was built up  that made the expectations set, fall apart like a house of cards.

Oh! And there might be a sequel to it.

A work of satire, The President Is Coming is unusual and more than just the much touted George W Bush visit to India. It veers off the traditional track and is packed with steoreotyped characters, each one driven by their own selfish desires, put through ridiculous and over the top tests that act as a deciding factor. The reward is a handshake with the notorious US President.

The movie features actual footage of Bush’s visit to India in 2006 as it mocks the media frenzy, the Presidential snore, the Presidential menu etc.

The face of New India, who is it going to be???  Samantha (Shernaz Patel) dressed in a power suit is completely believable as the ambitious slash bitchy slash kleptomaniac CEO of the PR agency that has landed the prestigious project. Ritu, her assistant, is a doormat. The six finalists are Maya Rao (Konkana Sen), who is brilliant as the ruthless Bengali novelist who exploits the other contestants’ Achilles’ Heels without batting an eyelid to get to Bush whom she openly detests. Archana Kapoor (Ira Dubey) is the Paris Hilton of India except darker – “a slut like a whore type” as Ajay puts it; Rohit Seth (Vivek Gomber) is an Americanised accent trainer from Gurgaon who thinks Hindustani Classical sounds like a cat being murdered; Ajay Kalekar (Satchit Puranik) , a social worker, from Nagpur is a racist and a chauvinist who can say fuck; Ramesh S (Namit Das) is a lusty software geek from Bangalore, reads Cosmopolitan and is looking for “some HBO type of fun”; Kapil Dev (Anand Tiwari) from Mumbai eats, breathes and lives the stock market,  believes Dow Jones is the capital of USA and is willing to buy Maya if only she were stock.

And what happens when they come together? Bribery, sex tapes, some maar-peet, homosexuality and even love happens!

The tests are hilarious and silly like a talent contest, recognizing American faces (Osama Bin Laden tops the list!), a physical endurance and speech round where they strike an animal pose and spout infamous Bushisms and Body Flexibility that has a good dose of Elvis the Pelvis tilts.

The laughs taper off as the story goes on. If you make room for some absurdity, predictability and a corny scene or two, it is great for laidback viewing. And if you want to delve deeper, it is nicely layered.