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Release Date : May 20, 2022

123telugu.com Rating : 2.75/5

Starring: Dr.Rajashekar, Athmeeya Rajan, Muskaan Kubchandhani, Shivani Rajashekar, Abhinav Gomatam, Kannada Kishore, Sameer, Bharani, Ravi Varma, Shravan Raghavendra

Director: Jeevitha Rajashekar

Producers: Beeram Sudhakara Reddy, Shivani Rajashekar, Shivathmika Rajashekar, Boggaram Venkata Srinivas.

Music Director: Anup Rubens

Cinematography : Mallikarjun Naragani

Rajasekhar has pinned a lot of hopes on his latest film Shekar. The film directed by Jeevitha has been released today. Let’s see how it is.

Shekar(Rajasekhar) voluntarily retires from his job as a cop but helps the department in their key investigations. One fine day, his ex-wife passes away suddenly. Shekar has his own doubts and starts the investigation. Shockingly, he finds out that his daughter’s(Shivani) death is also connected to his wife. Who is behind this? And how will Shekar solve the mystery? That forms the rest of the story.

Plus Points:

Angry star, Rajasekhar goes for a makeover and does a mature role this time. He as the aged cop looks good and deftly handles the body language and dialogue delivery. The senior hero is good in all the emotional scenes of the film.

Heroine Shivani has a cameo as the hero’s daughter and makes her presence felt. Abhinav Gomatam, Sameer and other supporting cast do well in their roles. The inner turmoil that the character of Shekhar faces has been showcased well.

The second half is where the actual drama starts and the investigation scenes are good and are showcased in detail. The climax and the way the hero’s character is ended look quite good. Prakash Raj was neat in the court scene.

Minus Points:

One of the biggest minus points is the thrill that is needed for a suspense drama is missing in key areas. Thrillers have a great pace but in Shekar, it is slow. Though there is nothing wrong with the proceedings, the screenplay is dull and does not make the audience sit on the edge of their seats.

As the subject had good scope for drama, the director Jeevitha should have created more twists and situations to confuse the audience. But the film runs on a single thread and this looks simple to the viewer.

Also, the first half is started on a good note but the love story of Rajashekhar and back-to-back songs deviate from the film. Had the makers narrated the film to the point with an engaging drama, the output would have been even better.

Technical Aspects:

Music by Anup Rubens is quite good and his BGM was also impactful. Production values of the film are top-notch and the able camera work only enhances the proceedings. Dialogues and production design are neat. Editing is just about okay and the first half needs trimming a bit.

Coming to the director Jeevitha she has done a passable job with this Malayalam remake of Joseph. While she neatly sets the film in Araku and also extracted good performances, her screenplay is not that engaging. She narrates the film in a detailed manner without any deviation but the needed masala for a thriller with twists and turns is missing a bit.

On the whole, Shekar is an emotional thriller that has a decent premise and able performances. The storyline is good but the needed thrills and slow pace are slightly missing. If you ignore these factors, Shekar ends up a passable watch this weekend.

123telugu.com Rating: 2.75/5

Reviewed by 123telugu Team

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Shekar Movie Review: An Earnest Remake That Needed Some More Bravery

Cast:  Rajasekhar, Aathmeeya Rajan, Muskaan Khubchandani, Shivani Rajashekar

Director:  Jeevitha Rajashekhar

Before watching Shekar, I felt awkward reviewing it. The film is a remake of the Malayalam original Joseph, directed by M Padmakumar, starring Joju George . I saw Joseph in 2018 when it was heavily praised by critics and casual film audiences alike. But I didn't enjoy that film. At best, it was like a film version of boiled broccoli in that it's supposed to be good viewing but felt bland, and at worst, it felt like the angst of a slam poet pretending to be a lot deeper than he actually is. 

It doesn't help Shekar that it's too faithful a remake of its original. 

Shekar is about its titular character played by Rajashekar, a brooding policeman who deals with the death of three women he loves.  He continues to waste his life and detective-like intellect drinking and smoking until he gets a chance at redemption when he discovers that the deaths were in fact murders. Can he use his powers to find the murderers? Did he contribute in any way to their murders? Does he redeem himself?

At first, Shekar seems to be a self-aware remake and the first fifteen minutes are not only gripping but also a hat tip to its leading man and the director. The film is directed by Rajashekar's wife Jeevita Rajashekhar and both of them were a smash hit pair in the 80s and early 90s. In fact, Rajashekar was known to play roles that ranged from angry young man to angry young cop to angry young brute and Jeevita would play characters that tame the man. It was a hit formula and it contributed to big numbers at the box office. In the beginning of the film, Shekar is listening to ' Idi Cheragani Premaku ' from Ankusham , the biggest hit starring Rajashekar and Jeevita. 

I applauded this little meta touch and expected more such cleverness from the director. 

I also expected the film to explore the character's additional meta-baggage because Shekar, the weary and cynical cop, could be an extension of the angry young cops played by its leading man. Rajashekar once enjoyed stardom similar to Chiranjeevi in the 80s and 90s but now it's completely waned and he is a shell of the star he once was. A character like this is a perfect metaphor of that decrease in popularity and box office pull – the body is frail, the beard and hair are whiter, and the trademark energy in the gait is now reduced. Even Sai Kumar seems to have hit the perfect melancholic note while dubbing for the film's leading man.

But sadly, past the first fifteen minutes, Shekar runs out of freshness and sticks to not just the beats but even some of the shots and frames from the original. While the original consisted of long uninterrupted shots, here we get more cuts and lesser time to imbibe the performance. Rajashekar himself seems more comfortable with the pathos than the portions involving Sherlock-esque intelligence. The film rushes to tell its two love stories that make Shekar a grey character who seems to have strayed from the path his moral compass was pointing him towards. The problem was there in the original and it lies in this one too. The way we learn about what broke the man feels like an information dump rather than something we live with and feel heartbreak about. Similarly, the climax which has the big reveal feels like a sermon in a star-driven social message film than a satisfying conclusion to a well made thriller because it feels like information thrown at the audience as a lecture in caution rather than as dialogue meant to engage. 

This film too depends on "aha"-moments where the leading man has solved the case already and we are two steps behind him, waiting for him to explain the case to us like an impatient teacher. Abhinav Gomatham's Sudhir, who is the computer expert, gets to do all the tech dump but it is to the actor's credit that the exposition seems partially lighter with his performance and delivery. Similarly, Shivani Rajashekar impresses in a well-conceived but poorly executed character. Her character Geeta is the one big departure from the original where she becomes the fulcrum upon which we learn the Shekar's past. While she is excellent at selling the bubbly and the lovable character, her character's fate never feels as tragic as the Anup Rueben's score makes it out to be. 

Rajashekar seems to be taking the right steps to reinvent himself for a new generation. Whether it was the impressive tech-thriller PSV Garuda Vega, or the brave but underwhelming action thriller Kalki or the mediocre Shekar . It is particularly impressive that in Shekar director Jeevita didn't change the ending of the film or what Indu (Athmika Rajan) chooses to do after leaving Shekar. But this film, despite its earnest efforts, needed more bravery at a conceptual level. 

For now, we can consider it a success that a star from the 90s is finally playing his age and taking some brave steps and hope that he isn't the last.

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Shekar Movie Review: An engrossing thriller

Rating: ( 3 / 5).

Jeevitha Rajasekhar's latest directorial Shekar is a compelling investigative thriller that throws light on the life of a retired police constable, who is going through emotional turmoil. An official remake of the Malayalam crime thriller Joseph (2018), Jeevitha stays mostly faithful to the blueprint of the original film aside from making it tight and crisp in the second hour.

