The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau is an enjoyable piece of hokum – your basic doom-laden parable of metaphysical sci-fi mind control, only with a surprise romantic sparkle. It's based on a 1954 short story by Philip K. Dick (called ''Adjustment Team''), but even as the film gives you a taste of Dick's crazy-visionary the corporation ate my brain! paranoia, it infuses that twisty gloom with a spirit that's lighter and almost playful. It's like Philip K. Dick meets Sliding Doors.

Matt Damon, beefy and gregarious, has just the right expansive yet guarded charisma to play David Norris, an on-the-rise political star who gets derailed (because of his not-quite-tamed frat-house side) in his bid to be a New York senator. In a luxe hotel men's room, just before his concession speech, he meets Elise, a free spirit and professional dancer who had ducked into one of the stalls. She's played by Emily Blunt, and in the 
 extended scene that follows, she and Damon, jousting and then kissing, generate the rare connection that actually feels spontaneous.

Blunt, who has the big-eyed, straight-haired beauty of a '60s swinging-London model, is a magnificent flirt, with smiles that aren't just come-ons but an intriguingly telegraphed series of wishes and promises. And Damon makes David not only smitten but shocked, as if love had slapped him awake. Their bond grounds the entire movie. Because a little 
 later, when David, now with a corporate job, wanders into an office he wasn't supposed to enter, he sees that everyone in the office has literally been frozen. And is being worked on. By men in fedoras and dark suits (led, in an ideal casting touch, by Mad Men's John Slattery) who look like '50s FBI agents as reimagined by Kafka. From that moment on, David's dream of love may not be an option.

Who are these American fascist Mad Men? I don't want to give away too much, but let's say two things: They control…a lot. And though creepy and sinister and all that, they're not nearly as black-and-white evil as you first think. The Adjustment Bureau is the thriller as glorified philosophical videogame, with David dashing through doors that are like looking-glass passageways, trying to wrench his destiny away from the forces that claim he has no free will. In many ways, this is a dated and rather gimmicky movie. Yet it's directed (by The Bourne Ultimatum's coscreenwriter George Nolfi) with a wide-eyed spirit. It taps into your longing for the days when a sci-fi matrix could explain the world without making it a darker place.

Take Me Home Tonight

There are deep-dish '80s nostalgia movies, like Adventureland and Hot Tub Time Machine. Then there's Take Me Home Tonight, which duplicates the car crashes, drug jokes, all-night-long plot twists, and robot hip-hop dance moves of low-rent '80s party flicks with such casual fidelity that you may ask: Why not just watch Losin' It, Bachelor Party, or License to Drive instead? I can't claim that Take Me Home Tonight, set in the summer of 1988, is much better than – or different from – the real (cheesy) thing, but it does possess a certain backward-glancing innocent appeal.

Topher Grace, as an MIT grad who has become the world's most overqualified L.A. video-store clerk, looks longer and leaner than before, and he's got a new confidence, too. He spends the film crashing beer bashes and pretending to be a big deal at Goldman Sachs, all to woo Teresa Palmer, who's like Kristen Stewart minus the storm-cloud moodiness. The more he lies, the faster he talks, but that's his rite of passage. (Any wuss can be sincere.) He also has to look after his pudgy-loser-sidekick buddy, played by Dan Fogler, who bounces off the walls like Jack Black and also evokes the smarmy-cute Curtis Armstrong from Risky Business. It gives you a jolt to recall, in this age of geek chic, that being unhip was once truly unhip.

I Saw the Devil

Charismatic Korean star Choi Min-sik found international fame as a man bent on revenge in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy. In director Kim Jee-woon's wildly violent, genre-pushing vengeance pic (I Saw the Devil), Choi goes to town as the embodiment of murdering, torturing evil; Lee Byung-hun plays the equally mono-minded special agent seeking maniacal revenge for the death of his pregnant fiancée. Somewhere in all the blood (sickening realism is a selling point), a question is posed: When does the one fighting a monster become a monster himself?

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Spirit, animal, and human worlds coexist in dreamy harmony in this (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) remarkable drama, winner of the 2010 Cannes Palme d'Or. The latest film from groundbreaking Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) features Thanapat Saisaymar as Boonmee, who, nearing the end of his life, calmly waits for death in the lush countryside. Magical visitors include the ghost of his late wife, the spirit of his dead son (returned as a giant monkey with glowing red eyes), and a seductive catfish.

happythankyoumoreplease

With very little modification, the relationship woes of the six chirpy young New Yorkers in this (happythankyoumoreplease) self-absorbed indie could be reworked into episodes of TV's How I Met Your Mother. The casting is in place: HIMYM star Josh Radnor — who also wrote and directed — plays a puppyish aspiring novelist with a knack for one-night stands (Kate Mara lasts a few nights longer). Good thing the guy's got nice friends: One, a pretty, bald woman (Malin Akerman), phones him before a job interview to remind him to tuck in his shirt.

