Bengali Warrior

I must confess that I am thrilled by a Bengali hero (Dev) holding his own through kitschy plots filled with a delectable heroine - Nandini (Mimi Chakraborty), malicious villians, a storyline that could be a copy of a hundred others, and special effects that are some three decades behind Hollywood - in short, a Bengali movie that looks oh-so-suspiciously like a Bollywood flick. Dev holds his own as a passable warrior and a mostly passable romantic hero, as a flashback storyline plays back and forth. Yoddha is quite entertaining for the average Bengali movie-goer who gets a treat of Bollywood from Tollywood.

12/20

Bengali Movie v 2.0

I went in to watch Chander Pahar expecting incongruity – the barely-peripatetic Bengali out in the open wilderness in Africa, on a treasure hunt that is not his own. The first half of the movie kind of corroborated this impression. And then came the second half. Some spiffy acting, stunning or near-stunning vistas, and the Bengali explorer Shankar (Dev) standing shoulder to shoulder with the Portuguese explorer Diego Alvarez (Gerard Rudolf). While the special effects leave a lot to be desired, the movie itself is stunning – weaving its way through the part-fiction part-reality almost-mythical lands of Africa

15.5/20