Balaji's Thots

With just a few movies, Quentin Tarantino has established a style that is uniquely and unmistakably his own. With unpredictable screenplays, brutal but stylized violence, dark humor and memorable dialogs, his films have been relentlessly entertaining. In Django Unchained, he put his stamp on the Western. More conventional in most aspects when compared to his [...]

With Roger Ebert’s death last week, Hollywood lost its most well-known critic. A movie reviewer who grew to be much more than that, he will be missed by movie lovers everywhere.
Ebert had all those qualities that one finds in a great reviewer. He loved movies, was incredibly knowledgeable about them, was honest about his views, [...]

Its pretty clear that the Oscar producers are struggling to find the right tone for the show. After they opted for familiarity last year with Billy Crystal, they went for the exact opposite this year with their choice of Seth Macfarlane, the man behind TV shows like Family Guy and the film Ted. Seth’s opening [...]

Making a movie out of a true historical event is a double-edged sword. While the real-life connection adds to the emotional impact of the story, the opportunity to generate suspense is muted since the outcome of the event is well-known(unless of course the director is audacious enough to alter history as Tarantino did in Inglourious [...]

Like most genres, horror too has a few basic plot outlines and the success of a movie in the genre depends on how well it generates chills and thrills within the framework of one of these stories. The Cabin in the Woods picks one of the oldest of horror movie tropes as its foundation but [...]

What cycles lack in size and speed they make up for in agility and maneuverability, qualities that come in handy when riding on city streets. That is made very clear in Premium Rush, a film whose highlights are the numerous bike chases that happen on the busy New York streets. Its never tense or thrilling [...]

With his Batman Begins reboot, director Christopher Nolan restored respect to the comicbook superhero after the campy and silly turn taken by the previous films after Joel Schumacher took over from Tim Burton. He continued the job in The Dark Knight, one of the best superhero films ever and now concludes the trilogy with The [...]

The Avengers had a really long set up leading up to it as we had a series of movies introducing us to 4 of the superheroes(the Hulk, Iron Man,  Thor and Captain America) making up the group before they, along with 2 others, Black Widow and Hawkeye, were brought together  in 1 movie.  The team-up [...]

After the plot-heavy, twisty series opener, the Mission Impossible franchise has moved away from that model to focus more on action. Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the fourth entry, which sees Hunt(Tom Cruise) and his team(Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg), now on their own, pursue a Russian who intends to trigger nuclear war, [...]

The Descendants tackles serious topics with a refreshing lack of melodrama as it delves into the life of a man tackling everything that life throws at him. Clooney plays a rich lawyer whose wife is in a coma after a boating accident. He learns from his older daughter that his wife was cheating on him [...]