Intentionally Blank

Purja - Invincible

 Nirmal Purja is unbelievable. A Gurkha endurance athlete that scaled the world's fourteen highest peaks in less than 7 months. And with a generous dose of humanity (read rescues) and HACE along the way too. A man whose endurance beats the world's greatest athletes. A SBS recruit and sniper survivor, and one who says that the unremembered Gurkhas needed to make their point by doing their own great climb, sans ingrate White climbers. Unmissable and beyond inspiring is 14 Peaks (Documentary - Netflix)

16/20

Tadap (Hindi)

A one sided romance and act of pure deception. A movie that limps along and then suddenly finds its legs in a good read of human emotion. Ishaan (Ahan Shetty) and Ruksana (Tara Sutaria) are literally no match for each other

13.5/20

Dune - Resurrected

 In a huge improvement from David Lynch's version, Denis Villeneuve brings the realpolitik of Dune back to the big screen. Uncluttered and far more nuanced than the likes of Star Wars, with none of the pedantic Star Trek genre nor the incessant intrigue of Game of Thrones, Dune is faithful to the storyline. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) flee from the aftermath of a Harkonnen plus Federation attack, to regroup and reclaim what is owed to him, through an alliance with the Fremen. After a long time, a movie thats definitely a must watch

16/20

WW84 and back to the neighbourhood theatrer

Black Mirror - Brief Review

https://g.co/kgs/cz1emj

Black Mirror (NFLX) is so reminiscent of The Twilight Zone on cable many moons ago.. heard of it often, finally saw 2 episodes today.. this is true cyberpunk inasmuch this is no urban dystopias but the confluence of technology and the darkness of our minds. Highly recommend a sampling. Thought provoking, discrete episodes, not for good cheer

16/20

Heartwarming, Heartrending, Real

Having watched various animal world related programs since early childhood, I am yet to see anything like My Octopus Teacher - where Craig Foster - the protagonist - spent from two decades of corporate life - finds his world blending into the life of a wild common octopus while free diving in a kelp forest off the coast of South Africa - its empathy and play, its extreme and unexpected level of intelligence, its brushes with deadly pyjama sharks and regeneration, and finally its procreation and fulfillment of purpose. There is probably no instance of a human coming so close to the animal world and capturing it so well. This Netflix original documentary completely draws in the viewer, and the latter never loses his empathy. One of the very best - very real and very sad

17.5/20

Perfect QC Imperfect People

Devs is virtually a one woman show - distraught by the inexplicable apparent self immolation of her boyfriend, Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) reaches Devs - the top secret Quantum Computing (QC)-driven past/ future visualiser.. the brainchild of reclusive billionaire Forest (Nick Offerman) and his tool to resurrect Amaya.. His lost daughter and the name of his company. Lily does not know it yet but only she has the ability to alter the course of the future itself

15/20

Robot Times

Love Death and Robots is an unusual collection of 18 largely high quality stories that involve robots or deep tech in some manner. Some of the storiew are quite outstanding.- Zima Blue (E14) is quite a watch.. Therr are others that involve uploading consciousness to giant fighting robots, lost in space into a simulation, a Gravity-esque return to base while losing a limb, and many more. The quality of stories is high, several are thought provoking, and at a sharp 15 mins each this is undeniably a watch

16.5/20

Electric

The Current War - we watched this in the relative intimacy and detail of one of the smaller (Insignia) screens in Imax Inorbit Malad. The small screen brought the brute rivalry of the genius Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the equally determined Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) to focus... None gives the other a quarter in looking at lighting up America and eventually the world. It is AC vs DC, pitches and patronage of investors - the eponymous JP Morgan (Matthew Macfayden) - a narrative that resonates to this day more than most, the alliance with the genius Tesla (Nicholas Hoult). The movie begins with the memorable line "It is 1880 and the world is still lit by fire" - highlighting the sheer extent of the change brought about by the rivals. Perhaps it is great competition that brings out both the worst and the best in our nature

16/20

Knife's Edge

Knives Out has celebrity detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) solves (sort of) a whodunit at a remote suburb where a family - largely underserving in spades - looks forward to an inheritance from patriarch Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) - with a cast that includes a wastrel grandson in Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans) and a near invisible domestic help in Marta (Ana de Armas) with ponderables of her own, it is an interesting if not extraordinary feat of deductive reasoning with a touch of the copybook thriller. Worth a watch, but Andhadhun (Hindi) or Badla (Hindi) frankly do a better job...

















