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Siraj Syed is the India Correspondent for FilmFestivals.com and a member of FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics. He is a Film Festival Correspondent since 1976, Film-critic since 1969 and a Feature-writer since 1970. He is also an acting and dialogue coach. @SirajHSyed
Badshaah Pahelwan, Review: There’s a brown wrestler in the boxing ring, tra la la la la
When director of photography S. Krishna turned producer just over two years ago, vicariously, through his wife, Swapna, having directed two action genre films, he decided to make his third film in nine Indian languages. Down the line, he settled for five, with the original in his native Kannada, and dubbed versions in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Rather ambitious of Krishna, considering the fi...
Chhichhore, Review: Posers for losers, choosers and imposers
Few ideas would be more contradictory than a parent’s attempt to revive his dying son by calling his college mates to the Intensive Care Unit of a posh hospital and collectively narrating to him, in some detail, their recollections of the hellcyon days they spent in a college hostel, as a bunch of slimy, gooey, swearing, cheating, boozing, smoking, rude, flippant, frivolous ‘losers’. All this is done in the hope th...
Saaho, Review: Posture Boys
Grand emptiness fills the screen as the Saaho saga unfolds. There is a semblance of a plot and a picture post-card collage of both serene and breath-taking visuals. However, most unfortunately, the most crucial element of a well-crafted film, story-telling, is at a discount. Gory and one-sided fights, a floating, free-falling and soaring mortal superhero, and flesh flaunting femme fatales cannot compensate for flimsy premises and disbelief inviting sequences.
Prit...
This underwater horror-survival movie takes its cameras and main cast down 47 meters (going by the title) and discovers a Mayan labyrinth of caves and cages. When one cage is broken open, out come deadly sharks. Oh, they are as blind as dead bats, but as hungry as whale-sized ravens. Why did four teenage girls venture into uncharted oceanic depths, and will any of them re-surface alive? To find out, you will have to endure some amateurish story-telling and some cyclical, repetitive scares.
Mi...
A maker with a penchant for addressing social and sociological malaises tries his hand at the intra-nation village/small town to big city trans-migration issue in India, as seen through three different angles, by inhabitants of a Mumbai chawl (shanty/slum). Though Bhonsle is largely realistic cinema, Devashish Makhija, nevertheless, bends his treatment occasionally, to use tropes to move the story forward. The result is an above average film that has enough merit to be watchable on its own, bu...
Angry Birds Movie 2, Review: And angry birdwatchers 2
To even begin getting lightly entertained, you will have to sit through the first twenty minutes of Angry Birds Movie 2, which are a cacophonic assault on your senses. During this testing time, you are served a machine-gun fire recap and a kind of general introduction to the birds and pigs that are going to play out a tale of spurned birdy love and its calamitous consequences. Proceedings do get more and more tolerable, and offer a modicum...
Angel Has Fallen, Review: Dad’s Bad, Banning’s Mad, Jennings’s Glad
Angel here is the guardian angel of the President of the United States of America, and fallen refers to his being critically wounded and, allegedly, falling from grace. So much for ethereal and angelic interpretations of the title. Now, the subject: it is a run-of-the-mill ‘cop injured in attempt to murder a VVIP that kills all others except him, falsely accused of attempted murder, discredited, arrest...
Crawl, Review: Alligator…will it get her?
If you were to consider making a film about a creature that has equally or more lethal Jaws than sharks, you would have little problem coming up with the alligator. In fact, it is a more dangerous and slimy looking being than the shark. An alligator’s jaw exerts 1,342 kg of pressure, giving it the most powerful bite ever recorded in a living animal. It can swim at 32.18km/hr, faster than the Olympic record. And the fact that it is an amph...
Yomeddine, Review: Disability or this ability?
Unlikely companions embark on an impossible journey, to trace their roots, hundreds of miles away, on a donkey cart, with little money and barest of supplies. Both, the journey and the destination, hold many surprises for the two, some pleasant, some very unpleasant. On the way, they offer you a tribute to the indomitable human spirit, but also make you realise that in a society of regulars and normals, the irregular and abnormal cannot find thei...