Hall Pass

Men and women, as every chick flick and buddy-slob comedy will tell you, don't just come from different galaxies — they're locked in a battle for supremacy. But Hall Pass, a light comedy of horny marital woe from directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly, makes a novel statement about the sex wars: It says that they're essentially over. And that the guys — in case there was any lingering suspense about it — have lost.

Rick (Owen Wilson), a real estate agent who dresses in amazingly dweebish plaid shirts, and Fred (Jason Sudeikis), a life-insurance salesman as genial and square as Howdy Doody, are suburban schlubs devoted to their wives and (in Rick's case) family. When Rick isn't taking out the trash or disciplining his children with textbook New Dad sensitivity, he, like Fred, has one topic on the brain: all the sexy, gorgeous women who, as faithful and loving husbands, they will never, ever get to sleep with.

All of which, I know, makes them sound like the most common and boorish of male movie characters. Except for one thing: These two, though they spend their hours fantasizing about straying, would never dream of actually doing it. They're like neutered dogs who carry their own leashes. When it comes to satisfying their libidos, they're whipped, defeated — by the demands of family life (who has time for sex when you're trying to get the kids to bed?) or just by their loyalty. The raunchy chatter spills out of them, and some of it is funny, but mostly because it's so pathetically vicarious.

Hall Pass presents these men as a new archetype: the frustrated middle-aged husband as randy adolescent virgin. Wilson, geeked out in super-square hair, knows how to use his gentleness to turn himself into a figure of soft desperation. And Saturday Night Live's Sudeikis, in his first major movie role, has an agreeably dorky, bootlicking officiousness. (Fred thinks that he's scored a victory if he figures out how to look at a woman's behind without his wife seeing him.) They are so domesticated, the joke is they don't even know their pent-up sexual frustration is driving them nuts.

It takes their wives, Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate), to figure that out, and, under the influence of a pop psychologist (Joy Behar), to propose a solution: They will give their husbands a ''hall pass,” a week off from marriage during which the two will be allowed to sow their wild oats — and, in theory, purge all those demons of roving-eyed desire. It's a kind of high-concept therapy for a high-concept comedy that views the hidden and buried lusts of married men in the age of Internet porn as a ticklishly normal state of affairs.

The Farrellys, working from a script they co-wrote with Pete Jones and Kevin Barnett, set all this up with an innocent dirty-minded aplomb. Still, if Rick and Fred's dilemma is the film's amusing appetizer, the main course ought to be what they actually do when they're let loose. And the punchline is: Out on their own, Rick and Fred are such hapless, inept womanizers that even when ''freed,” they're still trapped — imprisoned — in their overgrown-teenage heads. They treat Applebee's as a pickup joint and eat themselves into a food coma. They scarf pot brownies on a golf course, with even uglier results. And when they do try to hook up, they're so wild-and-crazy clueless about how seduction now works (''R-O-C-K in the USA!” says Rick, thinking that he's just said something cool, which makes you want to dive under your seat) that women look at them as if they were another species.

That, however, is a joke of diminishing returns. Hall Pass would like to be as dunked in reality as Judd Apatow's best comedies, but the movie is thin. The Farrellys can't quite nudge the characters from two dimensions to three. When Rick and Fred get lessons in humanity, the movie seems to be about two sketch-comedy characters learning they have souls. As one of the girls they keep approaching might say, Ewwww! It would have helped if the women on screen, from the wives to the ''perfect” Aussie coffee-bar babe (Nicky Whelan), were remotely interesting. But they're not. Which raises the question: How shrewdly can a comedy satirize the arrested male gaze when the movie itself is trapped in it?

Drive Angry

Shaven-headed men in tattoos and ugly goatees. Pretty girls who punch guys out. Hash-slinging diners and trashy neon honky-tonk bars. A jet-black 1969 Dodge Charger. A cherry-red 1970 Chevelle SS 454. (Wow, just writing that made me feel like I know something about cars.) Nicolas Cage in thatchy frosted-blonde Owen Wilson-as-biker hair. (Another Nic Cage hair joke? I bring it up only because there's nothing else to the character.) A devil-worshipping apocalyptic fundamentalist cult, led by a rapist in Jim Jones glasses, who murdered Cage's daughter and now wants to use his baby granddaughter for a blood sacrifice. A plot that's not so much off and running as off the rails and galumphing. 3-D that, except for a few bullets coming at the audience, doesn't exist.