13/20

A Few Quick Ones

Bohemian Rhapsody: Admittedly stepped into the hall with more than a little skepticism, but was bowled over by the sheer talent of one Freddie Mercury and how the Pakkie found his voice all the way from a highly skeptical Parsi family in London all the way to Live Aid. 15.5/20

Ralph Breaks the Internet: To get to EBay to find a steering wheel and save Candy Race in the Arcade, Ralph and Vannelope undertake a coming of age journey that while cementing their friendship truly shows up the different people that they are. 15/20

The Girl in the Spider's Web: Lisbeth Sallander finds her way through the Russian mafia and an irate NSA to a Bourne style thriller to recover some truly world-saving information. Claire Foy needs to use her full complement of hacking skills as well as physicality. Includes some brutal sibling face-offs too. 14/20

Thuggery

Thugs of Hindostan robs both your wallet and sanity in equal measure. I cannot rate this movie as I left in the interval. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what truly and irredemably dooms the movie - the terrible script, weak cinematography, utterly underdeveloped characters and relationships, a background score that is among the worst one has ever heard. With the dominance of IPTV the bar in terms of quality has irrevocably risen, and this sort of execution will inevitably and swiftly get consigned to the dustbin of history

1/20

Some movies of note

Badhaai ho hindi 15.5/20
Stree hindi 14.5/20
Tumbaad hindi 15/20
First man ... Neil armstrong.. 15.5/20
Bazaar hindi 15/20
Aandhadhun hindi 12.5/20

Winning Stree - k

Stree (Hindi) is a horror comedy with just about everything done right. When its not frightening you, its leaving you in splits. And somewhere it manages to leave a social message as well, without turning into a meaningless mishmash. Well done

15.5/20

Papi

The wonderfully executed true to the novel movie sees Henri Charierre being pushed out from the life of a charmer in Paris straight to the wilderness and horrors of French Guyana. In a ceaseless sequence of horrors, the resilience of one man is tested to the limit and beyond, and eventually one insight far in the future allows for a gateway to final freedom. Maybe Papillon is about never giving up. Maybe its just a story where the protagonist could have simply died of he treated life with some insouciance. A midt watch

15.5/20

Every Woman is a Wonder Woman

As has been said many times before, it took 75 years to give Wonder Woman her own franchise. Not a great one for diversity and inclusion. The story is simple, the execution flawless. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) heads into Europe to destroy Ares, the god of war and the perpetrator of WWII. Worth more than just a watch

16/20

Nutan is Newton

Nutan aka Newton Kumar conducts an election in Naxalite infested Chhatisgarh. Calling into question who lives off the land, how democracy truly works, and begs the question as to how we should make sense of it all. A black comedy par excellence, haunting in more than one way..

14/20

The War For Independence

The ghazi attack is about an war between India and Pakistan because east pakistan wants to seprate from Pakistan so this story starts when the Pakistan navy sends a submarine named ghazi and when the Indian navy comes to know they send a submarine named s21 then the s21 goes for some distance until they come to know that the submarine ghazi sent a torpedo on a Indian ship in which two refugees survived and then Pakistan creats a land mine which made the Indian ship crash ash but they manage to float then the other side sends six torpedoes and they miss them and India sends another torpedo which made ghazi crash

- Vinayak Gupta

12/20

The Lost Children

Lion is about two boys who got lost at a railway station and the younger boy  boards a train which is empty and goes to callcuta and then he starts shouting and is not able to find then after some time a orphanage takes him and then a man and woman from Australia take him there and he lives there with another boy for the next twenty years and he uses google earth to find his biological parents and then he comes to India and he finds his real parents and he realised that his older brother has died but he still has the love for his Australian parents

15/20