Review of the 12th Fail: Vidhu Vinod Chopra gets excellent performances out of his ensemble, with Medha Shankar and Vikrant Massey expertly taking centre stage

A notable feature of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail is an atta chakki, or gristmill. It’s a powerful, if indirect, metaphor for the torturous grind of the extremely difficult Indian Civil Services exams. However, the biographical drama enhanced by creative directorial touches is much, much more.

The film, a realistic and restrained adaptation of the book of the same name, follows a young man who struggles to make his way from a lawless Chambal village to the upper echelons of the police force, unavoidably encountering many intimidating obstacles along the way. He is a Hindi medium student.

The dilapidated building housing the grain-grinding mill is gloomy, depressing and replete with flour dust. Here, the main character secures a job as he intensifies his preparation for a crucial examination.

The underprivileged young person is well aware that his only option is to work hard in order to achieve his goals. He comes from a rural family. The only language he can speak and understand is Hindi. And his financial resources are alarmingly low.

Having promised his grandmother that he wouldn’t go back home until he had earned the right to wear a police uniform, he understands he has no space for complacency in the face of several social handicaps and a language barrier, realities that thousands of boys and girls like him must face.

The film 12th Fail is an amusing and thought-provoking retelling of a true event about an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer. The screenplay creates a perfectly relatable story. It extracts every ounce of drama from the man’s journey without resorting to any type of excess.

The video examines the specific circumstances of one person’s experiences in the context of the general reality of an examination system, often delving into the three-stage testing procedure in great depth. In the process, the story of Manoj Kumar Sharma’s hardships and tribulations (Vikrant Massey in a difficult part that sees him effortlessly traverse a wide range of emotions) takes on the form of a classic, universal, and absorbing underdog drama.

The significantly less onerous arc of Mussoorie girl Shraddha (Medha Shankar) intersects and merges with Manoj’s mastery of the frightening nitty-gritties of the UPSC examinations. The latter assists the doubt-ridden individual in fortifying himself against the second thoughts that begin to attack him as obstacles pile up.

Shraddha, who comes from a relatively rich family, has abandoned her medical studies in order to become a bureaucrat, believing that this will give her the capacity to make a real difference in the lives of ordinary people who are denied their rights.

12th Fail is a narrative of love and friendship being challenged by life’s hardships for Manoj, who fails his 12th board exams. He decides not to cheat despite the fact that everyone else in his class does, in reaction to the briefest – and most timely – of pep talks from a deputy superintendent of police (Priyanshu Chatterjee) assigned in Morena. He prefers honesty to expediency.

12th Fail is pitched as a tribute to the few of bureaucrats who stubbornly refuse corruption in the face of the temptation to go with the flow of an administrative structure that encourages cynicism and compromise.

The film’s early focus is on Manoj’s father, Ramveer (Harish Khanna). When he stands up to a corrupt official and a smarmy local legislator who abuses his power with impunity, he loses his menial government job.

With the help of his grandmother’s finances, the boy travels to Delhi as the father leaves for Gwalior to pursue legal action over his termination (Sarita Joshi). When he falls asleep on a transport, his suitcase is taken. After being left without food and without money, Manoj encounters Pritam Pandey (Anant Vijay Joshi), a grudging but happy candidate for the civil services.

The young man finds it difficult to navigate the large and confusing city of Delhi until he is taken under Gauri Bhaiyya (Anshuman Pushkar), a man who has attempted the UPSC tests multiple times but has never succeeded. Under Gauri’s guidance, the young man finds friendship and guidance.

Manoj gets a low-paying work in a library. It provides him with a modest bit of money, a roof over his head, and access to a large number of books. As a result, he works in an atta chakki for 14 hours a day, leaving him with only six hours for exam preparation and four hours for sleep. He continues nonetheless.

He requires the funds not just to support himself in Delhi, but also to support his mother (Geeta Agrawal) and siblings. On the one hand, there is continuous chaos and uncertainty, and on the other, there is steadfast perseverance and pluck.