After all the bad Nicolas Cage movies I've sat through, I got lured into seeing Drive Angry because the trailer made it look like it might have a certain shameless, demolition-happy American Mad Max excitement. It tries to, but it's simply not... well done. The car chases are rote and sparse, the gunplay is the usual lock-and-load fetishistic onslaught with heavy-metal trimmings, and even the film's one ''original'' twist is just a desperate attempt to link it up to Ghost Rider, the only lousy Nicolas Cage action film that is actually spawning a sequel. Cage has gotten too old for this stuff, yet one of the reasons people mock him for it is that, after dozens and dozens of paycheck thrillers, he still never looks a hundred percent comfortable in a movie like Drive Angry. His voice is too naturally expressive to lend credence to a somber howler like, ''Hell already is walking the earth.'' Cage has forged his own hell, and it's called: the movies he's addicted to making, even when they trash his brand.

Tanu Weds Manu

Why should you watch "Tanu Weds Manu"? For R. Madhavan who will win you heart as a sweet lovable NRI doctor Manu who has the misfortune of falling in love with a Kanpur-girl Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) who not only rejects him as a suitor but also uses him to elope with her ruffian boyfriend.

Hiding his heartbreak and disappointment behind a smile, Madhavan fits into the role of a goody goody NRI like a glove. He is hopelessly in love with Tanuja who doesn't miss a single opportunity to hurt him. Rules, they say, are meant to be broken and that's what Tanu's agenda in life is - to break all rules that a middle-class family swears by.

Well, an NRI coming home to find a suitable bride for him is very common in Indian society and director Anand Rai's comedy opens with the same. He tries to be as close to reality as possible - from the backdrop, to clothes, to character artists - all bring out the element of a middle-class setup perfectly.

With a marriage in the background providing a perfect place for Tanu's second chance meeting with Manu, the movie traces the relationship between the girl and the NRI. Surely, perfect material for sentimental romances with 'comedy ka tadka'.

But there is something missing to make it a perfect romantic comedy. First, the script is punctured, then their is no chemistry between Madhavan and Kangana and if that was not enough, the narrative doesn't flow at the desired pace - it's slower than it should be.

Though the director picked up an interesting subject, he has not succeeded in executing his story effectively on screen - there are not enough laughs in the film. Whatever funny scenes are there, credit goes to the chemistry between Madhavan and Deepak Dobriyal who plays his friend Pappi.

Kangana's dialogue delivery puts you off and she lacks the spunk and spark to play the free bird that she is in the movie. In fact, Swara Bhaskar, who plays her friend Payal, holds the fort as the Bihari girl who is marrying a sardarji (Eijaz Khan) who also happens to be Manu's best friend.

Payal is impressed with Manu and even tries to drill some sense into Tanu's head but Tanu, a rebel, doesn't want to admit her feelings for the man who is picked by her parents.

Critics won't appreciate the plot but Madhavan fans would find enough material to enjoy the film.

Music plays an important role in a wedding-based romantic comedy and the director could have got it right if he had opted for fast-paced peppy numbers.

In the performance department, full marks go to Madhavan, Deepak and Swara. The supporting cast of K.K. Raina, Rajendra Gupta and Navni Parihar don't have much to do, but whatever role they have, they carry it well. Jimmy Shergill as Kangana's ruffian boyfriend is wasted, so is Ravi Kishen as his sidekick.

If you are looking for a great romantic comedy, this is not the one, but watch it for Madhavan and his chemistry with Deepak.

Of Gods and Men

Gravely serene and suffused with tenderness, Of Gods and Men takes the simple, profound stand that how a person of faith lives matters more than the circumstances of his death. I stick with the male pronoun here because this superb, award-laden French drama — a surprising omission among this year's Foreign Language Film Oscar nominees — is so essentially about how men behave in the name of religious conviction.

The movie is loosely based on real events: In 1996, seven French Catholic monks in an Algerian monastery were kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and then disappeared, the circumstances of their murder unsolved. Prior to the abduction, the monks in Of Gods and Men know they're in danger — even though they have lived in friendly harmony with their Muslim neighbors for years. For the group decision of whether to leave Algeria or stay, every man must first decide for himself, and the movie grants each the dignity of individual struggle. (The understated cast is led by The Matrix Reloaded's Lambert Wilson as the elected head monk and Michael Lonsdale from Munich as the monastery's aging doctor.) But it is their shared strength as a band of brothers humble before their Christian God — and indeed before the God of Islam — that may stir viewers to an awe that transcends skeptical opinions about religion or politics. That devotion is never so movingly expressed as when the men join in the beautifully plain chant that fills the soundtrack. Tchaikovsky trend alert: Secular music makes one emotionally climactic appearance when, having absorbed the consequences of their choice to stay in North Africa, the men share wine and listen to voluptuous music on an old tape deck. Their selection: Swan Lake's grand theme, a button pusher in Black Swan.