Cast: Dr Rajasekhar, Shivani Rajasekhar, Athmiya Rajan, Muskaan Khubchandani Director: Jeevitha Rajasekhar

Shekar ( Dr Rajasekhar ) is a man of restrained emotions and is popular in his department for his adept investigative skills. Shekhar and three of his friends lead an undisciplined retired life and the group does not miss an opportunity to use their expertise when there's a suspicious case in the town. He is still the go-to guy for his superiors and he doesn't hesitate to help them crack unsolved murder cases. After tracing the culprit behind a twin murder case, Shekar returns to his home only to be haunted by the memories of his ex-wife Indu (Athmiya Rajan) and daughter Geetha (Shivani Rajasekhar). He couldn't give up on the happiest memories and the cheerful life he spent with his loved ones and we get to see the many layers and sublayers of his life as the back story begins to unfold.

Deftly switching between the twin tragedies and the mastery in personal crime scene investigation, Shekar slowly draws you into the suspense at the heart of its plot. The story doesn’t veer off into comedy tracks and romances either — at least not too much. Most of the twists are smartly revealed, and Shekar builds on the little unexpected things. With mobile tower tracking, Benzidine test (for detection of bloodstains), call dumping, data matching, creating a plan, and providing a picture of events serving as key plot points, you get the sense of being consistently invested in the outcome of the investigation.

The screenplay unravels skillfully but also quite sluggishly, especially in the first half which ends in a fantastic twist. The second hour picks up the pace with interesting plot twists and detailing what is the mission and who Shekar’s target is. Jeevitha deserves applause for constructing Shekar ’s world to perfection —  be it his present life with his friends, his love story in the past, and his strained relationship with his wife. She has also handled the relationship between Shekar and Mallikharjun (Kishore), his ex-wife’s husband, in a mature way. But I am unable to understand why Mallikharjun from the very first scene has immense respect for Shekar and perhaps, some detailing into their acquaintance would have made things a bit more interesting. The songs too sync well with the narrative and perfectly complement the flashback sequences. Araku Valley makes for an evocative setting, and Jeevitha Rajasekhar relies heavily on scenic beauty.

Then there are those plot holes like the ease with which Shekar goes in and out of people’s homes at will. The director failed to bring the nail-biting suspense that will keep the viewers enthralled from start to finish. As with many films in the genre, we’re required to take a giant leap of faith when faced with the facts of the crimes. The climax coated with an underlying message seems stretched and underwhelming.

What helps Shekar is its brilliant cast of actors, each never trying to dominate the other, but performing committed to their characters. Dr Rajasekhar brings to the table what only he can as the anguished father, emotional husband and abandoned lover, who hid his feelings under his tired eyes. He is fantastic in the character, conveying angst, guilt and enthusiasm in everything from his body language to his dialogues. Sameer, Bharani and Abhinav Gomatam are reliably solid as Shekar's friends. Athmiya Rajan makes an impression, while Muskaan Khubchandani, who appears in the flashback, portrays heart-rendering emotions with ease. In fact, it is these characters that provide the emotional wallop to the story. Shivani Rajasekhar, although billed as a special appearance, delivers a subtle act. Kishore is alright.

Anup Rubens's background score is the soul of the film, while Mallikarjuna Naragani's cinematography is eye-catching as in the original.

Overall, Shekar is an engrossing thriller that benefits from efficient direction and an inherently riveting plot (originally written by Shahi Kabir). The film seldom loses its grip or your attention and stays engaging when it focuses on its core plot.

• తెలుగు

'Shekar' Review: Engaging But Not Exciting

Title: Shekar Rating: 2.5/5 Cast: Rajasekhar, Muskan, Shivani Rajasekhar, Atmeeya Rajan, Kishore, Sameer, Bharani Shankar, Abhinav Gomatham, Prakash Raj etc Story: Shahi Kabir Camera: Mallikarjun Music: Anup Rubens Producer: Venkata Srinivas and Shivani Rajasekhar Direction: Jeevitha Rajasekhar Released On: 20 May 2022

After a long time Rajasekhar has come up with this film showing off his realistic look. This is the remake of Malayalam film "Joseph" that pulled critical acclaim when it was released in 2018.

Let us discuss how it worked in Telugu with this remake.

Story: Shekar (Rajasekhar) is a retired cop who has sharp investigation skills. He lives all alone. He got separated from his wife (Atmeeya Rajan). He also loses his daughter (Shivani) and lives with her memories and illusions. He keeps on drinking day and night.

The reason for this grief has a connection to his past where he loves a girl Kaveri (Muskaan) but fails to marry her.

What is the role of that girl in Shekar's life? And what's the root cause for all the misery in the story forms the crux in the climax.

Artistes' Performance: Rajasekhar impresses us with his character that is perfectly in sync with his age. The dubbing given by Sai Kumar shows us the vintage Rajasekhar. 

Muskaan, the George Reddy actress put on some weight but made a good pair with Rajasekhar.

Atmeeya Rajan did the same role that she did in the Malayalam original.

Shivani Rajasekhar played a guest role, appearing in some glimpses.

Prakash Raj comes in a scene in the climax.

Sameer looked very fat and unhealthy and the rest of the characters are just ok.

Technical Expertise: Every shot and frame are taken from the original and so no big effort can be observed. The background score given by Anup Rubens is good and the signature music for Rajasekhar's intro scenes is captivating.

The production values are reasonable and up to the requirement. Camera work is commendable and editing is upto the original.

Highlights: Rajasekhar's subtle performance Sai Kumar's dubbing Plot point Crime angle

Drawbacks: Overdose of sentiment Predictability

Analysis: Generally Malayalam films are popular for their gripping narratives, unique plot points and engaging screenplay. But sometimes they too make some films with loose ends and average intelligence in screenplay writing. They may engage in the first instance but not always.

'Joseph' was the 2018 film that garnered good reviews and later in the OTT revolution in the last two years it reached many audiences crossing the boundaries. 

The film runs in cinematic format with a tinge of being realistic. The songs, too much of sentiment, tragic end to all female characters are forced and they hardly help the overall content at the end. 

The realistic touch with the sacrificial protagonist is something unique at the end but until then many twists and turns sound beaten for the audience who watched the films like Drishyam.

Cracking a case with mobile numbers is understood with Dishyam and so something that goes on similar lines wouldn't make any impact in the thrill factor.

The story ends up in a realistic way without doing poetic justice at the end. The darkweb of the medical field is exposed and alerts the system.

If the audience steps into watch this film without carrying any expectations, it may prove engaging though not exciting. But for those who binge watch the films on OTTs, the crime point gets revealed in the middle, killing the surprise factor at the end.

But the decision of the protagonist to put an end to the culprits in the climax is something unique and unpredictable. All said and done, it's a sincere remake but lacks the required punch in the original writing itself.

Bottom Line: Unique Climax

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• Aay Review: Message Packed With Humor

Tags: Shekar Shekar Review Shekar Movie Review Shekar Telugu Movie Review Shekar Rating Shekar Movie Rating

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‘Shekar’ movie review: This slow-burn crime drama has its moments

This crime thriller that doubles up as a character study is earnest, but the scene-by-scene remake will invoke deja vu for those who have savoured the malayalam original.

