Screen Test

Rarely do you come across thrillers that have you hooked from the first scene to the last. The potential that the genre offers is often underutilised and many times compromised, with add-ons like songs killing the joy of unravelling a mystery (You’d relate to this if you’ve had the misfortune of watching Jagga Jasoos earlier this year). Thankfully, Faster Fene avoids all this and ends up becoming a racy adventure thriller. Banesh Fene travels to Pune to appear for a medical entrance examination and lives with an aged writer-uncle (Dilip Prabhavalkar) there. At the exam centre, he briefly encounters another aspiring doctor and gets chatting with him. When he reads in the newspapers the following day that the boy has committed suicide, he finds it hard to believe that a certain topper would end his life abruptly. The inquisitive Fene then sets out on a mission to unearth the truth with the help of a sidekick, a lady journalist, an autorickshaw driver and guidance from his uncle...

Secret Superstar is one of the better films of 2017 because of its solid content, intriguing storytelling and top performances. What makes it particularly watchable is that a simple premise of a girl wanting to become a singer is woven around several issues plaguing our society. However, these points are so blatant and yet so understated that they are bound to move the viewers while ensuring they contemplate on the reality surrounding us. Zaira Wasim, a schoolgirl in Vadodara, is blessed with a beautiful voice that is suppressed by her authoritarian and dominating father (Raj Arun). It is her mother, fantastically essayed by Meher Vij, who gives wings to her dreams and supports her in every way that she can, even if that means risking being beaten black and blue by her husband. With a guitar and laptop, both gifted by her mother, Zaira decides to put her talent up for show on the internet. The fear of her father, however, looms large and so, she decides to hide her identit...

Conjoined twins separated at birth due to unfortunate circumstances come together after they have grown up to create a series of misadventures for each other. One's grown up poor, bold and strong and the other as a polished, harmless and weak boy in a rich family. It's a formula that has been tried in several films before. In  Judwaa 2 , the difference is that when the twins are in close proximity to each other, one reacts in the same way as the other. For instance, if one slaps a guy on his right cheek, the other will repeat the act with whoever he is with, however harmless that person is. That in essence is the premise of  Judwaa 2  and jokes are created around this for the audience to have a hearty laugh. The problem, however, is that a majority of them are so pathetic that they fail to evoke even a yawn from you. Like, Sa Re Ga Ma Amitabh Bachchan because the legend played the title role in  Paa . Besides, while the original  Judwaa  worked...