The Last American Virgin

When the teen T&A comedy Porky's scored at the box office in the spring of 1982, Hollywood quickly realized there was an audience — largely male, teenage, and horny as hell — itching to see guys as clueless as they were willing to humiliate themselves in the quest to get laid. Most of these knockoffs were god-awful. But a few, like the three in a new MGM '80s box set, added heart to the hormonal high jinks.

The Last American Virgin (1982, R, 1 hr., 
 33 mins.) Porky's rip-offs don't come more shameless than this tale about a trio of sex-hungry high school pals gunning to lose their virginity (it even has a locker-room peephole scene). But Virgin is also one of the few Reagan-era romps that could put a lump in your throat, as loser Gary (Lawrence Monoson) watches his skeevy best friend (Steve Antin) steal his dream girl. Thank-fully, the Cars keep things fizzy by shaking it up on the soundtrack.

Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

There's no point explaining the flimsy buddy-com clichés that force an FBI agent (Martin Lawrence) and his son (Brandon Jackson) to go undercover at an all-girls art school in Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, a follow-up to 2000's Big Momma's House and 2006's Big Momma's House 2. It's all an openly lame excuse for Lawrence to hop back into the eye-assaulting muumuus of his alter ego Big Momma, a wheezing, overripe hybrid of a Southern dumb-belle and a Julia Child drag impersonator. The trouble is, once the movie drops its cop-drama trappings, it doesn't do any better as a comedy. Lawrence's gender-bending jokes are played out, and his slapstick is wooden and slow. It's understandable: Clowning around underneath that fat suit must be exhausting. Almost as much as watching it.

Unknown

Has the dire situation in Unknown ever happened to you? You and the wife take a trip out of the country for a business conference in Berlin. When you get to your hotel, you realize you've left luggage behind at the airport — luggage containing your passport. (Who lets luggage containing their passport leave their hands? Not the point.) So you deposit the wife at the hotel reception desk, hail a taxi, speed back toward the airport, and (these things happen) end up in a crash that sends your car hurtling off a bridge into wintry German waters. When you emerge from a coma in a hospital bed (props to the taxi driver's heroic underwater rescue skills), you're pretty sure you know who you are. Trouble is, you've got no ID. And then, against your doctor's orders, you make your way back to your hotel, but the woman you know as your wife looks at you with utter incomprehension: She's never seen you before in her life. She's already got a husband. And he's got your name.

P.S. Assassins are now after you. What the #@*!?

Unknown says what the #@*!? too. Under the Euro-moody direction of Catalonian ad-and-music-video guy Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) and shaped by the big thumbs of producers Joel Silver and Leonard Goldberg, the movie whips up a big old puree of ingredients borrowed from other cinematic recipes. Then it dishes out the mildly spiced results as post-Oscar-quality snack food: You can sample a little identity confusion from the Bourne trilogy, wrong-man anxiety from Hitchcock, East German Cold War spy tactics from The Lives of Others, and a car chase from (insert favorite car-chase movie here). Continuing to pursue his options as an action hero, Liam Neeson runs around, angry and documentless, as Dr. Martin Harris. Mad Men's January Jones looks exceedingly blank and exceedingly blond as somebody's wife Elizabeth Harris. Aidan Quinn glowers belligerently as the other Dr. Martin Harris (with the passport to prove it). And Inglourious Basterds' Diane Kruger darts like a chicly scruffy Artful Dodger through the Berlin streets as the Bosnian-born taxi driver with the bad luck to draw Neeson's Dr. Harris as a passenger in the first place. By the way, at this point in his career, the appearance of Frank Langella — gray-haired, close-cropped, moving with vulpine deliberation — ought to trip audience triggers that the character he's playing has something up his sleeve.

To scrutinize the action-driven absurdities of Unknown is, surely, overkill in a movie in which Neeson barks,“Out of the way!'' with cartoonish ferocity as he pushes through crowds. (The screenplay is by journeymen scribes Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell.) Still, it's worth pausing to marvel at the chutzpah (as Berliners might not say) of tossing a soupçon of concern for illegal immigrants, nostalgia for the bad old days of East German secret police, and optimism about ending world hunger into a doozy in which Neeson also intones, “Do you know what it feels like to become insane?''

Memento

As much as I dig Christopher Nolan's Batman flicks, he's always been at his best when he's taking an eggbeater to moviegoers' brains. I'm talking about the Möbius-strip dreamscapes of Inception, the sleight-of-hand trickery of The Prestige, and most of all, his dizzying breakout behind the camera, Memento (2001, R, 1 hr., 53 mins.). Now marking its 10th birthday with a Blu-ray debut, Memento is one of those jigsaw puzzles whose pieces snap together more tightly with each viewing. Fueling it all is a performance by Guy Pearce that's as indelible as the tattoo ink covering his body. He's a mural of vengeance. Pearce's Leonard Shelby is a hero straight out of a '40s film noir — he remembers nothing...other than the certainty that he must track down and kill the person who 
 murdered his wife.