Updated - May 20, 2022 05:44 pm IST

Published - May 20, 2022 04:18 pm IST

Dr Rajashekar in ‘Sekhar’

How much you are likely to enjoy Shekhar might be proportional to whether you have watched its 2018 Malayalam original, Joseph, starring Joju George. Faithful, scene-by-scene remakes have lost their sheen in the OTT era when the originals are available with subtitles. However, if you haven’t watched Joseph , Shekar has an interesting story to narrate. A story that is also a character study of the protagonist. Director Jeevitha Rajashekar steers clear of mainstream Telugu cinema trappings and stays true to what the story requires. She and the team also deserve an appreciation for not trying to change the ending. 

Shekar is a family project involving Dr Rajashekar, his wife Jeevitha and daughter Shivani. Yet, it does not get indulgent. The father-daughter portions get a few more minutes than in the original but without tampering with the proceedings.

Jeevitha sets the story in the idyllic Araku Valley. The unhurried, less populated space befits the story. We see Dr Rajashekar as Shekar, a middle-aged loner who is wasting away his days in the company of smoke and alcohol. An erstwhile cop, his crime-solving instincts remain sharp and intact. A crime he solves in the opening minutes, delineating the how and who, befit the small-town setting and almost has that Sherlock Holmes method to it.

The story takes off when Shekar smells something fishy after his wife’s death and digs deeper, and realises that another loss from the past has also been murky.

Cast: Dr Rajashekar, Aathmeeya Rajan, Muskaan Khubchandhani, Shivani Rajashekar

Direction: jeevitha rajashekar, music: anup rubens.

The modus operandi of the crime gets unravelled in the second and third acts of the narrative. Before that, there are other layers to peel. The non-linear narrative goes back and forth to piece together what has made Shekar a brooding recluse. He carries the burden of the past, consumed by guilt that he did not act in time to save a loved one; that in turn unsettles his home.

In the present day, he shares a great equation with his friends who always stand by him. The more interesting and subtly explored rapport is the one he has with Mallikarjun (Kishore in a restrained, effective portrayal), his former wife’s second husband. The quiet respect the two have for each other shows their inherent maturity. 

Shekar largely sticks to the beats of the original, recreating camera angles and even many of the dialogues. But unlike the original, it does not hold intrigue since not all the actors do justice to their parts. While Dr Rajashekar puts forth a sincere performance as the middle-aged man, the throwback to his younger days could have been handled better. Older actors trying to appear young is always a tough act. In the case of Aathmeeya Rajan (as the wife Indu), the reverse is true. While she can carry off the younger portions with ease, her makeup for the older part isn’t effective. 

The romance portions between Muskaan and Rajashekhar also stick out like a sore thumb, with a song thrown in. The songs that punctuate the narrative further slow down the languidly paced film. 

Shekar is a detour from the norm for Telugu cinema and is an earnest attempt. If only it had more spark in the performances and better music.

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Shekar Story

Shekar cast & crew.

Shekar Crew Info

Director
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Editor	NA
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Budget	TBA
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Shekar Critics Review

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Shekar

In this Shekar film, Dr. Rajasekhar , Athmeeya Rajan played the primary leads.

The Shekar was released in theaters on 20 May 2022.

The Shekar was directed by Jeevitha Rajaseskhar

Movies like Prabhas Hanu , Mechanic Rocky , The Raja Saab and others in a similar vein had the same genre but quite different stories.

The Shekar had a runtime of 131 minutes.

The soundtracks and background music were composed by Anup Rubens for the movie Shekar.

The cinematography for Shekar was shot by Mallikarjuna Naragani .

The movie Shekar belonged to the Crime,Drama,Thriller, genre.

Shekar User Review

• Movie rating

Disclaimer: The materials, such as posters, backdrops, and profile pictures, are intended to represent the associated movies and TV shows under fair use guidelines for informational purposes only. We gather information from social media, specifically Twitter. We strive to use only official materials provided publicly by the copyright holders.

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Shekar Movie Review

Article by Satya B Published by GulteDesk --> Published on: 1:42 pm, 20 May 2022

2 Hrs 11 Mins   |   Action   |   20-05-2022

Cast - Rajasekhar, Athmeeya, Muskaan, Shivani and others

Director - Jeevitha Rajasekhar

Producer - Sudhakara Reddy, Shivani, Shivathmika, Sreenivas

Banner - Pegasus. Taurus Cinecorp, Sudhakar Impex IPL, and Tripura Creations

Music - Anup Rubens

Rajashekar, who made a comeback with Garudavega, is hoping to sustain his position. He has chosen Malayalam film Joseph to remake. His wife Jeevitha wielded the megaphone and daughter Shivani Rajashekar played his daughter in the movie. Rajashekar is pinning high hopes on the film.

What is it about?

Shekar (Rajashekar), an investigation specialist in the police department, opts for a voluntary retirement after tragedy strikes his life – loses his darling daughter Geetha (Shivani). Occasionally, he helps the cops in cracking mystery cases. Shekar’s estranged wife Indu’s accidental death causes suspicion. As he starts investigating the case, he learns shocking details and unearths a major scam. How he resolves the crime mystery forms the crux of the story.

Performances:

Rajashekar’s one-man show in the film as he is seen throughout the movie almost in every frame. His grey hair and salt-and-pepper look is fresh. Most of the shots are close-ups and mediums. But after a point, he gets monotonous. He often gets tears in his eyes. He is stuck in the past – missing his daughter. Overall, he does a good job in investigative scenes.

Sai Kumar dubbed for Rajashekar which is a welcome development as one could hear vintage Rajashekar. Shivani is confined to a cameo as a daughter. She is seen in the flashback scenes. Rajashekar’s friends Sameer and others are just alright. Abhinav Gomatam does a fine job as a techie in the cyber crime wing.

Technicalities:

Shekar is the remake of Malayalam original Joseph. Director Jeevitha doesn’t find it hard as she made a frame-to-frame remake without any changes. But the first half is slow. She took a lot of time in establishing the premise and the characters. The plot takes off at the interval. Anup Rubens music isn’t impressive. Songs don’t offer relief.

Plus Points

Intriguing Plot Rajashekar

Minus Points

Sentiment Overdose Lacks Thrill Slow First Half

Directing a remake is always a double-edged sword given that it comes with its own risks and disadvantages. Most importantly, comparisons do exist. Though the makers have opted for a frame-to-frame remake and tried to pose like an honest remake, it is really lost in the translation. The emphasis is on the lack of thrill. Crime mysteries need to have edge-of-the-seat moments that are clearly missing in Shekar. The first half treads a familiar path.

Director Jeevitha wastes a chunk of screen time in establishing Shekar’s past and his emotions. The final rites of the dead are given so much importance and they are stretched out. Instead of creating sympathy or emotion, they test patience. The film only gets serious towards the interval. The pre-interval scenes bring some hope after a slow, boring first half.

The second-half revolves around the mystery and its solving. The good thing is the makers haven’t deviated from the story here. However, they just beat around the bush. The sentiment and drama overdosed, taking off the thrill factor. Barring these, Shekar has its moments in the latter half. As all the dots get connected, it becomes evident. It throws light on a serious issue of organised crime in today’s age. The problem with the film is it doesn’t have a villain, it lacks a face for the villain. So, one doesn’t get connected much for the crime going behind. Shekar isn’t on par with crime drama Drishyam. It falls flatter.

Bottom-line: A Failed Remake!

