FILM REVIEWS

SIMRAN    --  a review Here is a movie that began with a bang and ended leaving us with a sour taste in our mouth. I love Kangana Ranaut. Her “Queen” was adorable. “Tannu weds Mannu” left us asking for more. But “Simran” was a letdown. A bubble that stretched as far as the sky and exploded into acid rain. Something went wrong somewhere. And what was that? That is the question. Modeled on innumerable American stories of desperate and decadent teens messing up their lives, Simran was more an irritant than a balm to the eyes. I left the theatre wondering did I or did I not enjoy the film! Briefly, Simran is the story of a young working-woman, a thirty-year old, divorced  'Gujju-ben' with flawed English, born to a small business family in Atlanta, U.S.A. She is in the house-keeping department in a hotel but indulges and excels in weaving big dreams for herself. Since dreams are often intangible fantasies that come with an expiry date, she is caught ...

https://doladuttaroy.blogspot.in/ SHOB BHOOTUREY   -- a review Shree Venkatesh Films (SVF) has more or less been successful in their endeavours to either thrill or chill you.‘ Shob Bhootorey ’ hangs somewhere between the genres of a horror and a spooky movie. Certainly inspired by the secret element of M. Night Shayamlan’s tremendously successful movie “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, Director Birsha Das Gupta -- along with producers Srikant Mohta and Mahendra Soni -- makes this supernatural thriller to hold your attention with creepy music and hair-raising suspense. Aniket (Abir Chatterjee) desperately wants to get rid of his dilapidated, eerie ancestral home in North Calcutta but the editor of his father’s spooky magazine SHOB BHOOTUREY that told chilling supernatural tales, is quite unwilling to sell the mansion which was also the office of the old man now dead. To make matters worse, a sinister looking young woman, Nondini (Sohini Sarkar), enters the scene to t...

CHAYA-O- CHOBI – A REVIEW The man who gave us movies like Apur Panchali, Cinemawala, Shobdo, Chotoder Chobi, Bishorjon and a kaleidoscope of movies all along, has added something new on the platter this time that tastes rather bitter-sweet. Kaushik Ganguly’s preoccupation with human relationships and social anomalies is common knowledge. Some like his treatment and, then again, some don’t. An original thinker, dwelling on new concepts incessantly, writing his own script and directing his own movies, Kaushik Ganguly’s Chaya-O-Chobi , (read ’Shadow and the Picture’) is, I think, inspired by Francois Truffaut’s film " Day for Night"   where an entire film crew come to shoot at a location far from home. What unfolds is the mingling of reel and real life in the lives of some that is both painful and enlightening. The movie begins with the dedication and enthusiasm in Maya (Churni Ganguly) to make a Bengali film funded by her own grandmother. She has come all the...