 Every time he wakes up, he's essentially starting from scratch with only the “facts'' stenciled on his body to guide him. Nolan, the merry prankster, unspools Leonard's story in reverse, so the audience is solving the case with him, always reevaluating whether to trust 
 the weaselly Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and the femme fatale Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss). The Blu-ray's extras are mostly leftovers from previous DVD editions, but the film itself has aged beautifully. It's a throwback to a time when indie upstarts like Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and David O. Russell were flipping the bird to the establishment, saying, Hey, here we come. The good news is, 10 years later, all three are up for Best Picture. They are the establishment.

Vanishing on 7th Street

Vanishing on 7th Street is a throwback of a horror movie that sets out to re-create the spooky, bombed-out, trapped-in-a-bunker atmosphere of such '60s and '70s B-movie landmarks as the Living Dead films and Assault on Precinct 13. But the director, Brad Anderson (The Machinist), apes those films without a hint of their gutter shrewdness. In essence, he's made a zombie movie without the zombies. Early on, John Leguizamo, as a shopping-mall movie-theater projectionist, wanders out of his booth to discover that seemingly all of humanity (except for him) has been literally sucked away, leaving nothing but piles of clothes on the ground. All the electricity has been neutralized as well.

He runs into three fellow survivors (played by Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, and the 14-year-old pop star Jacob Latimore), and the four hole up inside a bar, where an emergency generator powers a jukebox that wavers between speeding up and slowing down as it keeps on playing the Marvelettes' ''Darling Forever.” That's a good, queasy effect, and so are the ghostly shadows that crawl like smoke over the surfaces of things. But that's about all the tricks that Anderson has. Mostly, we're left staring blankly at a quartet of victimized ciphers.

Saat Khoon Maaf

Chalk up an absolute winner for the Vishal Bhardwaj-Priyanka Chopra team. They make a coherent vision out of an inconceivable marital crises.

How do you make sense of a woman who's an incorrigible potentially-loathsome serial spouse-killer who when challenged about her weird passion for changing husbands by divine decree rather than the law of the land, turns around and says, "This heart of mine, it's to blame." Wicked laughter follows. And dammit, we are amused!

How does one make head or 'tale' of such a woman? Well, the first thing a director with a canny sense and sensibility does is sign Priyanka Chopra to play the wretchedly unfulfilled, genetically incomplete woman, a living, throbbing warning against the institution of marriage!

Priyanka, not for the first time, proves she is leagues ahead of all competition. She approaches this strange and sensual creature of the night from the outside and then quietly makes inroads into the woman's heart and soul. We can actually see the character's snarled inner-world on Priyanka's face! We don't even know when and how she does it. Priyanka is that kind of a player.

Vishal Bharadwaj has earlier made films about gangs and gangsterism. Every time the dark brooding atmospheric surface seemed to suggest a life of sinister suppressions. Those unspoken, intangible thoughts and visions that often guide a human being to his or her doom are outlined in "7 Khoon Maaf" with supreme poetic elegance.

This is Bhardwaj's most fluidly-narrated film to date. Of course, having Gulzar on board helps. He pens Urdu poetry for Irrfan Khan and rock poetry for John Abraham. For Priyanka poetry is not needed. She creates a kind of indecipherable poetic statement for her deeply dysfunctional character who kills 6 husbands and moves to the 7th at the end of the film with the profound satirical grief of a woman who has discovered that this world has no true love to offer her.

True love...ah! Now that's an idea. At heart Vishal's dark elegiac film is about the search for true love. The relationship that Sussanna (Priyanka) forms with a young boy(Vivaan Shah) as she goes from one husband to another remains at the core of the film. In a macabre subversion of the almost-pure love that Susanna shares with Vivaan's character, at one point in the narration she tries to seduce the boy who's almost like a son. It's a dark ugly moment, almost repugnant in its incestuous resonances but in keeping with the character's insatiable appetite for destruction.

Vishal Bhardwaj brings to the storyboard a deep sense of tragic grandeur even as Susanna slips from self-gratification to delusional spirituality.

Priyanka Chopra has already proved herself way ahead of her contemporaries in her earlier works notably "Fashion" and "What's Your Raashee". In "7 Khoon Maaf" she moves to another level, displaying a range of emotions and age-changes (minus prosthetics) that one last saw in Shabana Azmi's performances.

Priyanka's sequences with Irrfan Khan (playing a gentle poet who transforms into a sexual pervert in bed) are stuff poetic nightmares are made of. We can clearly see the cinematographer (Ranjan Palit) is not in love with the actress, but the character. His camera searches for intransigent images in Susanna's life, even as Priyanka's quest for the character's core takes her into areas of self-expression that are far beyond the reach of cinema acting as we know it.

