MOVIE REVIEW

Only Lovers Left Alive

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Writers:  Jim Jarmusch
Stars: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright
Strength: Not an average vampire movie, beautiful atmosphere
Weakness: Slightly long playtime for a romantic movie
Runtime: 123 minutes
Rating: 4/5

Plot: A depressed musician reunites with his lover, though their romance - which has already endured several centuries - is disrupted by the arrival of uncontrollable younger sister.
Review:  The film starts with a close-up of a seven-inch single spinning on a turntable. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are Adam and Eve, a married vampire couple of many centuries. Adam is depressed and surrounded by records and guitars in a house in Detroit; Eve is living in a flat in Tangier. They've seen it all and met everyone – the English civil war, Franz Schubert, Coleridge – while their lives have taken on an end of the century, glum air.
The film looks beautiful and has an excellent nighttime air to it, especially when Adam and Eve drive around the ruins of Detroit at night in Adam's white Jaguar XJS. At times it feels like a great idea, atmospherically realized, and ominously thinned. Too many times we hear references of waking up at dusk and falling asleep at dawn and talks of humans as zombies  becomes a little annoying after a while. Brief appearances from Mia Wasikowska as Eve's less mature sister Ava, Anton Yelchin as Adam's rocker pal Ian and John Hurt as Christopher Marlowe lift the film out of its stylish inactivity.
But there's still something magical and magnetic about this world of mature, know-it-all, ultra-cool vampires and it never seems silly. On the contrary, we come to see them as something like cultured heroin addicts – extremely sophisticated, but always looking for the next fix. They acquire their blood on the black market, they recall their friendships with Byron and Shelley. If this is partly a compendium of Jarmusch's arcane knowledge, then Hiddleston and Swinton, are the perfect people to portray it with.

Reviewed by Waleed K. Rajamiya

***

KILL  DIL

Director: Shaad Ali
Casts: Ranveer Sing, Parineeti Chopra, Govinda
Runtime: 127 minutes
Strength: Great for as a time pass
Weakness: Unlikely to be considered as a serious movie
Rating: 2/5

Plot: A stylishly shot and neatly packaged action caper, Kill Dil could have been a killer film.  It simply doesn't have enough soul and substance to be able to go all the way to the finish line with its grand design in one piece.
Review:  This isn't one of those films that slide after a promising start. This begins badly, plods away the way it began, and ends worse.  A street-side hood picks up a couple of babies from a “Kachre ka dabba”, raises them to shoot sharp from mouth and barrel, and the boy gang rolls along merrily till it hits a roadblock: the plot is thinner than a wafer, and older than the hills.
Govinda plays Bhaiyyaji, the Goon who goes through the film slitting his eyes and growling his lines, and bantering with his henchmen.  Chief henchmen Dev (Ranveer Singh) and Tutu (Ali Zafar) wear leather and wield guns, surrounded by standard Yashraj designer grunge. Then Dev runs into Disha (Parineeti Chopra), and sees the light. Nothing rescues us, however. Because Govinda can dance, he's given a couple of completely outlandish numbers. But there's nothing in this that he can save with his still-deft moves. Ali Zafar's familiar amiable self is hopelessly miscast. Ranveer Singh is given a part that allows him to shoot and scoot, things he can do with ease, and is partnered with Parineeti Chopra: the two are buried under despite their best efforts. It's one thing to have an element or two which is exaggerated but completely another to get through a full film with such few credible moments.
Music definitely forms an integral part of this film. The trio of Shankar Mahadevan, Ehsaan Noorani and Loy Mendonsa seems to have got all their rhythms and beats right in this film. While the film struggles to establish itself within the first half, the second half not just loses its pace, but also the direction in which the film is heading towards.
On the whole, KILL DIL is a film, which could have been worth watching, had it been handled and directed properly. This film's definitely worth a miss.

Reviewed By Broti Rahman

***

Classic Review

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Director: Stanley Kramer
Writers: William Rose
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn
Runtime: 108 minutes

Plot: Matt and Christina Drayton are a couple whose attitudes are challenged when their daughter brings home a fiancé who is black.
Review: TV shows and movies nowadays have characters with different ethnic backgrounds. Wind the clock back 50 years however and you enter a completely different atmosphere all together where racial discrimination was a massive ongoing issue. So imagine the stir created by Guess Who's Coming to Dinner when it came out in 1967. Seeing this movie makes you realize how hard things were for them and how lucky we are in contrast.
 The film feels like watching a dramatic play in three acts.  There is a lot of dialogue and emotional speeches.  It may feel a bit heavy-handed to the modern viewer, but it must be remembered the world this film was made in.  One line really reminds the viewer, when the young couple are reminded that their relationship is still illegal in sixteen or seventeen states.  
That's what the film is really about.  It isn't about either set of parents being prejudiced against a skin color.  They're concerned that the prejudice of the world will make the marriage unbearable for their children.  The movie is about choosing to stand up and hold on to the ones you love in the face of prejudice.  That's a powerful message and not at all the issue that one expected to see in the film.
The cast, it must be said, is absolutely stellar, featuring Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton, Spencer Tracy, Beah Richards, Cecil Kellaway, and Isabel Sanford.  These people have serious acting chops, and there's serious doubt whether a lesser cast could have pulled off this film.
Overall, this is a classic deserving of the title.  Although it is a bit dated, if the audience bares in mind the actual world of race and racism at the time the film was produced, they will be surprised at how progressive it actually was.

Reviewed by S.M. Intisab Shahriyar