Madhuri Sen – Google

Problematic premise. Defends the male protagonist's (Raj Kumar Rao) "right" to lie and blatantly manipulate the truth - because he fear losing the love of his life (Kriti Sanon). It's difficult to relate to his need to lie - while the director/script clearly portray him to be the one the audiences should feel sorry for. The real victim is just the girl and her family. Yes, it's just a movie - but it's tragic that Indian culture has devolved to the point of normalizing the justification of lying and manipulation to get what they want. If beg and borrow doesn't work - then snatch or steal. No wonder large number of relationships today don't work anymore - the core of relationships of building trust on priority is lost. This movie is just probably a sign of the times we live in and contemporary "convenient" morality. It's an ok, one time light watch with some great performances, if one can look past the inherent toxicity of the premise itself.

Weird, clichéd storyline and concept. Poor dialogue, direction, even worse clothes styling (especially the fashion show 🙄) If judging people for being obese isn't ok...why are they judging the man for his choice of trade (ball bearing business)? How does that make anyone inferior to ambitions to be a sports presenter or designer. Even worse to be a sports presenter who has the option to simply marry a well heeled bloke, if her fancy ambitions flop. Movie designed to make compulsive overeaters feel justified. There is certainly a "growing" (pun intended) that would simply lap that up 😂! While anyone's overeating disorders, body weight and size is not anyone's business, but their own...it's simply not great to pretend that obesity doesn't come with several attendant health issues that compromise even quality of life!

It's one of those cringe, sickly sweet, forced, stilted fairy tale Christmas romance movies. I never thought of Brooke Shields as any sort of actress with acting skills...but this one has to be a new sort of low. Maybe someone else may even have carried it off even with the triple cheese dripping all over the screen! Taking the cheese metaphor too far, this one is burnt triple cheese fondue. Watch at own peril. PS: An overshare...I had to stop the movie half an hour before it ended to write this. PPS: The two stars is for the lovely Scottish landscape - else it would have got a 1.

Just left me with the feeling of I'm sure the book did it better. Without the book (and I haven't got to it yet), it's wholly disconnected. OK so Phil is closeted, possibly Bronco Henry was too, Pete struggles less. But other than that the character portrayals are cardboard cutouts. And if making paper flowers and playing the banjo are meant to point at a gay sexual orientation - it's really making the problem it wishes to discuss - worse. Perfectly straight men could do that too. Sheesh. If that's what the book does too., it's not a tragic treatment of an LGBTQAI+ issue with stereotyping, but also general gender binary stereotyping.

Starts off with a promising premise depicting new gen dating in India (relative to the standard Bollywood fare), but disappoints quickly. Kiara Advani's character, Indoo, is the most poorly thought through. It's like they couldn't make up their minds what she was meant to be like and kept shifting who she was meant to be through different parts of the movie. Also terrible dialogues. Not to speak of poor handling of the rather fragile subject of confused desi sexuality.

One of the movies I've found most difficult to watch because it's so intense and raw in its depiction of injustice. I'm glad that they cut out the actual gore to the bare minimum and also dimmed the lights down on what was not possible to keep out. The last a movie about injustice that shook me as deeply was probably Malena. Excellent scripting, direction, cast, acting and editing. Unless you detest anything but fast entertainers, this is one of the most hard hitting meaningful movies you could watch. As a follow up watch, you can also look up Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - also a Netflix original based on a true story of what happened up North to those who moved South, set against the backdrop of a decade before Mudbound.