A. Sreekar Prasad edits the life of Susanna with a surety that, alas,the character never comes close to achieving in her dealings with the opposite sex. Sreekar creates a symphonic seamless movement from one husband to another, sometimes joining segments in Susanna's life with visuals that would otherwise seem incompatible.

The husbands are all played by actors who have no qualms in stripping away their vanity to become the kind of suave but duplicitous untrustworthy spouses who cheat and betray for the sake of the opposite emotion to love. Irrfan Khan as a wolf in poet's clothing, Naseeruddin Shah as the affable old Bengali dietician (his Bengali accent is more dead-on than any true-blue Bengalis) and John Abraham as a stereotypical rock musician gone to poppy-seed, are pitch-perfect in their creating a drama of the callous for Priyanka's character.

But it's Neil Nitin Mukesh as her first legless army-man husband whose display of clenched menace jolts you.

As a storyteller Vishal Bhardwaj has never been more in command of his language. He punctuates Susanna's story with bouts of unexpected humour and poetry. Providentially the murders are committed in ways that appear more humorous than savage. And that's both a good and a bad thing.

The narrative shows a rare understanding of the gender dynamics and the sexual tensions between men and women. Priyanka Chopra's interaction with the unctuous and closet-horny police officer Anu Kapoor delectably illustrates the fable of the Temptress & The Besotted. And by the way Viagara never seemed funnier.

Priyanka Chopra goes from husband-to-husband with a mocking sigh of resigned surrender. She is not a victim. But neither is she the hero of the bizarre web of destruction and delusion that her character weaves around her.

MOVIE PREVIEW

When was the last time you saw Akshay Kumar in a no-nonsense, sober role (not counting the bland Tasveer) where he didn't made a caricature of himself with his over-the-top comic antics? And when was the last time you found him extremely impressive while underplaying his character?

The first and the best thing that Patiala House does is redefine the typecast Akshay Kumar from the slapstick clown to a splendid actor.

The second thing that the film does is give us back the fabulous filmmaker whom we lost to the never-ending Salaam-e-Ishq and the fully formulaic Chandni Chowk To China. Picture this scene in the final reel of the film when Akshay Kumar is bowling for the last over of the cricket match. His father who never approved of his son's dream arrives at the stadium just on time. While any other director would have exploited this situation with a sentimental bonding between the father-son or a jingoistic call for victory by the father, Nikhil Advani avoids any such confrontational cliché. He steers away from stereotypes and cuts out every trace of melodrama and every foreseeable formula from the film, thereby bringing freshness to the otherwise predictable family drama.

Bauji (Rishi Kapoor), the patriarch of the Kahlon family, has been fighting against racism faced by Indians in England and has brought respect and individuality of their community in Southall. He has always been the dominating head of his extended joint family (that can put Rajshri to shame) and his diktats have decided everyone's destiny. His elder son Gattu (Akshay Kumar) had to forsake his dreams of playing cricket for the national England team since Bauji was never in favour of the firangs, despite residing on foreign lands.

17 years later, when Gattu gets a chance to be a part of the England team again, Simran (Anushka Sharma) encourages him to live his dream. After much probing by the younger generation in the Kahlon family, Gattu agrees to play, but without informing his father. Until Bauji learns of it just before the final match.

From characterizations to conflicts, one can find references galore in the writing, though thankfully nothing is blatantly duplicated. Rishi Kapoor's authoritative patriarch character who has things go his way has been a popular family figure in Hindi films from Dina Pathak's Khoobsurat to Amitabh Bachchan's Sooryavansham. Further Gattu facing opposition from his father to play cricket is reminiscent of Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham where the NRI Punjabi father (Anupam Kher) doesn't approve of his daughter's football fervour.

The screenplay by Nikhil Advani and Anvita Dutt Guptan has a systematic approach towards the storytelling. A quick prologue explains the racial discrimination plot and a fleeting flashback establishes Gattu's rise and renouncement in cricket. With the joint family setup, the narrative expectedly proceeds with a wedding in the household, as a dozen characters are erratically introduced and confuse you with their correlations. The story subsequently works towards Gattu's resurgent induction in the sport and humour comes naturally in the narrative with the family's attempts to cover up Gattu's field performance from Bauji. The concluding reels make way for heartrending dramatic moments between the father-son and an obvious yet exciting cricket match.

What's commendable about Advani's writing and direction is that he never overdoes anything though there is a common tendency with the theme he tackles. He never goes jingoistic in the racism track nor does he overstate Indian tradition and culture on London lands with the NRI setting. Again the family drama is never overblown and is treated with subtlety and maturity. Anvita Dutt Guptan's restrained yet powerful dialogues help achieve that in a big way. The first half might appear slow and one-dimensional but it works steadily to bring conviction to the protagonist's journey. The horde of familial characters might baffle you at times but they are all driven by a common conflict – living their dream over Bauji's.