Rating: 2.25/5

Tags Rajasekhar Shekar

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• Movie Reviews

Shekar Review

What's Behind

Angry Star Rajasekhar after scoring a hit with PSV Garuda Vega, entertained with a decent hit Kalki. Rajasekhar after a long time is coming with Shekar directed by his better-half Jeevitha. The film hit the screens today and let us see what impact Rajasekhar made on movie lovers.

Story Review

Shekar (Rajasekhar) resigns from his job as a cop and leads a secluded life along with his daughter Geetha (Shivani). He is addicted to alcohol but helps the department in solving cases. In the midst of all this, he gets a double personal shock and upon investigation, he unearths startling secrets. To find out more about the shocking secrets and developments in his personal and professional life and how they are connected to his wife Indu (Aathmeeya Rajendran), lover Keerthana( Muskaan Kubchandhani), and others, watch Shekar on screen.

Artists, Technicians Review

Jeevitha Rajasekhar on her debut as the director started off on an interesting note quickly going into the narration. Though the film kickstarts in a fast-paced manner, the narration from there on goes at a snail's pace. The entire first half is loaded with father-daughter sentiment, a father's love story, and also the strained relationship between the hero and his wife. The pace picks up ahead of the interval and a couple of twists. The entire story unfolds in the second half but even before one gets interested in the pace of the film, the pace dips much to their disappointment. The interesting twists and turns in between increase curiosity and the pre-climax and climax are well shot. However, despite all the efforts, the film turned out to be a routine entertainer as the makers though did not officially reveal that it is the remake of the Malayalam film Joseph, copy-pasted the film scene by scene except for including a couple of romantic scenes for the hero. Lakshmi Bhupala who made changes to the story included a few interesting ones but otherwise turned monotonous. Jeevitha's screenplay and direction are ok and followed the same pattern as that of the original.

Rajasekhar lived in the role of a cop who suffers from personal problems. He showed good expressions and emotions. He showed variations in body language and carried himself well on the screen. Dialogues of Rajasekhar made a powerful impact with intensity. Aathmeeya Rajan is good as the wife of Rajasekhar. Shivani, the daughter of Rajasekhar got limited scope to perform and the scenes involving Rajasekhar and Shivani are good. Muskaan Kubchandhani is confined to a song and few scenes and she indulged in glamor treats. Prakash Raj made his presence felt in a cameo as lawyer Balram. Abhinav Gomatam performed well in his role and others like Kannada Kishore, Sameer, Bharani, Ravi Varma, and Shravan Raghavendra performed according to their roles.

Anup Rubens' tunes for the songs are emotional, touching, and as per the situation. His BGM is fine. The cinematography of Mallikarjun Naragani is good but could have been better. The editing is just average and could have been far better as there are many drags throughout the film. Production values are good.

Disadvantages

Routine narration

Rating Analysis

Rajasekhar tried to highlight the shocking scams in his film Shekar. However, Jeevitha's screenplay and direction diluted the investigation stressing more on highlighting the emotions in the personal life just like in the original. Had Jeevitha paid more importance to the investigation by including twists and turns and exposing of the shocking scam that comes only in the pre-climax by working on the story, screenplay, and direction, the result would have been powerful. Considering all these points, CJ goes with a 2 rating for Shekar.

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Sekhar Review: రివ్యూ: శేఖర్‌

Sekhar Movie Review: రాజశేఖర్‌ కీలక పాత్రలో నటించిన ‘శేఖర్‌’ మూవీ ఎలా ఉందంటే?

చిత్రం: శేఖర్; న‌టీన‌టులు: రాజశేఖర్, ఆత్మీయ రాజన్, ముస్కాన్, శివాని రాజశేఖర్, అభినవ్ గోమఠం, కన్నడ కిషోర్, సమీర్, భరణి శంకర్, రవి వర్మ, శ్రవణ్ రాఘవేంద్ర త‌దిత‌రులు; సంగీతం: అనూప్ రూబెన్స్; కూర్పు: ర‌వితేజ గిరిజాల‌; ఛాయాగ్ర‌హ‌ణం: మల్లికార్జున్ నరగని; నిర్మాతలు: బీరం సుధాకర్ రెడ్డి, శివాని రాజశేఖర్, శివాత్మిక రాజశేఖర్, వెంకట శ్రీనివాస్ బొగ్గరం; ద‌ర్శ‌క‌త్వం: జీవిత రాజ‌శేఖ‌ర్‌; విడుద‌ల తేదీ: 20-05-2022

వేస‌వి సినీ మార‌థాన్ ముగింపుకొచ్చింది. ఇన్నాళ్లూ పాన్ ఇండియా చిత్రాల‌తో బాక్సాఫీస్ హోరెత్తింది. ఇప్పుడు మీడియం రేంజ్ బ‌డ్జెట్ చిత్రాల సంద‌డి షురూ అయింది. అలా ఈ వారం బాక్సాఫీస్ బ‌రిలో దూకిన సినిమా ‘శేఖ‌ర్‌’. గ‌రుడ‌వేగ, క‌ల్కి వంటి విజ‌యాల త‌ర్వాత రాజ‌శేఖ‌ర్ నుంచి వ‌చ్చిన చిత్ర‌మిది. మ‌ల‌యాళంలో విజ‌య‌వంత‌మైన ‘జోసెఫ్‌’కు రీమేక్‌గా రూపొందింది. రాజ‌శేఖ‌ర్ స‌తీమ‌ణి జీవిత ఈ సినిమాని స్వ‌యంగా తెర‌కెక్కించ‌డం, వారి పెద్ద కుమార్తె శివాని కీల‌క పాత్ర‌లో న‌టించ‌డంతో అంద‌రి దృష్టి దీనిపై ప‌డింది. మ‌రి ఆ అంచ‌నాలను ‘శేఖ‌ర్’ అందుకున్నాడా?  రాజ‌శేఖ‌ర్ ఖాతాలో మ‌రో విజ‌యం చేరిందా?

క‌థేంటంటే:  శేఖ‌ర్ (రాజ‌శేఖ‌ర్‌) రిటైర్డ్ పోలీస్ అధికారి. హ‌త్య కేసుల్ని ఛేదించ‌డంలో నిపుణుడు. క్రైమ్ సీన్‌ను చూసి.. నేర‌స్థుడెవ‌రో ఇట్టే క‌నిపెట్ట‌గ‌ల మాస్ట‌ర్‌. అందుకే క్లిష్ట‌మైన మ‌ర్డ‌ర్ కేసులు ఎదురైన ప్ర‌తిసారీ శేఖ‌ర్ స‌హాయాన్నే కోరుతుంటారు పోలీసులు. అయితే శేఖ‌ర్ వ్య‌క్తిగ‌త జీవితం విషాద‌భ‌రితం. మాజీ భార్య ఇందు (ఆత్మీయ రాజ‌న్‌), కూతురు గీత (శివానీ), ప్రేయ‌సి కిన్నెర (ముస్కాన్‌) జ్ఞాప‌కాలు అత‌న్ని వెంటాడుతుంటాయి. ఇందు రోడ్డు ప్రమాదంలో మ‌ర‌ణిస్తుంది. అంద‌రూ అలాగే అనుకుంటారు. అయితే ఘ‌ట‌నా స్థ‌లంలో క‌నిపించిన ఆధారాల్ని బ‌ట్టి ఆమెని ఎవ‌రో హ‌త్య చేశార‌ని శేఖ‌ర్ గుర్తిస్తాడు. మ‌రి ఆ హ‌త్య చేసిందెవ‌రు? దాని వెన‌కున్న కార‌ణాలేంటి? నేర‌స్థుల్ని ప‌ట్టుకోవ‌డానికి శేఖ‌ర్ ఏం చేశాడు? ప్రేయ‌సి కిన్నెర‌, కూతురు గీత ఏమ‌య్యారు? అన్న‌వి తెర‌పై చూసి తెలుసుకోవాల్సిందే.