Batla House, Review: Policeman with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Distinguishing one police thriller from another is becoming an increasingly difficult task. He is part of an incident/encounter that results in deaths of alleged criminals. The officer’s marital life is disrupted due to his erratic working hours and heavy post-traumatic stress. Having had enough, the wife threatens to leave him. The incident creates controversy and he runs afoul of the powers that be. Most of his higher-...
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Review: Good, but not as Tarantino was, once upon a time
It is inspired by the murders of actress Sharon Tate and her friends at the hands of a hippy cult in 1969, only the film re-writes this historical fact. It is inspired by the super-hit spaghetti Westerns of the mid to late 60s, led by Italian director Sergio Leone, only he is never mentioned in the film. It is a satirical take on martial arts’ ‘God’ Bruce Lee, but takes an amazingly unfla...
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Review: The spirit of Sarah Bellows, and the trauma of teenage fellows
Though the voice-over insists that stories hurt and stories heal, and that if they are repeated very often, they become true, any amount of repetition will not succeed in making Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark seem anything like real. Hurt, it does, heal, I wonder! It’s a horror story, pure and simple, or, rather, neither very pure nor very simple. A 70 year-old mansion has its se...
Jabariya Jodi, Review: Scaring, paring and pairing
Imagine a country where dowry demands are the bane. Imagine a state in that country where the demands of families of educated and gainfully employed men of marriageable age range in the region of one to ten million bucks. Now imagine a gang that kidnaps such extortionist grooms and marries them off to the hapless women, at gunpoint, after giving them the treatment. Jodi, literally, means a ‘pair’ or ‘couple’, in Urdu a...
Dora and the Lost City of Gold, Review: Adorable Dora, the explora
Dora is shown first as a six-year old, living in the forest with her explorer parents, and then as a sixteen year-old, studying in high school. That is highly appropriate, because Dora and the Lost City of Gold has something for all those who are in the age-group of 6-16, and some more for the older folks, who have seen 17 or more summers. The film is largely driven by the actress playing Dora, who is simply scintillating.
TV...
Khandaani Shafakhana, Review: Familial Clinic, Unfamiliar picnic
A title like that would suggest a medical practice that has been in the business for generations and garnered a formidable reputation of efficacy in treatment. Khandaani Shafakhana (Urdu for Familial Clinic) is not about any such practice. The subject is sex, in general, and the distressing conditions of erectile dysfunction and lack of libido in particular. Okay, so they have a misleading title. You could overlook this fact if ...
Chase--No Mercy to Crime, Review: Robbing trains for electoral gains
A taut crime thriller in the making, Chase: No Mercy to Crime proceeds at a languorous pace that is quickened only by some rapid cuts and jerky pans. It is based on true events that spanned two Indian states, and the criminals-police chase crossed into Nepal and Thailand too. But, unless the thrills are present and confined to the first few scenes, which I missed due to awful road traffic, the film ends up being a routine cr...
Ash is Purest White, Review: Never Love a Gangster
Ash is Purest White is a tale of unrequited love that flows seamlessly along the backdrop of the socio-political upheavals in China, during 2001-18. It is an ode to old-fashioned love, set amidst gangsters and con-artistes, making two, revolutionary, and highly controversial, observations: gangster mobs are the last vestiges of loyalty and righteousness, and men are incapable of reciprocating women’s sublime love.
Qiao (Zhao Tao) lives...
Family of Thakurganj, Review: Nannu, Munnu and nothing New, New
Referencing dozens of mafia/gangster movies made in India and the West, Family of Thakurganj glorifies crime for the major part, gets into a conscientious hiccup and sermonising after the midway mark, and ends-up offering ‘crime kills crime’ as a solution against the rot of corruption that has set in the entire fabric of the Indian police/law/politics nexus. Except for a couple of twists in the plot, there is little t...