At a broader level, the film gives a subtle social message of breaking boundaries of regionalism and nationalism. Patiala House doesn't need an all-Indian or an all-Asian team, like in the John Abraham – Arshad Warsi starrer football film Goal, to incite nationalistic sentiments in the viewer. Even as an Indian audience, the director compellingly makes you root for an NRI who plays for the England cricket team and defeats Australia.

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's music is refreshing and the theme song that frequently plays in the background adds value to the proceedings. Santosh Thundiyil's cinematography is competent and Manan Sagar's editing is just perfect. Remo D'Souza smartly choreographs the song Rola Pe Gaya as an Indo-Western fusion.

Akshay Kumar underplays his character with absolute sincerity and gives one of the best performances of his career. So used are we with his histrionics that, at times, it seems he is overtly toned down here. But then he remains in his character and is impressive. Rishi Kapoor is superlative in his commanding character. His body language, dialect and expressions are impeccable. Anushka Sharma isn't ignored in this father-son drama and stands on her own. She has a well-etched role and is confident as always. Dimple Kapadia is decent in her part. Hard Kaur is amusing. Geneva Talwar is good.

Nikhil Advani's hold on the film is so strong that you don't want to leave the hall even when the end-credit song is playing. Patiala House simply bowls you over.

‘True Grit' spurs Berlin film fest start

BERLIN: ‘True Grit’, an Oscar-nominated remake of the classic western, on Thursday kicks off the 61st Berlin film festival, a 10-day extravaganza of glitzy entertainment and explosive political fare.

US film-making brothers Joel and Ethan Coen and stars Jeff Bridges and Josh Brolin were expected in the wintry German capital to promote the shoot-em-up's European launch at the Berlinale, one of global cinema's top showcases. The movie, which is up for 10 Academy Awards, is screening out of competition for the festival's Golden Bear top prize, which jury president Isabella Rossellini will award to one of 16 contenders on February 19.

The Berlinale will screen nearly 400 films from 58 countries including 3D pictures from art-house directors such as Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, while Madonna may drop in to unveil out-takes from a new movie she directed, "W.E".

"Margin Call", the feature film debut of US director J.C. Chandor starring Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore and Jeremy Irons and set at an investment bank at the start of the financial crisis, will launch the competition Friday.

British actor Ralph Fiennes, a two-time Oscar nominee, is to unveil his directorial debut, "Coriolanus", a retelling of the Shakespeare tragedy about a Roman general who mounts a rebellion against the empire.

However festival director Dieter Kosslick opted for less Hollywood and more Sundance this year, with 20 films from January's independent movie showcase in Utah due in Berlin, often a key stepping stone to an international cinema run.

"Kosslick seems to have placed less of an emphasis on the fame of the directors and actors this year and that's a mark in his favour," Lars-Olav Beier, film critic for Der Spiegel magazine, told.

"Better to have good films from unknowns than mediocre films with stars."

Iranian film-maker Asghar Farhadi, who won a best director prize for his haunting drama "About Elly" at the 2009 festival, will be back with "Nader and Simin, A Separation" about an estranged couple reunited by a surprise event.

In keeping with its reputation for political engagement, the Berlinale invited Panahi to serve on its jury and will screen nearly all of his films as a tribute to him in his absence.

The festival will also feature a raft of hard-hitting documentaries including a film about the jailed Russian former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Unknown vandals stole material from the picture from director Cyril Tuschi's Berlin offices last week and the film-maker has reportedly gone into hiding.

Last year's Golden Bear prize went to Turkish drama "Bal" starring a seven-year-old boy as a struggling pupil who loses his father in a freak accident.

The Rite

When Anthony Hopkins signs on to play a sinister old exorcist in a generic satanic rehash like The Rite, does he hate himself for getting hired, yet again, to trot out Hannibal Lecter's ravenous snarl and hypnotist's gleam? Does he stalk around between takes muttering things like ''I should be doing Lear''? Or is he only too happy to milk that Lecter leer? The Rite is set in Rome, and it presents the Vatican as having officially embraced the rituals of exorcism as a de facto enhancement of its brand. (If the devil is at large, then the church must still be relevant.)

Hopkins becomes the tutor of a young priest (Colin O'Donoghue) too skeptical to believe the gnashings and writhings of the ''possessed'' are anything but psychological symptoms. The trouble is, the film seems to think that this amounts to a serious crisis of faith. The hero is a cipher; who cares if he's saved from his skepticism? When he and Hopkins team up to expunge a demon from a pregnant Italian teenager, there's no shock in her tongue flickerings and Latinate rantings. ''Were you expecting swiveled heads and pea soup?'' asks Hopkins. Maybe not, but we were expecting something we hadn't seen a dozen times in the recent cycle of exorcist thrillers. The Rite commits the supreme sin of making the devil dull.

