(According to Salman Bagwan Pk is a 5 star movie)

pk is here. rajkumar hirani's first film in five years is a warm, funny and piercingly provocative satire that should blow the blues away. it is the kind of full-blooded but genteel entertainer that should get us all into just the right frame of mind to usher in christmas and bid adieu to a year that has seen us celebrate ugly excess on all fronts with unseemly glee. pk, buoyed by a magnificent script and outstanding acting all around, is an uplifting fantasy that springs a surprise at every turn but never overplays its hand. it comes as close to storytelling perfection as any mainstream hindi movie has done in living memory. it has great songs, beautifully filmed musical set pieces, brilliant pacing and nary a moment that flags. as a cinematic send-up on gods true and fake, pk pulls no punches at all and speaks its mind like a carefree child that has just learnt to talk and make sense of the world.
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(According to Salman Bagwan Main Aur Mr. Riight is a 3 star movie)

miss perfect looking for mr right: standard rom com schtick gets played out in ‘main aur mr riight, with a couple of nice touches, but it never lifts off the screen. aliya ( shenaz treasurywala) is a bollywood casting agent with not a hair out of place, nor a crease in her dress. her search takes her through fruitless dates with artless men to no, as they say, avail. clearly, she is ripe for the ‘opposites attract’ cliche, and when struggling actor sukhi (barun sobti) shows up in her office with a hearty punjabi accent and crude sense of humour, we know where this is headed. this takes more than two long hours which leave us impatient. in between there are conversations between aliya and her pals — couples going through commitment issues, incipient fatherhood issues, and so on— but except for a few sequences, everything seems scripted, and silly. and the film takes the leading lady’s job description a bit too seriously, by giving us endless takes of strugglers trying their hand at ‘acting’. we end up, like her, grimacing and clutching her head. i liked that shenaz treasurywala ‘s character is allowed to have a little thing with a guy in their group, and that a lonely wife moves on with a former love, leaving the always busy- busy spouse to his devices. sobti gets the hungry-actor look right, but the smiley treasurywala needed to be deeper.
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(According to Salman Bagwan Action Jackson is a 0 star movie)

action jackson is a drinking game of a film, one well over the so-bad-it’s-good line, its main merit being that it holds some genuine surprises, says raja sen. “aj,” the girl gasps into her cellphone, breathlessly and furtively while gangsters surround her, “some people are after me.” efficient to the last word, her man wastes no time in getting to the point: “what are they wearing?” this is but a taste of the relentless absurdity served up by action jackson, the peculiar new film from prabhudheva. it is an uneven, tacky, cheesy actioner, a film that has much going catastrophically wrong (the brunt of it involving sonakshi sinha). but it is also -- surprise, surprise -- at times incredibly zany and, more importantly, a film that strikes back against the unending misogyny routinely perpetrated by our heroes in these larger-than-life movies. in many ways, action jackson can be read as a feminist statement, a film that shows girls proactively leaping onto the top rung while the leading man languishes several footholds short of heroic. that’s right, ajay devgn is anything but a ‘hero’ in this film.
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