prakash kovelamudi's bombastic directorial tics - the over-bearing, almost numbing use of background music, the rapid montage-like editing, and the decision to consistently emphasize dialogue over silences - initially threaten to entirely consume kanika dhillon's sharp writing and kangana ranaut's typically hilariously unhinged performance. but, fortunately only five-ten minutes into the film, it struck me that all this audio-visual overload is very much in service of representing bobby's psyche. viewed through the prism of our central protagonist's fractured mind, which…

contrary to Anubhav Sinha’s barn stormingly effective Mulk in which the director made his screams against Islamophobia loud and clear through the drama in his film, the narrative in Article 15 seems a bit too subservient to his outrage against casteism. what is meant to be the driving narrative force of Sinha's film — the police's search for one of the lower caste girl who seems to have gone missing from a crime scene that saw two others raped and…

to claim that Erik Poppe's Utøya: July 22 exists as a vicious counter to Paul Greengrass' far-more-conventional, but still emotionally devastating 22 July is to do a disservice to both of the filmmakers' intentions. whereas Greengrass extended his focus way beyond the events that occurred on the titular date to show the psychological effect that the victims underwent, and even more crucially, examine the true meaning and strength of democracy in the face of extremism, Poppe's film eschews this macro-level…

less actively infuriating and more equal in its attempts to provide all its characters with any sense of dimensionality than the previous luv ranjan scripted box-office smash hit Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, director akiv ali's De De Pyaar De still mostly feels like a lazy comedy, albeit with grander pretensions of actually being about something other than male camaraderie. the problem here is not then the complete hollowness of the ranjan directed products. but, the poor way in which…

Imbuing what are essentially very conventional potboiler-y Bollywood plots - the mistaken delivery of a dabba to a lonely person who turns out to be the dissatisfied wife's soulmate in "The Lunchbox," and the chance encounter between two complete lonely strangers through a photograph here - with a European art-house sensibility doesn't sound like a workable fusion of styles. But, director Ritesh Batra allows the old-school Bollywood romantic charm to float around so quietly, and delicately in his bustling version…