Hum Dono

Abhi na jao chhod kar ke dil abhi bhara nahin…The film's anthemic love ballad, regarded as one of the finest love songs ever composed for Hindi cinema, rings through your heart after the lengthy film is done—and let's face it, nearly 3 hours of playing- time for a long-forgotten war saga can get tedious when you have the next chapter in the Egyptian civil-war waiting at home.

Yes, Hum Dono is back. The 1961 film about two look-alike soldiers who become friends at war, is as far-fetched in plot as…say, today's Dabangg or James Cameron's Avatar.

Indeed the film's old-world values of valour, integrity, loyalty, fidelity and trustworthiness seem to belong to another era, if not a completely different planet. They are rescued from fading by compter-coloured velocity.

Admittedly even today Hum Dono makes a fairly engaging triangular love story with war at its backdrop.

The coloured version that has come to us now leaves us with mixed feelings. Though at first one enjoys the splash of colour that is added to V Ratra's outstanding black-and-white cinematography a lot of the film's original visual intensity is lost in colorized translation.

We are left wondering who decided what colour Dev Anand's shirt or Sadhana's saree was meant to be!Did the color- generating department check with the film's core team to decide the colour schemes? If not, is it ethical or even legally permissible to tamper with the film's creators' original vision?

The Dolby-enhanced sound leaves no room for quibble.Jaidev's music score, considered by many aficionados to be one the 10 finest Hindi motion-picture soundtracks of all times, heals all the wounds of excessive coloured flamboyance.

Whether it is Mohd Rafi and Asha Bhosle's Abhi na jao chhod kar or Lata Mangeshlar's immortal Bhajan Allah tero naam, or those two imperishable Rafi Ghazals Kabhi khud pe kabhi halaat pe rona aaya and Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya…you just can't help being swept into the sheer melody of the moment.

The casually stylish way the songs are shot, the sharp close-ups being intercut with lyrical poetic long-shots, incidental but intense interludes of passion played out in the visual detailing, all carry the distinctive stamp of Vijay Anand who wrote Hum Dono.

The film's direction is credited to Amarjeet who later directed Dev Anand in a film called Gambler.

Ah, Dev Anand…a star beyond any definition of stardom!! He shines with meteoric melancholy in the double role of men at war with themselves, much more than for his country.

The way this debonair actor enacts the solo numbers by Rafi makes you wonderif the the song came first ?Or was the song inspired by the face that conveys the numbers on screen?

Sadhana (impish, coquettish) and Nanda (tremulously poignant) are lovely supplements to the Dev Anand mystique.What was he thinking when he romanced these beautiful ladies?Surely more than what Sahir Ludhianvi's love-lorn lyrics describe!

They don't make stars like Dev Anand any more.They never will.Or for that matter a film so suffused in the splendour of its own cultivated grace is impossibly to come by in today's era of pelvic passion.

Abhi na jaao chhod kar indeed.

The Mechanic

Jason Statham is the B-movie bruiser of the moment. He appears in the occasional Guy Ritchie gangster head game, but his genre of choice is the revved-up testosterone action film. The key to his charisma is that he's so much more cutthroat smart and elegant, and so much more coolly British, than an actor from the crash-cars-and-ask-questions-later school needs to be. With his shaved skull and handsome you-talkin'-to-me stare, he's like a Bruce Willis mad-dog avenger crossed with a more sociopathic James Bond.

As Arthur Bishop, the title character of The Mechanic, Statham is playing one of those super-stealth hitmen who can sneak into the most protected of lairs and slip away moments later with the target dead. The opening swimming-pool assassination is just clever enough to set you up for a hitman version of a heist thriller. But then Statham's lone wolf is tricked into killing his longtime corporate associate (Donald Sutherland). Feeling used, he tries to make up for his sin by taking Sutherland's son under his wing — a dissipated rich boy played by Ben Foster, who suggests a gnarled, hillbilly Justin Timberlake.

How do Statham and Foster team up in this movie? Simple: Statham, in about six minutes, teaches Foster everything there is to learn about being a master assassin. Before long, the apprentice is leaping off skyscrapers and wielding his weapon with fearless aplomb. The implausibility of The Mechanic, even on its own genre-movie terms, is jaw-dropping. Yet I might have forgiven that had the movie tried to involve us in some more elaborately sneaky contract murders. As it is, The Mechanic is ham-fisted pulp, like Robert Rodriguez's Machete taking itself seriously. It's enough to make you want to see Jason Statham take a break from B movies and become the A-list character actor he deserves to be.