If you happen to like this film, I have to assume there's something seriously wrong with your idea of a journey, Sreehari Nair says.
Dibakar Banerjee delivers his finest work to date, and Sreehari Nair makes sure to applaud him.
Hindi Medium works because it manages to stretch itself beyond its scrubby elements, easy half-baked jokes, lessons about consumerism and our love for English, into a simple story about a boy who would do anything to see his girl smile, feels Sreehari Nair.
Ram Gopal Varma is back with Part Three of that series, which presented to us the first clear evidence that the great man was slipping, rues Sreehari Nair.
'Kaala's sin is not that it is presented as a mouthpiece for its director Pa Ranjith's political viewpoints, but that it makes a travesty of them.' 'Ranjith turns Marx into merchandise, all the while functioning as a hired hand for Brand Rajinikanth,' points out Sreehari Nair.
True misogyny is when you stop being curious about women, and Milind Dhaimade directs his actresses with a sense of wonder. Tu Hai Mera Sunday has delightful women characters, sketchy men, and individual threads that work better than the whole package, feels Sreehari Nair.
'Parts of Pad Man look like a Vicco Turmeric commercial, parts of it look like a Tourism Ad and parts of it like a commercial for Etihad Airlines. But almost all of it, unmistakably, sounds like one big town-hall message,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Sriram Raghavan is mainstream Hindi cinema's greatest gift to us,' declares Sreehari Nair after watching the director's latest movie caper.
'This is a movie, which if you allow it to, will wash itself all over you, so that you emerge from it a little drenched but wide awake,' says Sreehari Nair.
Raag Desh is one of the best films of the year, Sreehari Nair raves.
If Manto, the film, falls short of being a masterpiece it's because Nandita Das could not quite crack the Manto code: She couldn't quite see the wholeness of her subject with the same eyes that Manto saw his people. This imperfection in the film, in a way, becomes the greatest tribute to Manto, feels Sreehari Nair.
...But a comedy about Class Wars. Sreehari Nair tells us why.
'This colliding of worlds is a feature of chawl life in Mumbai, where the clashes in one household often become prime-time television for the neighbours; where the boundaries of good sex, lechery, and incest are frequently blurred,' says Sreehari Nair.
'How can you blame poor Kabir Khan for the Tubelight fiasco?' 'We know that his Job Description expects him to work below full capacity, to sell his soul, and we know his SOP-sheet has the title: Design the next Salman Khan Project.' Sreehari Nair sees through Kabir Khan's cunning.
'2 hours and 20 minutes later, I walked out of Sachin: A Billion Dreams learning not one additional thing about Tendulkar: Not one factoid, not one statistic.' 'Maybe it's convenient filmmaking, or maybe just the essence of God,' says Sreehari Nair.
'As citizens of this country, we often expect sweeping changes here, but find the smallest of abdications that we may ourselves be called upon to make far too inconveniencing.' 'Think about it deeply -- about the move and the reactions it has gathered -- and we will actually learn a lot about ourselves,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Sudhir Mishra takes us into the dreams and fears of our politicians, into their self-deceiving pitches, and he shows us their demons and angels,' says Sreehari Nair.
Baahubali: The Conclusion doesn't enlarge the scope of the first picture or deepen its meaning, feels Sreehari Nair.
'Love Sonia is a motion picture with the ambitions of a novel.' 'When I walked out of Love Sonia this Monday night, I walked out with a hushed audience that seemed too overcome by the raw power of the film to even pause for applause,' notes Sreehari Nair.
'The overarching fact of modern social behaviour isn't that we are irresponsible women and men, but that we are never quite sure, when and how to act responsibly.' 'This is the real side of every Twitter outrage, where those who tweet about stories of 'unreported domestic abuse' end up feeling superior to those neighbours who are summoned up as clueless witnesses.' 'This view of the supposed spiritual decay of our times, which is at the core of Gali Guleiyan, is thus more fashionable than perceptive,' says Sreehari Nair.
