The animated dragon in Pete’s Dragon never quite melds with the environment, especially with the humans, and in another film, it’d be tempting to think of this as a flaw. But here, this incongruity is almost sort of the point. Elliott, the dragon, is among the most docile ever seen in cinema, and not just…
Category: Film Reviews
War Dog: Guns and posers
War Dogs reminded me of quite a few films that were far more successful at doing what it tries to do. It begins by showing a gun pointed at one of the protagonists, David Packouz (Miles Teller), who coolly takes on narrating responsibilities and makes a comment to us about the gun’s making. “It’s a…
Suicide Squad: Suicide squad, indeed
What Marvel achieved by painstakingly releasing film after film to establish its superheroes, DC tries to do with hyper-stylised minute-long intros for the dozen characters that populate—no, crowd—Suicide Squad. Here’s Deadshot (Will Smith); he’s a hired gun who has never missed a shot. You nod in glee, excited to meet the next one. Here’s Harley…
Jason Bourne: Great action sequences in a familiar story
There’s an action sequence in Jason Bourne that is a thing of such cinematic beauty that nothing the director Paul Greengrass could have shown later on would have made me regret watching the film.
The BFG: An enchanting journey
For those of us whose birthdays were never good enough for lack of an admission letter from Hogwarts, The BFG is the closest a film has come in a long time to waking the child inside, providing the assurance that life’s quite all right and encouraging us to dream away.
Sudhir Srinivasan 