TheMovieManiac

When one has a stellar film resumé comprising of  Sanju, PK,  and  3 Idiots,  the audience expects excellence of the same standard whenever they walk into theatres to watch a movie directed by that particular director. With Dunki being Rajkumar Hirani’s much-awaited collaboration with Shah Rukh Khan, the expectations were set sky-high, and the movie is a curious case for deciding whether the expectations were met or not.    In short, the film centers around a group of five friends who aspire to go to London in a bid to earn money and acquire a wealthy lifestyle to come out of the clutches of poverty and financial despair.    The film’s initial half, which is focused on primarily being comical, turns out to be quite hit or miss. The humor doesn’t land quite a few times and comes off as cringe. Some completely avoidable scenes could’ve been removed to cut down on the run time of the movie, which does start to feel like a drag towards the business en...

With Animal being Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s third directorial venture following the highly idiotic Kabir Singh and Arjun Reddy, I was skeptical Vanga would again resort to taking the route of displaying unnecessarily controversial stuff on the big screen as a tactic to take a satirical whip at his critics, or the ‘woke batch’ – 3 hours of the protagonist doing the most nonsensical things being made to look epic by the background music which blasts at full force at any random time of the movie without regard to the circumstances (Kabir Singh summed up). But boy was I proved wrong. Animal is a well directed film which delivers everything it promised – a violent, gory and disturbing presentation of a toxic father – son relationship, albeit not free from its shortcomings.   The first half of the movie is its better half, although it has it flaws. After the opening half an hour, the film transitions into a slightly puzzling delineation of past and present events which makes it somewhat diff...