Tere Ishk Mein

December 15, 2025 Leave a comment

Genre: Romance | Year: 2025 | Duration: 167 mins | Director: Anand L Rai |  Medium: Theatre (PVR Cinemas) | Trailer: HERE | Language: Hindi | Cast: Dhanush, Kriti Sanon, and others | My rating: 4/5

Favourite Dialogue: “Prem mein mrityu hai, mukti nahin”

I have a fascination with morbid romance, where passion is fierce and consuming, love and ruin walk hand in hand, and loss feels almost sacred. After a long time, I totally enjoyed a Bollywood film, Tere Ishk Mein, for its feverish, fractured, and fearless ode to obsessive love and loss. Anand Rai, as Director, and Dhanush and Kriti Sanon as actors have so beautifully portrayed the volatile landscape of love, messy and irrational, dark and bruised. It is a film that is less about romance and far more curious about what happens when love mutates, dissolves boundaries, and begins to reshape identity itself.

The film centres around Raghu (Dhanush), a young man navigating the emotional ruins of unrequited affection. His world is small, ordinary, burning with relentless restlessness, textured with the familiar lanes of Rai’s cinematic universe. When he falls in love with Mukti (Kriti Sanon), it is with the conviction of a man who sees devotion as delusional destiny. Dhanush’s performance is a masterclass. His portrayal of longing, with shoulders slightly slumped, eyes rimmed with unspoken ache, voice cracking in the in-between spaces of sentences, is brilliant. He brings a fragile humanity that compels empathy even when the character’s choices spiral into moral greyness. There are moments when Raghu’s yearning feels suffocating, and moments when it feels heroic. In several scenes, especially those dealing with solitude and heartbreak, the camera lingers on his face with cruel intimacy. He allows vulnerability to show across the frame, leaving behind emotional aftershocks.

The film’s leading lady, Mukti (Kriti Sanon), is a girl caught between affection, caution, and the burden of societal expectations. She is real, flawed, and aware of her own contradictions. Her emotional arc of moving from curiosity to confusion to a painful clarity is one of the more grounded aspects of the film. What stands out is that Mukti is not a passive recipient of Raghu’s affection. She pushes back, speaks for herself, asserts her boundaries, and refuses to become a prop for his emotional turbulence. In many ways, her character reminded me that intensity does not equal righteousness.

Rai’s filmmaking has always been rooted in the everyday—narrow streets, chaotic homes, lived-in locations where life unfolds in all its contradictions. In Tere Ishk Mein, he retains this aesthetic but adds a layer of psychological depth. His director truly excels in designing silences. Some of the best moments in the film are those where nothing is said: an unfinished sentence, a doorway half-shut, a glance held for one second too long. These are the moments when the film transcends melodrama and ventures into introspection.

What distinguishes this film from typical love stories is its willingness to confront the darker territories of attachment. The film does not glorify suffering, nor does it portray persistence as virtue. Instead, it presents a sobering reality that love can be transformative, but it can also be corrosive if it becomes entitlement.The climax, which is raw, unsettling and necessary, is where the film truly earns its place. It is neither triumphant nor tragic in a conventional sense. Rather, it is painfully truthful. It is a rare mainstream film that lets discomfort linger. A must-watch if you enjoy a turbulent exploration of love.

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Transcendence

December 1, 2025 Leave a comment

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller | Year: 2014 | Duration: 119 mins | Director: Wally Pfister | Medium: DVD | Trailer: HERE | Language: English | Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, and others | My rating: 3.5/5

Favourite Dialogue: “People fear what they don’t understand. They always have.”

Transcendence is Wally Pfister’s directorial debut, the Oscar-winning cinematographer known for Christopher Nolan’s Inception and The Dark Knight. With its stunning visuals and high-concept premise, the film explores one of the most provocative questions of our digital age, ‘What happens when artificial intelligence merges with human consciousness?‘

The story follows Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp), a brilliant AI researcher who dreams of creating a machine that possesses both the collective intelligence of the world and the full range of human emotions. When anti-technology extremists assassinate him, his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max (Paul Bettany) upload Will’s consciousness into his supercomputer, blurring the boundaries between life and machine. What follows is a descent into techno-dystopia as Will’s omnipotent digital self begins to reshape the world and redefine what it means to be human.

Transcendence is an exploration of human ambition, love, and the moral limits of science. The film poses timeless philosophical questions on consciousness, intelligence without morality, and the balance between technology and humanity. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy running through the narrative, a love story caught between grief and godhood. Evelyn’s devotion to Dr. Will drives her to defy nature itself, but the film wisely leaves viewers uncertain whether she resurrected her husband or merely unleashed an emotionless imitation.

Johnny Depp delivers a subdued performance, both eerie and strangely empathetic. Much of his screen presence is disembodied, conveyed through flickering screens and an omniscient digital voice, both of which add to the uncanny tone. Rebecca Hall’s portrayal of Evelyn is poignant, depicting a scientist torn between love and moral dread.

Pfister’s cinematographic pedigree shines through every frame. The film’s visual style is striking with sunlit labs, desolate deserts, and the sterile, godlike glow of Will’s data-driven empire. The imagery echoes the themes of transcendence and decay of organic humanity struggling against technological infinity.

