Colonizers

In the tragic hilarious and eminently watchable movie Mickey 17 the invasion of a planet and the attack on the superintelligent native species (dismissively labelled "critters") is best exemplified by the capture of a baby critter by the humans. The curiosity for interspecies understanding is limited to, well, cutting off the tail of the said critter, putting it in a blender, and then saying "what sauce does this best go with?"

Irreverent, wildly unpredictable, and in the end hopefully, Mickey 17 is an original movie that traverses sci fi, humour, dystopia - and holds well

16/20

Looper

 A random Youtube video profiling bizarre mind-bending movies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K0d0BTRJ9M&t=595s) brought me to The Triangle (2009) – which in turn I watched on an “unconventional” URL (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9iu0zq). Clearly the OTT masters of the universe consider us intellectually incapable of processing such fare. In the story of Sisyphus, the protagonist pushes a boulder up a hill in an endless temporal loop. In The Triangle, Jessie (Melissa George), mother of an autistic child, goes on a boat trip in the Bermuda Triangle with her friends. Their boat hits the doldrums, and the deserted ship Aeolus is where they take refuge. Soon after coming on board a sinister sequence of events ensues – things are not what they seem at all – and friends are injured and dying, and Jess and the castaways are heavily looping in time. A mindbender that is likely to stay in the mind for a while in a sea of cinematic monotony

16/20

Intentionally Blank

Pole star

Reviewing a Hindi movie, and that too squarely in the romantic genre, is not the vein of this site at all. When I watched Saiyaara in Infiniti mall, it was because I was choosing between commuting in the rain and whiling some time in a theater that is a stone's throw from my place. Sometimes perhaps you are surprised in the positive - Karan Kapoor (Aahan Pandey) and Vani (Aneet Padda) have some pretty compelling screen chemistry, bring a fair amount of intensity, and in a movie that is not all giggles and dance sequences - pull off a pretty convincing execution of a rather simple storyline. Karan is the wannabe rockstar looking for a break and superstardom, the once betrayed Vani, who also suffers from Alzheimer's, is his rock - well, at least as long as she can hold on to her memory. Pretty good work

15/20

Rinse (with the Mososaur), Repeat

 It is the present day, and people have lost interest in the dinosaurs; the apathy could not be more apparent as an ageing brontosaurus is removed from the streets of Manhattan. But money hasn't lost its draw unlike the dinosaurs, and a team led by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a man of dubious morals, joins hands with Zora (Scarlett Johansson), Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and others to seek samples from the aquatic Mosasaurus, terrestrial Titanosaurus, and avian Quetzalcoatlus, in order to find a lucrative cure to a heart disease. On the way their paths cross with the Delgado family – father Reuben, daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Xavier (David Iacono), who are on an unlikely Trans-Atlantic voyage on their summer break. With adventures over land and water, and on the high cliffs of the equatorial island, Jurassic World – Rebirth makes specific effort to draw on the  memories of the franchise – children below overturned means of transportation, T-rex drawn away with flares, the inevitable raptors vs children in a dark room. But all said and done it's executed well without monotony – perhaps the strength of the movie is in its excellent casting – memories with new energy and freshness

16/20

Memento Amoris

Remember you must love. Perhaps not the predominant emotion in a remote island in the quarantined British Isles, but Spike (Alfie Williams) shows affection, and how. While the first half is about Spike and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) sussing out the mainland in a coming of age for the former, the second half is a far more emotional story of Spike getting is mother Isla (Jodie Comer) her deliverance. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland dont miss a beat in 28 Years Later. Spectacular work by Alfie. Unmissable for the apocalypse fans, with character arcs instead of pitched battles with violent hordes

16.5/20

Swan Lake grace

Eva Macarro (Ana de Armas) is orphaned early in life - and finds herself at the Continental Hotel and trained to be a assassin in Ballerina. Several slick but predictable assassin sequences later, Eva finds the mark of her father's killers on one assassin - which loops somehow to Baba Yaga (Keanu Reeves) and the Ruska Roma. Ana de Armas lacks the extreme physicality of Keanu Reeves and the smoldering rage, but covers some decent ground with litheness and improvisation. All in all a good watch but not necessarily unmissable

15/20