ఎలా సాగిందంటే:  ర‌స‌వ‌త్త‌ర‌మైన థ్రిల్ల‌ర్ చిత్రాల‌కు చిరునామాగా నిలుస్తోంది మ‌ల‌యాళ చిత్ర‌సీమ‌. ఏ భాష‌లో లేని విధంగా ఏటా బోలెడ‌న్ని థ్రిల్ల‌ర్‌లు మ‌ల‌యాళం నుంచే ప్రేక్ష‌కుల ముందుకొస్తున్నాయి. ప్ర‌స్తుతం తెలుగులో వ‌స్తున్న థ్రిల్ల‌ర్స్‌లో దాదాపు స‌గానికి పైగా.. మాలీవుడ్ రీమేక్‌లే. ‘శేఖ‌ర్‌’ కూడా ఆ సీమ నుంచి అరువు తెచ్చుకున్న క‌థే.  2018లో విడుద‌లై విజ‌య‌వంత‌మైన ‘జోసెఫ్‌’కు రీమేక్‌గా రూపొందింది. మాతృక‌తో పోల్చితే తెలుగులో నేటివిటీకి త‌గ్గ‌ట్లుగా చిన్న చిన్న మార్పులు చేసినా.. క‌థ మొత్తం యథాత‌థంగా చూపించే ప్ర‌య‌త్నం చేశారు. ఓ వృద్ధ జంట హ‌త్య‌కు గురి కావడం.. ఆ కేసును ఛేదించేందుకు పోలీసులు శేఖ‌ర్ సహాయం కోర‌డం.. అతను రంగంలోకి దిగి త‌న తెలివితేట‌ల‌తో నిమిషాల వ్య‌వ‌ధిలో నేర‌స్థుల్ని క‌నిపెట్ట‌డం వంటి స‌న్నివేశాల‌తో ఆరంభం చ‌క‌చ‌కా సాగిపోతుంది. ఆ వెంట‌నే శేఖ‌ర్ ఫ్లాష్ బ్యాక్‌ను ప్రారంభించి.. అత‌ని వ్య‌క్తిగ‌త జీవితంలోకి ప్రేక్ష‌కుల్ని తీసుకెళ్లే ప్ర‌య‌త్నం చేశారు ద‌ర్శ‌కురాలు జీవిత‌.

కానీ, అక్క‌డి నుంచి మొద‌ల‌య్యే శేఖ‌ర్ - కిన్నెర‌ల ప్రేమ క‌థ మ‌రీ రోటీన్‌గా అనిపిస్తుంది. ఇందుతో వైవాహిక జీవితానికి సంబంధించిన ఎపిసోడ్లు సైతం చ‌ప్ప‌గా సాగుతూ బోర్ కొట్టిస్తాయి.  థ్రిల్ల‌ర్ సినిమా చూస్తున్నామా?  రొమాంటిక్ ఫ్యామిలీ డ్రామా చూస్తున్నామా? అన్న అనుమానాలు రేకెత్తిస్తాయి.  తండ్రీకూతుళ్ల అనుబంధాల నేప‌థ్యంలో వ‌చ్చే స‌న్నివేశాలు అక్క‌డ‌క్క‌డా గుండెల్ని హ‌త్తుకుంటాయి. ఇక విరామానికి ముందు ఇందు రోడ్డు ప్ర‌మాదంలో చ‌నిపోవ‌డం.. అది ప్ర‌మాదం కాదు హ‌త్య అని శేఖ‌ర్ క‌నిపెట్ట‌డంతో ద్వితీయార్ధంలో ఏం జ‌ర‌గ‌బోతుందా? అని ఆస‌క్తి పెరుగుతుంది. ద్వితీయార్థం ఆరంభం నుంచే కథలో వేగం పెరుగుతుంది. ఇందు హ‌త్య కేసును ఛేదించే క్ర‌మంలో శేఖ‌ర్ వేసే ఎత్తుగ‌డ‌లు అక్క‌డ‌క్క‌డా కాస్త రొటీన్‌గా అనిపించినా ఆద్యంతం ఉత్కంఠ‌ భ‌రితంగానే సాగుతాయి. బ్రెయిన్ డెడ్ అయిన వ్య‌క్తుల అవ‌య‌వాల‌ను.. జీవ‌న్‌దాన్ వ్య‌వ‌స్థ ద్వారా వైద్య రంగంలోకి  కొంద‌రు వ్య‌క్తులు ఎలా దుర్వినియోగం చేస్తున్నారో చెప్పిన తీరు మెప్పిస్తుంది. ప‌తాక స‌న్నివేశాలు గుండెల్ని బ‌రువెక్కిస్తాయి.

ఎవ‌రెలా చేశారంటే: శేఖ‌ర్ పాత్ర‌లో రాజ‌శేఖ‌ర్ చ‌క్క‌గా ఒదిగిపోయారు. వ‌య‌సు పైబ‌డిన వ్య‌క్తిలా ఆయ‌న క‌నిపించిన తీరు.. ప‌లికించిన హ‌వ‌భావాలు చాలా బాగున్నాయి. ఈ చిత్రానికి అన్నీ తానై ముందుకు న‌డిపించారు. ఆత్మీయ రాజ‌న్‌, ముస్కాన్, శివాని, అభిన‌వ్ గోమ‌ఠం త‌దిత‌రులు త‌మ పాత్ర ప‌రిధుల మేర న‌టించారు. థ్రిల్ల‌ర్ సినిమాల్లో క‌థ‌ బాగుండాలి. ట్విస్టులు ఉక్కిరి బిక్కిరి చేయాలి. వీట‌న్నింటితో పాట క‌థ‌నం చ‌క‌చ‌కా ప‌రుగులు తీయాలి. అప్పుడే ఓ ఉత్కంఠ‌భ‌రిత‌మైన థ్రిల్ల‌ర్ చూసిన అనుభూతి క‌లుగుతుంది. శేఖ‌ర్‌లో క‌థ‌నం, ట్విస్ట్‌లు చ‌క్క‌గా కుదిరినా.. సినిమా మాత్రం చాలా నెమ్మ‌దిగా న‌త్త‌న‌డ‌క‌న సాగిన‌ట్లు అనిపిస్తుంది. ముఖ్యంగా ప్ర‌ధ‌మార్ధంలో వ‌చ్చే రొటీన్ ప్రేమ‌క‌థ‌, ఫ్యామిలీ డ్రామా ప్రేక్ష‌కుల సహ‌నానికి ప‌రీక్ష పెడ‌తాయి. అనూప్ రూబెన్స్ స్వ‌ర‌ప‌రిచిన‌ పాట‌లు విన‌సొంపుగా ఉన్నా.. వెంట వెంట‌నే రావ‌డం వ‌ల్ల క‌థ‌కు అడ్డు త‌గిలిన‌ట్లుగా అనిపిస్తాయి. నేప‌థ్య సంగీతం ఆద్యంతం మెప్పిస్తుంది. మ‌ల్లికార్జున్ ఛాయాగ్రహ‌ణం ఆక‌ట్టుకుంటుంది. అర‌కు అందాల్ని త‌న కెమెరాలో చ‌క్క‌గా ఒడిసిప‌ట్టారు. నిర్మాణ విలువ‌లు క‌థ‌కు త‌గ్గ‌ట్లుగా ఉన్నాయి.