However, the film oscillates between quiet reflection and blockbuster spectacle but lacks the rhythm of either. Where Inception fused emotional weight with conceptual complexity, the film feels conceptually grand but emotionally distant. The screenplay by Jack Paglen is ambitious but uneven. It introduces bold ideas of digital consciousness, technological ethics, and nanotechnology, but often resorts to familiar tropes of man versus machine. The narrative lacks the depth to sustain itself and is a film of grand intentions and mixed execution. It aspires to be a meditation on the next stage of human evolution, the merging of flesh and code, but ends up being a sketch rather than a completed vision. Still, it deserves credit for engaging with the moral anxieties of our era, like artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, and the fear that our creations might one day outgrow us.

A visually stunning and intellectually intriguing film that ultimately succumbs to its own ambition. Transcendence doesn’t quite achieve cinematic immortality, but it leaves behind questions worth contemplating long after the lights dim.

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Unbroken

November 14, 2024 Leave a comment

Genre: War/Action | Year: 2014 | Duration: 138 mins | Director: Angelina Jolie | Medium: DVD | Trailer: HERE | Language: English | My rating: 5/5

Favorite Dialogue: “A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory.”

Unbroken is based on an inspiring true story of Louis Zamperini, a World War II bombardier, and an Olympic athlete whose remarkable life story is chronicled in Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010). The film is a powerful tale of human spirit and forgiveness.

The story follows Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), who survives a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean, captured by the Japanese navy and endure years of brutal treatment in prison camps. The film spans Louis’s early life, childhood and his troubled youth, athletic achievements, and his experiences during the war, first as a Bombardier and then as a POW. 

Jack O’Connell delivers a compelling performance, capturing both the vulnerability and strength of Zamperini as he faces unimaginable hardships. The supporting cast, including Domhnall Gleeson as fellow soldier Phil, and Takamasa Ishihara as the sadistic camp commander “The Bird,” contribute significantly to the film’s emotional weight.

Angelina Jolie’s direction is visually stunning, emphasizing the stark contrast between the beauty of nature and the brutality of war. The cinematography portrays the vastness of the ocean and the starkness of the prison camps, effectively immersing the audience in Zamperini’s harrowing journey, combined with Alexandre Desplat’s evocative score.

“Unbroken” excels in showcasing the inspiring and intensity of Zamperini’s ordeal, making it a powerful portrayal of the strength of the human spirit. However, the film differs from the original book in balance. While the book is more focused on his post-war journey of forgiveness and healing, the film focuses more on his suffering.

Overall, Unbroken is a visually compelling and emotionally charged film that pays homage to Louis Zamperini’s extraordinary life, and is certainly a must watch. For me, the DVD of this film is a collectible too.

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10,000 BC

November 7, 2024 1 Comment

Genre: Action/ Adventure | Year: 2008 | Duration: 109 mins | Director: Roland Emmerich | Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | Language: English | My rating: 2.5*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: ” D’Leh (Steven Strait) [in the pit, to Saber-tooth]: Do not eat me when I save your life!”

Roland Emmerich takes the sciences of evolutionary biology and anthropology and turns them into fiction. This film was actually so historically inaccurate that not even the giant ostrich attack & sabre-tooth scene made up for it. As the film progressed with the voice-over of the narrator (the legendary Omar Sharif) telling that this is a “story of blue eyes” and all the trappings that come along with magical realism, it became clearly obvious that 10,000 BC is a bad ripoff of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. It seemed as if Emmerich had lost all sense of time in 10,000 BC, as the film showed Egyptian pyramids being built using woolly mammoths, ships, horseback riding, and Steel. It’s ice age in 10,000 BC, and then the hero D’Leh (Steven Strait) walks over a hill and suddenly he’s in the Nile Valley of 2,000 BC! Was Emmerich trying to put in a further taste of science fiction through time travel?

After an attack on their village Yagahl, by ‘four-legged demons’ (horse-riding slave raiders), D’Leh and his mentor, Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis), brave the snow-capped mountains, forests with dinosaur-like ostriches, wide savannah and parched desert in search of those who were abducted along with D’Leh’s beloved Evolet (Camilla Belle). In between this journey, D’Leh has to learn to fulfill his destiny as a leader to save his people. 

This awfully directed and archaeologically inaccurate drama can be avoided.

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The Man Who Cried

October 31, 2024 Leave a comment

Genre: Romance | Year: 2000 | Duration: 100 mins | Director: Sally Potter | Medium: DVD | Trailer: HERE | Language: English, French, Yiddish | My rating: 3.5*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: “Lola: One should never look back. One should never regret. Never.”

This romantic movie by Sally Potter has no chemistry between its co-stars, Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci, even though I quite liked their individual performances as Fegele, a Russian Jew with elfin features separated from her father as a child in 1927 and later re-named as Suzie when she escapes to England, and Cesar, a Romani gypsy with brooding countenance . And therefore there was no heat and the romance seemed sterile. 

Fegele’s father leaves for the promise of wealth and better future to the land of opportunity, America, intending to bring his daughter over later. However, after he left, a band of raiders attacks Fegele’s settlement, and she is bundled off in the middle of the night by her grandmother with few gold coins to take the ship to America. She ends up living in a foster home in England. After ten years she leaves England and joins a musical troupe in Paris, with the goal of making enough money so she can go to America to locate her father. She keeps her identity as a Jew a secret – only her roommate, Lola (Cate Blanchett), her roommate’s famous opera-singing lover, Dante (John Turturro), and her landlady know the truth. With World War II looming, Suzie and Lola escapes Paris, and after some drama Suzie reaches America and finds her ailing father in Hollywood.

This beautifully recorded and scored film of love, loss and human character is worth a watch.

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