Our Friend, Review: Cancer kills, friendship lives Several things are going right for this American true story. Slice of life characters, casting, a lead actress who looks really beautiful enough to justify the lead actor calling her the ‘most beautiful he has ever seen’, credible performances, locales shot from all angles, having its heart in the right place, generating heart-wrenching emotions, just that touch of humour, portraying an almost perfect marriage, as against divorced...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent All of us hoping the best for Shia LaBeouf are about to be rewarded. Say what you will about his bag-over-the-head former anti-fame performance art campaigns, Shia remains a bare knuckle talent on the screen. And you’ll see it for yourself on Aug. 9, when he stars with Dakota Johnson and newcomer Zack Gottsagen in THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON, a movie about doing crazy shit and making it up as you go along. Or you can go by the official descr...

How to be Single, Review: Not this way, for sure There is no success formula to being single, just as there is no magic prescription for being married. Time was when you were either single or married. Time is when you could be single, married, twice married, thrice married, nth time married, divorced, nth time divorced, undergoing trial separation, in a relationship, into one-night stands…. But the title of this film indicates that is about persons who are single, so let’s keep i...

MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, V Long festivals and so many films to watch, besides the regular weekly releases to see and review—not unexpectedly, festival diaries go into several parts, and even get interrupted by another festival that follows on the heels of the earlier one. MFF17 was followed by IFFI. But there still so much to day about MFF, so here’s one more instalment of the Diary. Thithi is a two-hour long Kannada film set in rural Karnataka. It has earned rave rev...

Black Mass, Review: Whitey’s black deeds and the FBI’s blind eye Black Mass is a term used to indicate a reverse Christian mass, the inversion of the traditional Latin Mass celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church, one that celebrates the occult. People who know this would think that a film with such a name was another supernatural horror drama. It is nothing of the kind. So, the makers toyed with the idea of changing the title, but for reasons best known to them, stuck with the or...