Hannah Montana: The Movie, the inaugural adaptation of Disney’s insufferable sitcom-lite television show, almost caught me off by. Coasting by on typical Disney archetypes and a broad but winning message, the film begins to promise a cyclical success as the minutes go by, doing away with the borderline-ironic laugh track of the series and integrating its slapstick elements into a personal story about a girl trying not to lose track of her personal identity in the face of global fame and a worldwide fanbase of undiscerning teenage girls….

Buddhadev Dasgupta’s ‘Swapner Din’ (2008) is subtitled ‘Chased by Dreams’. Literally speaking, one would have to say something like, Days of dreams. No doubt it’s a poetic re-creation of the original title, but I distinctly had the feeling that Swapner Din was more about characters travelling with their dreams…

Jean Renoir is a director associated with realist cinema and his films cannot be called ‘generic’ - in the strict sense - although this will need to be elaborated upon. Genre films are, by and large, self-conscious works that refer to film convention while realist cinema is concerned with producing a ‘true’ picture of the world. While genre cinema cannot exist without precedents, realist filmmakers like to believe that their vision of the world is not mediated by other films….

Kabir Khan’s obsession with untying the knots of terrorism and Yash Raj’s impulse for entertainment collide to draw out this sagacious cinematic skyline called “New York”. Flamboyant characters, foreign locations, the spice of love, the bittersweet taste of friendship and music that renders emotion another lift- the characteristic Yash Raj strokes galore. However, what makes this Friday opener interesting is the attmpt to explore social and political repurcussions in the terror strewn world of ours….

The name of the film is as prophetic as it is ironic. After the disappointment of T3 which was more or less a remake of the second, Termination Salvation seems to attempt a salvation of the franchise and the idea behind the concept. But does it?

Its 2018 and no, John Connor is not yet the leader of the resistance. He is one of the important lieutenants though and one who commands much respect. After an attack at a Cyberdyne facility, John is the is not the sole survivor…

Kabir Khan’s latest “New York” marks a wide departure from his earlier 2006 “Kabul Express”. Khan pans his camera away from “Kabul Express’ ” docu feel, down-to-earth realism to unbelievably fictionalised and highly romanticised account of friendship and fallout during and in the years following New York’s Twin Tower tragedy in September 2001…

One of the father figures of the French New Wave, Claude Chabrol, like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, took film criticism to new heights through Cahiers du Cinema before turning filmmaker. Influenced greatly by Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, Chabrol has been a prolific filmmaker, and also probably the first among the French New Wave directors to achieve commercial success. Now 79, Chabrol’s latest film “Bellamy”, his first collaboration with actor Gerard Depardieu, has been released recently. A master who has been traversing from one genre to another effortlessly, Chabrol’s films have been marked by explorations of the human psyche…

The Mission is a movie set in South America delving on the Spanish/Portuguese colonization in the 17th century. Some viewers of the film could consider it to be an interesting treatise on how the Catholic Jesuit priests went about converting the indigenous Guarani population who lived in the environs of present-day Paraguay. To other viewers, the film would be an interesting take on religion versus the state (here the Portuguese and Spanish), where religion and freedom gets smothered by forces only interested in financial gain….