MOVIE REVIEW

PLASTIC

Director: Julian Gilbey
Writer: Julian Gilbey, Will Gilbey
Cast: Ed Speleers, Will Poulter, Alfie Allen, Emma Rigby
Strength: Acting, story, casting
Weakness: Predictable ending
Runtime: 102 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Plot: Sam & Fordy run a credit card fraud scheme, but when they steal from the wrong man, they find themselves threatened by sadistic gangsters. They need to raise £5m and pull off a daring diamond heist to clear their debt.
Review: Four young London men, seeing their future limited by poor job prospects, develop a cottage industry of cloning credit cards. When two of them extend their activity to stealing a briefcase from the accountant of a rather unsavory gangster, the four of them find that they have inadvertently incurred a rather large debt which carries with it the promise of severe physical retribution. Their only hope is to recruit a young woman who works for a credit card company and go for the cards of big spenders to pay their debt of 2 million dollars in 2 weeks. Sounds pretty straight forward, but where Plastic shines bright is not its brilliance of script and storyline, but rather with is casting. The lead roles have been filled by newcomers to cinema, but they do a very decent job of pulling the story through on their shoulders. The antagonist and leader of the Polish mafia played his role convincingly as well. The character dynamics in this tale (allegedly based on a true story) contain no surprises - we have the hero-type, his decent back-up guy, the dozy one, and the unreliable and somewhat duplicitous one. The movie is quite enjoyable, but one should watch the movie with moderate expectations since the movie slowly develops in the most predictable of ways. There is a lot of swearing and a bit of nudity and drug taking. There is a fair amount of violence and crime.

Reviewed by Zakir Mushtaque

***

HAWAA
HAWAAI

Director: Amole Gupte
Writer: Amole Gupte
Cast: Partho Gupte, Saqib Saleem, Neha Joshi and Others
Strength: Interesting story, family entertainment
Weakness: No star casts
Runtime:  134 minutes
Rating: 4/5
Plot: On the whole, Hawaa Hawaai is an emotional and heart-hitting story of a poor little boy's dream to make it big in life. The film is a commercial entertainer, and a tribute to people who dare to dream.
Review: The current Bollywood productions are filled with movies being made with the names who sell at the box office. In this scenario, making a movie with unknown names or with a kid as a main lead is not easy, but the brave man Amole Gupte does it with gusto and aplomb. The film is about a slum boy who does a very small job at a tea stall to serve the customers with the cups of tea, but dreams high. It is an emotional story of a very poor little boy – it is a saga of being nothing to something in life. Hawaa Hawaai is the story of the will power of a boy whose farmer father passes away, who has to work at a tea stall to run his family. Rajo (Partho Gupte) dreams of becoming a champion of the sports on wheels – rollerblading. He bumps into Lucky (Saqib Saleem), a skating-coach who trains the kids in this sport. Raju and his five friends then get on board to fulfill their dreams of becoming the champion in this sport. It is well-penned and touches the hearts thoroughly. Although there are flaws in the script, but when the overall impact is laudable you could simply ignore those little flaws. Direction by Amole is splendid. Editing and cinematography is fantastic. Partho Gupte does well in the role of the central character. Saqib Saleem is wonderful and the rest of the cast acts well also.

Reviewed by Broti Rahman

***

CLASSIC

THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1957)

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov
Writers: Viktor Rozov (play), Viktor Rozov (screenplay)
Stars: Tatyana Samoylova, Aleksey Batalov, Vasiliy Merkurev
Runtime: 97 minutes
Strength: A new outlook into World War II, a moving love story, fantastic acting
Plot: Veronica plans a rendezvous with her lover, Boris, at the bank of river, only for him to be drafted into World War II shortly thereafter.
Review: The Cranes Are Flying, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, is one of the landmarks of Soviet film. The film was instantly greeted as a revelation in the Soviet Union and became an international success, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It may not be difficult for contemporary viewers to recapture the sensation which the film is said to have evoked in those who saw it when it was new: that of a fresh wind sweeping through a musty house.
In large and small ways throughout the film, the filmmakers affirm their commitment to personal drama above public platitude. Early in the narrative, which starts on the day of Germany's surprise invasion of Russia (June 22, 1941), the hero, Boris (Alexei Batalov), volunteers for the front. Avoiding glib appeals to nation and duty, the film foregrounds Boris' reluctance to tell his lover, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) that he has volunteered, and the pain and anxiety felt by Veronica and Boris's father, Feodor (Vasily Merkuryev), when they learn the truth. The film goes as far as to undercut rote patriotism—in what must have been perceived as a daring stroke in 1957.
The film is also exceptional in refusing to condemn Veronica for her involuntary infidelity to Boris while he is at the front. In Tatiana Samoilova, The Cranes Are Flying unveiled a magnificent screen personality: expressive, sexy, dynamic. Veronica is far from a traditional war-movie heroine (not only by the standard of Soviet war movies), and Feodor's impassioned denunciation of faithless women is clearly meant to be taken as more than just the party line, but Samoilova makes her character completely sympathetic, down to her bittersweet apotheosis in the moving final sequence.
One of the highlights of The Cranes Are Flying is the sequence in which Veronica, having failed to say goodbye to Boris, rushes in search of him through a crowd of people seeing new recruits off to the front. In the first shot of the sequence, she looks tensely out the window of a moving bus, gets off the bus, and weaves in and out of a crowd—Urusevsky's handheld camera staying with her all the while, without a cut. Then, unexpectedly, still in the same shot, the camera cranes up to look down at her as she runs between tanks across a street. The mobile camera heightens the urgency of the scene, gives it breadth, depth, and elasticity.
The Cranes are Flying won several international awards, and became a staple on the American art-house repertory circuit into the 1970s

Reviewed by S.M. Intisab Shahriyar