That may appear to be an extremely simplistic and cliched plot structure, but the seasoned director carves out a two-and-a-half-hour drama that makes its point forcibly out of what happens at the two extremes and in between them. Because the film never loses momentum, 12th Fail feels significantly more short and tight than its runtime would suggest. The numerous disturbing changes and flashpoints that Manoj must navigate add a sense of urgency to the story.

12th Fail, at times touching and heartbreaking, at others hard-nosed and clear-eyed, is a basic film with a direct message: India needs ethical officials and policemen just as much as anything else that keeps the country running.

It is not larger-than-life crusading officers of the type that Indian commercial cinema is particularly fond of who hold influence in the worldview that the screenplay promotes. The 12th Fail honours rooted, public-minded men and women who swear by the Constitution and are willing to go the extra mile to safeguard the ideas it enshrines.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra coaxes excellent performances from his cast, with Vikrant Massey and Medha Shankar taking centre stage with ease. Taking their inspiration from the film, all of the major and minor supporting actors are always alert.

At a time when Bollywood is routinely making a shambles of films inspired by genuine tales and real-life achievers, 12th Fail is a charming little picture that stays loyal to its objective and strikes out hard in all the right areas.

Cast:

Medha Shankar, Priyanshu Chatterjee, and Vikrant Massey

Director:

Vidhu Vinod Chopra is a Bollywood actor.

Review of Challengers: Zendaya stands up to the anticipation by delving deeply into the mind of a woman who will not accept no, in addition to portraying an enticing seductress with compelling elegance

Tashi Duncan, a champion whose career was cut short by injury, argues that tennis is more than just hitting a ball with a racket. Duncan is played by Zendaya. She implies that it is a romance. She fails to mention something that Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers does: sports have a way of changing, if not very subtly, with the ups and downs of form, confidence, and the guts to take a risk.

Tennis in Luca Guadignino’s Challengers is about human equations and mind games, as it typically is in life. In the lives of three persons involved in a chaotic menage à trois where the ball is hit from one court to the other and back without permission, it acts as both glue and repulsion. Instead of using overt titillation techniques, it produces an intriguing, sensual, and thrilling film.

To some extent, Guadagnino’s self-described “desire” trilogy—I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me by Your Name—may be extended in Challengers. The goal of this seductive and captivating sports movie isn’t just to build a rivalry between tennis players to a climax and then offer a serve-and-volley match that results in a variety of thrilling cross-court winners.

It does almost everything perfectly, yet nothing in Challengers can match its brilliantly thought-out and suspenseful conclusion. It is supported with a hardcore techno score by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who collaborated with Guadagnino on 2022’s Bones and All. It is enlightening with a brilliant burst of inspiration that matters for far more than a point gained in the game. It’s on a whole other level.

A tale of wavering love, ambition, ego, and obsession lies at the heart of the captivating drama around broken relationships. Self-interest and hatred propels three tennis prodigies onto dangerous terrain, where their lives have intersected yet produced different outcomes.

Three of them—one a three-time NCAA champion—had to give up tennis before she turned eighteen, another advanced to the pinnacle of the sport, and the third, having fallen short of his own expectations, has been reduced to oblivion. They are linked to one another irrevocably.

Challengers takes place in the 2019 ATP Tour tournament championship match. At the end, it features the final match between old boarding school roommates Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), with the former’s life partner and tennis coach Tashi watching as a spectator and a deeply involved spectator.

A losing streak is preventing tennis star Art Donaldson from completing a career Grand Slam in the lead-up to the US Open. Tashi advises him to sign up for a low-risk challenger at the New Rochelle Tennis Club, which is located outside of New York, in order to resume winning before the Big One, which has escaped him.

When Tashi finds out that Patrick—a man she and Art had eliminated from their lives over ten years ago—is also in the lineup, everything seems certain to go south. Patrick has no money. He can’t check into a hotel because of an issue with his credit card. He naps in his vehicle. When he paired with Art in college activities, his life and profession obviously haven’t brought him to where he would have loved to be.