బ‌లాలు

+ రాజశేఖ‌ర్ న‌ట‌న‌.. ఆయ‌న లుక్స్‌

+ క‌థా నేప‌థ్యం

+ ద్వితీయార్ధం

బ‌లహీన‌త‌లు

- రొటీన్ ప్రేమ‌క‌థ‌, ఫ్యామిలీ డ్రామా

- నెమ్మ‌దిగా సాగే క‌థ‌నం

చివ‌రిగా: థ్రిల్ల‌ర్ ప్రియుల‌ను మెప్పించే ‘శేఖ‌ర్‌’

గమనిక: ఈ సమీక్ష సమీక్షకుడి దృష్టి కోణానికి సంబంధించింది. ఇది సమీక్షకుడి వ్యక్తిగత అభిప్రాయం మాత్రమే!

గమనిక: ఈనాడు.నెట్‌లో కనిపించే వ్యాపార ప్రకటనలు వివిధ దేశాల్లోని వ్యాపారస్తులు, సంస్థల నుంచి వస్తాయి. కొన్ని ప్రకటనలు పాఠకుల అభిరుచిననుసరించి కృత్రిమ మేధస్సుతో పంపబడతాయి. పాఠకులు తగిన జాగ్రత్త వహించి, ఉత్పత్తులు లేదా సేవల గురించి సముచిత విచారణ చేసి కొనుగోలు చేయాలి. ఆయా ఉత్పత్తులు / సేవల నాణ్యత లేదా లోపాలకు ఈనాడు యాజమాన్యం బాధ్యత వహించదు. ఈ విషయంలో ఉత్తర ప్రత్యుత్తరాలకి తావు లేదు.

రివ్యూ: సరిపోదా శనివారం.. నాని యాక్షన్ థ్రిల్లర్ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: శాఖాహారి: ఆశ్రయం కోసం వచ్చిన వ్యక్తి మరణిస్తే..?

రివ్యూ: ముంజ్య.. రూ.30 కోట్లతో తీస్తే.. రూ.130 కోట్లు రాబట్టిన మూవీ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: విరాజి.. వరుణ్‌ సందేశ్‌ నటించిన థ్రిల్లర్‌ మూవీ ఎలా ఉందంటే?

రివ్యూ: డిమోంటి కాలనీ2.. హారర్‌ థ్రిల్లర్‌ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: బ్లింక్‌.. టైమ్‌ ట్రావెల్‌ కాన్సెప్ట్‌ మూవీ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: మారుతీన‌గ‌ర్ సుబ్ర‌మ‌ణ్యం.. రావు రమేశ్‌ మూవీ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: మనోరథంగల్‌: మలయాళ స్టార్‌లు నటించిన సిరీస్‌ ఎలా ఉందంటే?

రివ్యూ: ఆయ్‌.. నార్నే నితిన్‌ యూత్‌ఫుల్‌ ఎంటర్‌టైనర్‌ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: తంగలాన్‌.. విక్రమ్‌ యాక్షన్‌ అడ్వెంచర్‌ ఫిల్మ్‌ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: డబుల్‌ ఇస్మార్ట్‌.. రామ్‌-పూరి ఖాతాలో హిట్‌ పడిందా?

రివ్యూ: మిస్టర్‌ బచ్చన్‌.. రవితేజ యాక్షన్‌ ఎంటర్‌టైనర్‌ మెప్పించిందా?

రివ్యూ: వీరాంజ‌నేయులు విహార‌యాత్ర‌.. కామెడీ ఎంటర్‌టైనర్‌ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: టర్బో.. మమ్ముట్టి నటించిన యాక్షన్ కామెడీ ఫిల్మ్‌ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: కమిటీ కుర్రోళ్ళు.. కొత్త వాళ్లతో నిహారిక నిర్మించిన మూవీ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: ‘సింబా’.. జగపతిబాబు, అనసూయ నటించిన చిత్రం ఎలా ఉందంటే!

రివ్యూ: బడ్డీ.. అల్లు శిరీష్ మూవీ ప్రేక్షకులను మెప్పించిందా?

రివ్యూ: తిరగబడరసామీ.. రాజ్‌తరుణ్‌ ఖాతాలో హిట్‌ పడిందా?

రివ్యూ: బృంద.. త్రిష నటించిన తొలి వెబ్‌సిరీస్‌ ఎలా ఉంది?

రివ్యూ: రక్షణ.. పాయల్‌ నటించిన ఇన్వెస్టిగేటివ్‌ థ్రిల్లర్‌ ఎలా ఉందంటే?

రివ్యూ: శివం భజే.. అశ్విన్‌బాబు న్యూ ఏజ్‌ థ్రిల్లర్‌ ఎలా ఉంది

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• 'Shekar' Twitter Review: Check out what the public has to say about Rajasekhar’s family thriller

'Shekar' Twitter Review: Check out what the public has to say about Rajasekhar’s family thriller

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Shekhar Home Review: Bengali Sherlock Takes Too Long To Get Off The Ground

Shekhar home stars kay kay menon, ranvir shorey, rasika dugal in lead roles..

In the Peacock original Poker Face, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is on the run, driving across the US to hide from her angry casino boss. Along the way, she encounters a range of people from all walks of life, and more excitingly, murders, which she deftly solves with her superhuman ability to detect lies. Each episode presents a new case, with unique characters and an exciting puzzle. The series effectively straddles mystery, comedy, and crime, alternating smart deduction with hilarious punchlines. 

Created by Srijit Mukherji and Aniruddha Guha, the JioCinema series Shekhar Home has a similar premise and attempts to create a comparable alchemy by loosely drawing on stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.

The tone of the series remains lighthearted and low stakes, its attitude towards the source material playful rather than reverential. However, the humour feels too staged and the writing too lacklustre to do justice to Conan Doyle’s rich narratives and vivid characters. Closer to home, too, Shekhar Home doesn’t have the wit of an episodic show like Guilty Minds , and certainly lacks the depth of dramas like Kohrra or Dahaad . It’s never a good sign if a series reminds you of others but doesn’t measure up to any of them.

Kay Kay Menon in a still from Shekhar Home .

(Photo Courtesy: JioCinema)

Khel Khel Mein Review: Akshay Kumar, Taapsee Pannu Keep a Game of Secrets Alive

Shekhar Home is set largely in the fictional town of Lonpur, West Bengal, in 1993. Produced by BBC Studios India, the six-episode series follows the titular consulting detective Shekhar (Kay Kay Menon), a Bengali Sherlock Holmes, who’s joined by a new paying guest, Dr. Jayvrat (Ranvir Shorey) in a guest house run by Mrs Henry, or Mrs. H (Shernaz Patel). Like Sherlock and Watson, Shekhar and Jayvrat start a crime-solving company; Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, becomes Mrinmay (Kaushik Sen); the bumbling police officer, Lestrade, turns into Laha (Rudranil Ghosh); and Sherlock’s flame, Irene Adler, is Irabaty (Rasika Dugal). Of course, Sherlock's iconic adversary, Moriarty, or M (Kirti Kulhari), features as well.

Kay Kay Menon and Ranvir Shorey in a still from Shekhar Home .

The first four episodes explore different cases in and around Lonpur, from a murder or two, to a robbery, to supposed spirit possession. Aside from a few elements, though––like Irabaty and Shekhar’s dynamic and to some extent, some thrilling revelations of family secrets in “Bhaskar Villa” (episode 4)––these are utterly boring and inert.

