With all due respect to Sylvester Stallone fans, this is a dumb movie. To watch it, is like entering into a war zone where at the mere command of their chief Barney Ross (Stallone), the old boys -- and an utterly undesirable Chinese lass, who seems to know everything about everything -- won't think twice before jumping into the fray. The problem is they don't think at all. Their low IQ banter could put the other Stallone dud like Get Carter to shame...full review

Total Recall has a Minority Report hangover. The reason could be that both trace their origin to the works of the same writer, Philip K Dick. But more than that, it is director Len Wiseman's treatment and handling that recalls Minority Report (and a bit of Blade Runner, if you will). Set in a futuristic time when the world is ravaged by warfare, Total Recall begins at a dystopian moment when much of the population has crammed into United Federation of Britain...full review

Strictly from the perspective of a child, Ice Age: Continental Drift is charming and at some places, even adorable. The cute quotient works very well and so does the humour, which is basic, easily understandable and laugh-worthy. Visually, too, it is stunning and makes full use of 3D. Unlike most children's movies, this one doesn't have a moral lesson tucked inside, although it does tell you, the kids that is, the important values of true friendship and family...full review

Man is the worst animal. He kills for pure pleasure, animals for survival. This is the hinted message of Ashvin Kumar's The Forest. Then, there is a more emphatic message -- that of preservation of nature and wildlife, that human encroachment on forests could lead to a catastrophic future. The film begins with the arrival of an urban couple, Pritam (Ankur Vikal) and Radha (Nandana Sen) on their way to a jungle retreat. As a narrator, Pritam informs us...full review

Watching Johnny Depp play tricks with his long-nailed, slender fingers in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows reminded me of another of the duo's gothic-fantasy collaborations, Edward Scissorhands. The two films are in no way co-related but it is remarkable how, in both, Depp plays a character grappling with modern-day inventions. He wants to be useful but ends up either complicating a situation or causing harm. But that's never his intention...full review

Roughly translated into English the Hindi expression 'lag gayi' on which this film's title and theme is founded means 'screwed'. It's a quadriptych; four different stories melting into one another. Along the way you wonder how people from such sharply polarised backgrounds could have any connection at all. But, then, the idea of this seems embedded in the idea of Mumbai -- a melting pot, a potpourri in which anything can happen, to anyone and seemingly disconnected...full review

Illegal immigration is the take-off point for Priyadarshan's Tezz. But that's just the subtext. In truth, the film is full of Hollywood-style car chases amidst a long-running game of cat and mouse between Anil Kapoor and Ajay Devgn. Aakash (Devgn) is an engineer who runs his own firm, Global Services in London but is deported to India for violating immigration laws. His protégé Aadil (Zayed Khan) and his foster sister Megha (Sameera Reddy) are also there...full review

In the end, this week's Hollywood release Battleship looked like Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) saved the world -- in his own words -- just so that he can win over his lover, Samantha's (Brooklyn Decker) father, a stern Vice Admiral who wouldn't be convinced with any lesser feat. If there was no girl, there would have virtually been no plot points in Peter Berg's Battleship. It all begins on a comic note; at a bar, Hopper spots a famished Samantha and promises to return...full review

This could very well have been Mahabharata, of titanic proportions with added bonus features of 3-D and latest SFX. As utterly cheerless as its predecessor, Clash of the Titans, Jonathan Liebesman's Wrath of the Titans takes the same mythic Greek heroes by the dozen, six-limbed monsters, ravaging beasts and more such sword-wielding creatures, and installs them into a long-drawn, so-called divine battle for control and supremacy...full review

This could possibly be the only Bollywood movie -- about two men in love with the same woman, or, to reverse it, one woman in love with two men -- that isn't made in Bollywood. But, the amorous dinners, online dating, dirty talk, undercover missions, German adversaries, cars exploding and a poetic justice situation slipped in clumsily at the end are as American as they come. McG's This Means War degrades further the quality of breezy...full review

Sometimes, it's best not to go by the book, but to turn convention on its head. That is what Billy Beane (Brad Pitt [ Images ]) does in this film set in the world of that quintessentially American sport, baseball. Beane is general manager of a team that is underfunded and loses its best players to other teams. But the film is not about records or statistics or even baseball; it's about this one man who wishes to "shake things up" and produce a winning team...full review

Anchored in the David Dhawan-style of filmmaking, director Rumy Jafry turns a new leaf in this career with Gali Gali Chor Hai, in which he casts a satirical eye on the pressing social concern of our times -- the common man in the grip of corruption. Its timing couldn't have been more correct, with the public mood so intently focused on corruption in the Anna Hazare era. That's probably the only good thing one can say about this film...full review

Among many things, The Descendants is a film of infinite surprises and of breezy calm that is usually associated with seaside towns. The central paradox is the way in which director Alexander Payne places the inner turmoil, the emotional storms of his characters against an unusual choice of location, Hawaii ? laidback and affluent, visibly but not condescendingly. Early on, Matt King (George Clooney), a lawyer-land owner, perfectly settled into middle-aged complacency...full review

Stephen Hawking stands vindicated; if only viscerally and through the movies. But in all likelihood, he may not have imagined that alien invasion could make such a crashing bore of a subject in film. In this film, to be precise; one that aspires to seduce the amateur urban horror buff. I am one, not particularly drawn towards this genre, but it failed to make any impact whatsoever and lost, in the process, a potential admirer, a convert for life...full review

The third in the Chipmunks series, this current CGI adventure is like a colourfully-illustrated storybook which might barely crawl into children's literature category but is just about as silly and annoying to an adult as an obstinate brat on-the-loose. Mildly put, it's for our really, really tiny friends who might find the chipmunks cute (and cuter still for those who have seen them before) and wish to befriend them....full review

A deep thread of religiosity and personal conflict arising out of faith binds Marc Forster's Machine Gun Preacher, a biographical account of a man truly touched by the divine. "Helping you kids is about the only good thing I have ever done in this life," Sam Childers (Gerard Butler), an ex-outlaw and currently a missionary, tells a local African kid who, so to speak, appears to have "no idea" what Childers is doing there. Childers understands how precious life is...full review

If anything, the dancing penguins don't seem to have two left feet but it does look like those steps must have taken months of practice (on animation). But when the tiny tots take on the stage, set against the backdrop of the dazzling glacial vista of Antarctica, they turn themselves into rockstars. It's only in moments like those that Happy Feet Two comes truly alive, urging the worst dancers among the audience to get up and join them...full review

The kind of subjects director Tarsem Singh picks allows him to imbue his canvas and characters with a sense of monumentality that is becoming rare in cinema. Whether it is The Cell or The Fall, they are treated like epics. His latest, Immortals, is brutal, engaging and ironically savage given that it depicts a social order in which the gods of Greek mythology disembark for a feast of Mahabharata-style visual effects. What gives the film consistency is its explicit sense of disorder...full review

Yet another reimagining of Alexandre Dumas' novel, director Paul W. S. Anderson's version of The Three Musketeers is as awful as one marginally expected. It looks more like a dress rehearsal for a period drama than a film. There are fancy sets and props and state-of-the-art effects but they do not compensate for lacklustre storytelling which becomes a side-piece in most such adventure films. To serve France is at the centre of The Three Musketeers...full review