'The way the daredevil feats are set up, they don't have the maniacal feeling of actual gun battles, or good jazz, or a whacked-out dance performance -- they just don't provide you that giddy tingle you go looking for in such films,' feels Sreehari Nair.
'The best Indian movies today are ones that portray life as "something that doesn't end when the movies do".' 'There's no real arc to traverse or easy lessons to learn. And Irrfan and Nawazuddin -- who can both swerve a movie purely on the strengths of their instincts -- are just the perfect actors for this kind of movie sensibility,' says Sreehari Nair.
'2015 gave us a set of Hindi films that brought to light, the true uncorrupted joys of filmmaking even in their roughness.' 'Films which told us why we loved films in the first place. Films that were less ashamed of revealing their weakness and ones that took chances with audience expectations.'
'Kumbalangi Nights is a movie that respects women, but most importantly, it's a movie that loves them,' says Sreehari Nair.
Part of what make Ee.Ma.Yau so special is its ability to focus our attention on things that conventional movies throw away under the pretext of storytelling, says Sreehari Nair.
'What would a composite of Dawood, Rajan, and Arun Gawli be like?' 'What if an absconding mafia boss were to land in Mumbai tomorrow, tired from all the running, and tender his final apology to the city by narrating his story and narrating it with brutal honesty?' Sreehari Nair watches Sacred Games.
'In Sanju, Rajkumar Hirani has essentially found a Rajkumar Hirani story buried inside Sanjay Dutt's life.' 'Now if you think that's scary, sample the alternative: Perhaps Sanjay Dutt had been living his life to suit the narrative of a Rajkumar Hirani film,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Every time I watch Sholay telling myself that it is nothing more than a 'brazen potboiler,' the movie works. However, each time I take it for this iconic masterpiece, Sholay falls short; terribly short,' says Sreehari Nair.
Sreehari Nair is *not* impressed by this lot of films at all.
'Don't let anybody tell you that Kadvi Hawa is a manifesto for the fight against climate change or that it's an austere, unforgiving movie.' 'This is an intensely felt, beautifully expressed piece of cinema,' says Sreehari Nair.
Director Shanker Raman, with an appetite for noir and a natural temperament for fast-cutting, takes you so swiftly and so deeply inside Gurgaon's anomie that you may mistake his vision of the city for some dystopian view of the future, feels Sreehari Nair.
'He may be a scientist, a poet and a brat. And in addition to all this, Virat Kohli is also cricket's No 1 Rollerblade-Artist,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Omerta is a work of true moral force; it is, at the risk of sounding fancy, a motion picture for our times,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Any Muslim who shows even the slightest hint of revolutionary thought is marked as 'infected'.' 'At that point, he is taken to the nearest Detention Centre where a procedure called Reconditioning awaits him.' 'Areas with a high Muslim population have been designated as Scheduled Religion Zones.' 'To be an active participant in this social cleansing ritual, there is only one prerequisite: You have to be an undying patriot whose friend and family is his country.'
'This is a film that trumpets out its sex -- it is content in being a girl's version of the archetypical boy's locker-room picture.' 'And if it was just that, that would have been fun too, but Lipstick Under My Burkha doesn't want to affect your senses, it wants to control your mind!' Sreehari Nair comes away unimpressed.
A big part of October's charm is in its taking of a cinematic tragedy and presenting to us how we may experience it in real life, says Sreehari Nair.
The key to every Daniel Day-Lewis performance was a big theme and a thousand details. And in the final phase of his acting career, says Sreehari Nair, America became his big theme, and the details... well, he just popped them out like waffles.
'You walk out of Mukkabaaz feeling good about yourself, but unlike Kashyap's best pictures, it releases you from the responsibility of seeing yourself in it; the movie is darn clever, most of the way, but it hardly has any wisdom,' says Sreehari Nair.
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