With the use of flashbacks that trace the development of their friendship and relationships tainted by dishonesty and dubious behavior, the tale of tennis players who have known one another personally for more than ten years is stitched together. The three are too preoccupied with themselves to be seeking sympathy. That represents the film’s greatest obstacle. Tashi, Art, and Patrick are undoubtedly not considerate of manners because they will stop at nothing to get what they desire.

The viewer must determine how exactly to relate to the trio on their own. Which way do we want our feelings toward them to go? Should we support them or hate what they say, do, and say to themselves and each other? Challengers are at the losing end in the ambiguity game.

The screenplay by playwright Justin Kuritzkes is so rife with moral and emotional ambiguities that it is impossible to sympathize with the friends-turned-enemies Patrick and Art or the unwavering Tashi, who is determined to assist Art get out of his current situation. Her task ahead of her is formidable. She’ll stop at nothing to ensure she’s not left wanting.

With tennis at its core, Challengers is a chic, deftly constructed psychodrama that smacks the ball out of the park thanks to three incredibly self-aware central performances. O’Connor performs with incredible flare as a complete twerp. He annoys, he provokes, and he doesn’t back down from his arrogant behavior. The actor makes clicks with each step.

With equal conviction, Faist develops Art Donaldson, a man who is more manipulative than manipulative. There are many highs in the duet that the two performers perform. Their on-court and off-court jousting gives the movie its mesmerizing atmosphere.

But when all is said and done, Zendaya is the essence of Challengers. Patrick calls her character “the hottest woman I have ever seen” at one point. In addition to playing an enticing seductress with fascinating elegance, Zendaya lives up to the anticipation by delving deeply into the thoughts of a woman who will not accept no.

Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a renowned cinematographer whose credits include the Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Call Me by Your Name, contributes his established sense of texture and depth to the visuals, as well as his skill at using the camera to simulate the distanced and detached view of a world full of contradictions.

Challengers’s fractured timeline, which depicts encounters and exchanges that are both youthfully passionate and instantly traumatic, adds to the film’s allure. It shows how the dynamics of the story shift between a tense love triangle and a story in which a wedge the size of a tennis court is driven between former tennis partners. These dribbles are both enlightening and captivating.

The film Challengers is incredibly well-crafted. It is both palpable and vivid.

Cast:

Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist

Poacher Review: A welcome diversion from the vacuous speech and bluster that the terrorists, cops, spies, gangsters, traitors, and patriots we see in Indian web series (and movies) typically engage in

Emmy-winning filmmaker Richie Mehta, who also serves as executive producer alongside Alia Bhatt, is the writer and director of the well-made eight-episode Amazon Prime Video series Poacher, which revolves around unsung government officials doing the arduous and laborious task of safeguarding Kerala’s wildlife.
The overworked (and occasionally conflicted) men and women responsible with holding the poachers accountable would rather keep quiet while the forest rangers fight a valiant battle against them. As the stakes mount progressively and the hazards of stirring up a hornet’s nest increase, they chip away with intent.

Aside from all the other reasons Poacher is a very engaging series, it provides a welcome diversion from the vacuous speech and bluster that the police, spies, criminals, terrorists, traitors, and patriots in Indian web series (and films) typically engage in.

Poacher is a disciplined and concentrated wildlife crime thriller that skillfully transitions into a pressing environmental warning story. It operates as both perfectly.

It exposes the cruelty of poachers, the susceptibility of the majestic tuskers they target, and the determination of the investigating forest officers who find it difficult to balance their personal and professional lives.

The show does not disprove the conventions of its genre. The main characters are out to destroy a network of illegal ivory suppliers, dealers, and end users as well as tusker hunters. They’ll stop at nothing to get what they want.

They have the makings of heroes. However, despite functioning inside a narrative framework of good guys versus bad guys, these individuals—who are genuine and approachable—avoid using hyperbole and ostentatious rhetoric.

Poacher is a gripping, immersive, and suspenseful story about a multi-location, multi-pronged manhunt that takes place across multiple towns, villages, and wildlife sanctuaries in Kerala, as well as an art gallery and hidden warehouse in Delhi.