The series tries too hard to establish the camaraderie between Shekhar and Jayvrat, which feels more contrived than complementary. Many of the jokes don’t land, often bordering on cringey. But importantly, the cases aren’t clever or compelling enough for the episodic format. 

Much of the information is conveyed through awkward dialogue and flashbacks shown with voiceovers explaining the proceedings. Murderers are revealed out of nowhere. It feels like there’s a lot going on, but it’s all impossible to care about. These sluggish episodes drag on, and you’re left wondering why Menon would waste his time with this, after such meaty roles in Farzi, Bambai Meri Jaan, and The Railway Men in 2023 alone . His performance doesn’t disappoint, though. 

Menon plays Shekhar with Sherlock’s quintessential casual nonchalance. He can’t match the suave, sexy sophistication of Benedict Cumberbatch or Robert Downey Jr, but he doesn’t even try to.

Donning colourful batik kurtas and often lost in thought strumming the rabab , Menon’s Shekhar is a more brooding, reflective, and quietly brilliant Sherlock. Shorey, meanwhile, is just serviceable: his portrayal of Jayvrat feels laboured, which is a major barrier to connecting with the central Watson-Holmes dynamic. The supporting cast is uniformly reliable, especially Dugal and Sen. While Kulhari earnestly plays the villainous M, she’s hardly believable as a Bangladeshi fighter; it’s impossible to get past her anglicised Hindi and sanitised appearance. 

Kirti Kulhari in a still from Shekhar Home .

Each of the first few episodes ends with a looming threat of M, making viewers wonder: who is she and what’s her connection with Shekhar? Why is Shekhar living in Lonpur as a paying guest? Why does he really go by Shekhar Home? (there’s a nice little Easter Egg to Conan Doyle’s original here). Episode 5 depicts an extended flashback to two years earlier, which answers these questions. Directed by Rohan Sippy, these last two episodes feel so distinct from the first four––directed by Srijit Mukherjee––that they could be from a different series altogether. They’re much more crisp, punchy, and engaging. 

Kay Kay Menon and Rasika Dugal in a still from Shekhar Home .

Shekhar Home ends with a satisfying finale that cheekily and inventively uses Rabindranath Tagore as a centrepiece riddle. Finally, even Shekhar and Jayvrat’s dynamic feels more lived-in and natural. Though deliberately camp and outlandish, it’s at least quite fun to watch, a glimpse of what the series could have been. But all too little too late. The series simply takes too long to get off the ground, and the final ride isn’t entirely worth the wait.

‘Stree 2’ Review: A Hilarious Sequel That Could’ve Been Much More Sinister

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Shekhar Home

• TV Mini Series

Set against the backdrop of a sleepy town called Lonpur in Bengal in the early 1990s. Shekhar meets Jayvrat Sahni, who becomes his housemate due to a twist of fate. The duo end up solving my... Read all Set against the backdrop of a sleepy town called Lonpur in Bengal in the early 1990s. Shekhar meets Jayvrat Sahni, who becomes his housemate due to a twist of fate. The duo end up solving mysteries across East India. Set against the backdrop of a sleepy town called Lonpur in Bengal in the early 1990s. Shekhar meets Jayvrat Sahni, who becomes his housemate due to a twist of fate. The duo end up solving mysteries across East India.

• Aniruddha Guha
• Kay Kay Menon
• Ranvir Shorey
• Rasika Dugal
• 32 User reviews
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• Aug 15, 2024
• August 14, 2024 (India)
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‘Reagan’ the movie: Just say no

Dennis quaid stars in this interminable hagiography..

“Reagan” is the worst kind of hagiography. It’s a wretched 2½-hour bore that’s uncurious about its subject. This poorly constructed, hole-filled biopic is also so sanitized that it feels like Darryl Zanuck or Reagan’s old boss Jack Warner would have slapped it onscreen back in the 1940s.

I’m not surprised a movie about Reagan would lean so heavily into the myth of Saint Ronnie. I’m more stunned by the terrible performance of Dennis Quaid, an actor I’ve liked in many films from “The Right Stuff” to “Innerspace” to “Postcards from the Edge.” Made up to look like Reagan, Quaid instead resembles one of those puppets from Genesis’s “Land of Confusion” video ; the movie does him no favors by showing footage of that video at one point.

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Even worse, Quaid’s Reagan lacks any of the spark the genuine article had in his heyday. The contrast is most blatant when the film forces him to act alongside actual footage of politicians like Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. At least Penelope Ann Miller manages to convey some of Nancy Reagan’s personality.

I don’t think Reagan himself could have saved this execrable, poorly made movie. It’s narrated by Jon Voight, who plays a fictionalized former Russian spy named Viktor Petrovich. It’s Petrovich’s job to school the young Russian who stands in for us, the audience, about Soviet history. Voight’s Russian accent is as bad as his Spanish one in the killer giant snake movie “Anaconda,” but at least that movie was fun.

Here, we have to listen to a guy who sounds like Bullwinkle’s nemesis, Boris Badenov, tell us about Reagan’s life from his earliest childhood days until his presidency. Petrovich refers to Reagan as “the Crusader,” presumably because this film is based on Paul Kengor’s 2006 book, “ The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism .”

“Reagan” is cast with a who’s who of has-beens and questionable choices. Creed’s Scott Stapp plays Frank Sinatra, Kevin Dillon has a small part as Jack Warner. Kevin Sorbo is the preacher who introduces Reagan to religion. And in a scene that must be seen to be believed, Pat Boone plays a reverend opposite an actor who is supposed to be him. The real Boone tells the fake Reagan that he’ll be president if he stays faithful to God.

The relentless religious message is here because this is a movie written by Howard Klausner, the guy who wrote 2018′s “God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness.” So, not only is this a biopic with the kind of clichés shredded by the parody “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” it’s also a pander to the Evangelicals who attend those “God’s Not Dead” movies.

This means you get to sit through self-righteous twaddle about how Reagan was ordained by Jesus to defeat those godless communists and student protesters at Berkeley. Though the movie sidesteps all the gay men who died of AIDS whom Reagan ignored in real life (and the Just Say No war on drugs campaign as well), it works the AIDS quilt and ACT UP protesters into a montage of things Petrovich says were enemies of Reagan.

Great movies can be made about polarizing figures — see Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” with its fantastic Anthony Hopkins performance. “Reagan” is too busy pushing a false sainthood to care about complexity.

Directed by Sean McNamara. Written by Howard Klausner. Starring Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight, Scott Stapp, Pat Boone, Kevin Sorbo. At AMC Boston Common, suburbs. 140 min. PG-13 (violence)

Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.

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Shekhar Home Review: Riveting Watch

Six episodes are not enough, applauds Deepa Gahlot.  

Sherlock Holmes is reportedly the most portrayed fictional character in films and television, and the appeal of the eccentric pipe-smoking, violin-playing 'consulting detective' just never goes away.

Bengali literature has its own canon of detectives -- who hasn't heard of Feluda? -- so the mix of the two creates the new Web series, with the odd title of Shekhar Home .

It is the Holmes fandom of creators Srijit Mukherji and Aniruddha Guha laid at the door of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Tribute done, the show then proceeds to do its own thing, and has fun with it. Holmes tidbits peek out sporadically, and the viewer enjoys spotting them.