Jabariya Jodi, First look: Swinging infection
Jodi, literally, means a pair, in Urdu and Hindi. It also refers to husband and wife. Jabar or jabr is force, and jabariya, by extension, means forced or forcibly formed. So, we now understand the title of the upcoming film Jabariya Jodi to mean ‘Forced Couple’. As indicated above, the inference here is that the husband and wife were forced into matrimony. Nothing earth-shaking about it, in a country where thousands of such marriages t...
For a film production company that has been in the animation business for 90 years, and earned its initial popularity by creating Mickey Mouse, making a film, replete with state-of-the-art, photorealistic computer images of a host of animals and birds, has to be basic instinct. That it tells the story of lions, hyenas, vultures, and other creatures whose names one needs to look-up in Google, or Oxford or Cambridge or Merriam Webster dictionaries, that possess human instinct rather than animal ...
Super 30, Review: Inequality, equality and variable quality
Two basic tenets form the paradigm of Super 30: a real-life story about a nondescript do-gooder who is a super achiever must strike a chord with audiences, and, secondly, any tale of a low caste and poverty-stricken protagonist, sacrificing his lady love and filthy lucre for the cause of educating fellow under-privileged ‘untouchables’ in his society, will have them rooting for the unlikely hero. How these doctrines pan o...
ConnecTechAsia 2019, 10: Recap
ConnecTechAsia, comprising BroadcastAsia, CommunicAsia and NXTAsia, wrapped-up on 20th June, drawing 38,000 attendees and 1,700 exhibitors, over two venues, Marina Bay Sands and Suntec City, Singapore.
The event unfolded over three days of networking, announcements, thought leadership keynotes and discussions, showcases on the latest innovations and trends, including 5G, AI, IoT, Smart Cities, next-generation broadcasting and more.
Highlights this year inclu...
Marudhar Express, Review: Chain reaction
You might need to look-up the meaning of Marudhar, even if you are a native Hindi speaker. It refers to the Marwar area of Rajasthan, and the Express is a train that runs between Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh, and Jodhpur (Rajasthan), touching Lucknow and Kanpur, the two biggest cities in UP, with Allahabad (now renamed PrayaagRaaj) being the third. Now, lest you begin to think that this film is a travelogue or that events take place on the said train, le...
Hume Tumse Pyar Kitna, Review: Limerence, belligerence and incoherence
A clutch of songs, exquisitely picturised, with little or no lip sync, linked together by a skeletal story about obsessive love, came to Mumbai cinemas today under the title Hume Tumse Pyar Kitna (How Much Do I Love You). Taken from a hit number from the film Kudrat that was popular in the early 80s, the title of the film is appropriate, and the original song itself occurs several times in the film, on the radio, or as a ...
One Day Justice Delivered, Review: Perhaps, but not today
A judge dispensing justice by extra-judicial means immediately after retirement is not a common theme in Hindi films, and the novelty is undeniable. Sadly, that is just about where the merits of this film rest. Actors ham, the script meanders, co-incidences abound, dialogue disappoints and the climactic twist is of no consequence. One Day Justice Delivered espouses a noble cause but does more disservice than service to it.
Ranchi High...
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About Siraj Syed
 Syed Siraj
(Siraj Associates)
Siraj Syed is a film-critic since 1970 and a Former President of the Freelance Film Journalists' Combine of India.
He is the India Correspondent of FilmFestivals.com and a member of FIPRESCI, the international Federation of Film Critics, Munich, Germany
Siraj Syed has contributed over 1,015 articles on cinema, international film festivals, conventions, exhibitions, etc., most recently, at IFFI (Goa), MIFF (Mumbai), MFF/MAMI (Mumbai) and CommunicAsia (Singapore). He often edits film festival daily bulletins.
He is also an actor and a dubbing artiste. Further, he has been teaching media, acting and dubbing at over 30 institutes in India and Singapore, since 1984.
Bandra West, Mumbai India View my profileSend me a message
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