Though the events of Poacher bear only passing resemblance to the plot dynamics of police dramas and espionage thrillers, the forest officers and their associates conduct surprise raids, set up stakeouts, gather intelligence, and analyze all available call records data pretty much like secret agents and crime investigators do.

To put it simply, Poacher (available in Malayalam, English, Hindi, and a little Bengali) is significantly more engaging than the majority of Indian crime dramas available on streaming services.

It is a flawlessly staged fictionalized story of actual events that happened in 2015 during the nation’s largest-ever elephant poaching case investigation. This procedural mount has a keen sense of location and intent.

A confession by a remorseful gang member opens a can of worms for Mala Jogi (Nimisha Sajayan), a young Indian Forest Service officer, who is taken out of a bird sanctuary and reassigned to the elephant poaching case.

She is rushing into the mission for a very important personal purpose, but it has nothing to do with the relationship she recently terminated. Her anxious single mother worries about the privacy and well-being of her daughter.

After leading an anti-terror operation in Kashmir, Neel Banerjee (Dibyendu Bhattacharya), an Indian Intelligence cadre man, leads the anti-poaching drive. Neel must deal with serious health issues, a rocky marriage, intra-departmental lethargy, and the challenges of managing multiple agencies.

An organization in Delhi that protects wildlife employs Alan Joseph (Roshan Mathew), a computer programmer, to analyze call log data of suspected poachers and their collaborators. Like him, he works nonstop, frequently at the expense of his responsibilities as a husband and parent.

The show opens with Aruku (Sooraj Pops), a 30-year veteran forest watcher, arriving to a forest department outpost and admitting to the murder of eighteen elephants. The official to whom he complains is not sympathetic to Aruku, which is a faithful recreation of the events that transpired in real life.

Deep-seated issues within the forest department are revealed by a bungled raid on suspected poachers’ hideouts, which leaves forest range officer Vijay Babu (Ankith Madhav) in a mess. His employment is suspended. However, the ensuing procedure is so vast and intricate that the man keeps having intermittent involvement in it.

The difficulties that the forest cops’ careers present lead to issues at home, which complicates the character arcs of the main characters and adds layers to the story that revolves around them.

Although Mala, Neel, and Alan are, at their core, mere cogs in a vast narrative wheel full of people, locations, and information, they come off as well-rounded characters who struggle with feelings that the audience can identify with.

Poacher immerses us in the world of the forest officials and their operational regions with its steady script, strong execution, and excellent performances. Leading a superb ensemble cast, Nimisha Sajayan, Roshan Mathew, and Dibyendu Bhattacharya give exceptional performances.

Excellent performances are made by Kani Kusruti (in a shortened role as an official from Thiruvananthapuram who pays a price for her unwavering dedication) and Sooraj Pops, who plays a forest warden who exposes an illicit ivory trade.

A degree of reality that raises Poacher from a crime-and-punishment tale to the status of a crucial history of India’s largest-ever anti-poaching campaign is attributed to the characters and the actors who play them harmoniously.

Throughout the series, there is a constant presence of tuskers and their natural environment together with other amazing wild animals living in the jungle. At one poaching scene, an elephant that was shot in the head by the poachers’ leader slowly rots, and vultures, ants, and maggots feast on its remnants until the animal is completely decomposed and reduced to dust.

The camera hovers over and around the scene of the horrifying crime in almost all eight episodes, which serves as a powerful metaphor for the scope, character, and effects of the peril Kerala’s pachyderm population faces.

Along with cinematographer Johan Heurlin Aidt, editor Beverley Mills, and composer Andrew Lockington, Mehta’s Delhi Crime technical team masterfully demonstrates how to combine fact and fiction in the service of a drama intended to captivate, entertain, and provoke.

Poachers are full of life; they are not prone to excesses. It is incredibly powerful and has perfect timing, accuracy, and landing technique.

Cast:

Snoop Dinesh, Roshan Mathew, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Ankith Madhav, Suraj Pops, Kani Kusruti, Ranjita Menon, Vinod Sherawat, and Nimisha Sajayan

Director:

Mehta Richie