Playing the titular character, Kay Kay Menon, in his wardrobe of batik kurtas and shirts, mostly lazes around in Mrs Henry's (Shernaz Patel) lodge in bucolic Lonpur (in West Bengal, circa 1993), playing the rabab and occasionally helping the inept Inspector Laha (Rudranil Ghosh) with a case.

But what mischief could the denizens of this sleepy town be possibly getting up to?

Laha is both appalled and excited when the he actually lands his first murder case.

By this time, Dr Jayvrat Saini (Ranvir Shorey) has arrived to share the flat with Home, and his plans to meditate at a nearby ashram are junked ('you need thrill,' observes Home) as he is dragged into becoming Home's sidekick -- assistant according to Home, partner according to Saini.

Home, solves the case, of course, with his mythical powers of deduction and canine powers of smell, while having a pleasant chat with the killer.

Since the period is 1993 -- and there are references to films of the era, though Home is not seen as a film buff -- video technology has arrived.

Home is asked by his brother Mrinmay (Kaushik Sen) of the Intelligence Bureau in Kolkata, to help catch a blackmailer of local MLAs, who has incriminating tapes. Unlike Holmes, who is decidedly a bachelor, with just a small flutter in an encounter with opera singer Irene Adler, Home has a ' phir milenge' flirtation with Irabaty (Rasika Dugal).

She reappears with a case, which makes up the episode Bhaskar Villa , which is obviously inspired by Doyle's best known work, The Hound Of The Baskervilles .

The first four episodes (written by Guha and Niharika Puri, with dialogue by Vaibhal Vishal) are directed with the leisurely air of a coffee house adda by Srijit Mukherji, wherein lies the charm of the show.

Home's nemesis 'M' has been hinted at, when the crisis hits Kolkata and Rohan Sippy takes over directorial reins to direct the last two episodes, that require a lot of rushing about following clues as to why three important scientists were killed and one went missing.

The insertion of a more 'modern' plot line would not have been quite as welcome were it not for the homage to the Bengali icon, Rabindranath Tagore.

Kay Kay Menon bases his interpretation of Holmes/Home on the way Jeremy Brett played him with his tics and twitches but also brings his own sense of mischief to the part, like his way of saying ' Ha ' or teasing Jayvrat and Laha or mocking the too serious Mrinmay.

Ranvir Shorey makes space for himself without encroaching on Menon's spotlight.

There is a glimpse of the deer stalker hat, pipe and classic cape at the end, perhaps as a means to convey that there is more to come. Six episodes are not enough!

Shekhar Home streams on JioCinema.

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‘Reagan’ Review: The Gipper Takes on Moscow

In this unabashed love letter to former president Ronald Reagan, Dennis Quaid fights the Cold War with conviction.

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By Glenn Kenny

In his long career, Dennis Quaid has sometimes played politicians. He’s been former President Bill Clinton (“The Special Relationship”) and was the president in the musical comedy “American Dreamz” with Hugh Grant and Willem Dafoe. Now, in “Reagan,” Quaid portrays former President Ronald Reagan with, if not brilliance, at least evident conviction. Time truly holds surprises for all of us.

The movie, directed by Sean McNamara from a screenplay by Howard Klausner, opens with Quaid as the 40th president leaving a speech site and walking right into an assassination attempt. The picture then moves to present-day Moscow. Jon Voight plays Viktor Petrovich, a retired K.G.B. agent with an accent straight out of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” who narrates the story of Reagan to a younger functionary. And so we shift back to the 1980s, and then back to Reagan’s early years in radio and Hollywood. (Mena Suvari plays Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, and Penelope Ann Miller is Nancy.)

In the first eight minutes, the movie makes as many temporal shifts as a 1960s Alain Resnais work, albeit quite less gracefully.

Why is Reagan’s story relayed by a K.G.B. guy? Because in this unabashed love letter to the former president, Reagan was the force behind the fall of the Soviet Union. The movie implies that this “evil empire” collapsed as a result not just of his presidency, but of his anti-Communist activism during his entertainment career in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. These eras are depicted in scenes strongly suggesting that before shooting, the cinematographer, Christian Sebaldt, happened upon a fire sale on diffusion filters at the camera store.

The cast is dotted with cameos from the actors Lesley-Anne Down and Kevin Dillon; the prominent Hollywood conservatives Kevin Sorbo and Robert Davi also appear as seals of approval, one infers. It all makes for a plodding film, more curious than compelling.

Reagan Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

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‘reagan’ review: dennis quaid headlines an overly reverential tribute to a controversial politician.

Jon Voight, Mena Suvari and Penelope Ann Miller also star in the biopic directed by Sean McNamara ('Soul Surfer'), which hits all the major events of the former president's life and career.

By Stephen Farber

Stephen Farber

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Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan became the subject of The Reagans . Starring James Brolin and a superb Judy Davis, the very controversial TV movie elicited scornful reactions from Reagan acolytes and barely made it to the airwaves. But no one should have similar reactions to the reverential Reagan , starring Dennis Quaid as the former president. No one, that is, except people looking for a sharp, lively piece of cinematic entertainment.

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Perhaps the strangest choice is to have the story told by a former KGB officer (Jon Voight) who gives Reagan (whom he calls “the Crusader”) credit — or blame — for the downfall of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and early 1990s. No mention is made of the return to KGB values under the reign of Vladimir Putin, perhaps because that would complicate the story and displease the nostalgic moviegoers presumed to be the primary audience for this glossy tribute to Reagan.

Most of the major events in Reagan’s life are covered, but few of them are recounted in an incisive fashion. We see him when he was president of SAG and got involved in the anti-Communist frenzy of the late 1940s. In one scene, he even banters with the most famous of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo (Sean Hankinson), and he is enlisted by studio chief Jack Warner (a miscast Kevin Dillon) to help root out the Red threat in Hollywood. There are a few scenes with Reagan’s first wife, actress Jane Wyman — but she’s made out to be a shallow shrew in order to build up his lifelong bond with Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller), which leaves Wyman actress Mena Suvari with nothing to play. An end title informs us that Wyman ended up voting for her ex-husband twice when he ran for President. How would anyone know? Aren’t ballots supposed to be secret?

The highlight of the film, and perhaps of Reagan’s life, was his 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It was indeed a rousing moment, but one might question whether that alone caused Communism to topple. Mikhail Gorbachev himself, portrayed sympathetically by Oleg Krupa, probably played a role here.

Quaid has been given puffy, rouged cheeks to match the familiar image of Reagan, and while his performance is competent, he never matches the charm that he conveyed in The Right Stuff or Great Balls of Fire . Miller takes a very different approach from the one that Davis took in The Reagans , where she portrayed Nancy as Lady Macbeth in high heels. Nevertheless, Miller makes an appealing presence and does convince us of Nancy’s lifelong devotion to her Ronnie. Other members of the very large cast don’t have enough to do to make much of an impression. It is nice to see Lesley-Anne Down as Margaret Thatcher, some 45 years after her starring roles back in the 1970s.

Technical credits are solid. Scenes filmed at the Reagan ranch in the Santa Barbara area have a special luster. The most moving moments, however, are the newsreel shots of Reagan’s funeral, which Thatcher and Gorbachev attended. No screenwriter was able to meddle with that footage.

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Simplistic 'Reagan' offers a take on the president as rosy as Dennis Quaid's cheeks

The gipper does little wrong in a fawning biopic light on subtlety..

President Ronald Reagan (Dennis Quaid) delivers his historic 1987 “tear down this wall” speech at Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in a scene from “Reagan.”

Rawhide Films

If you knew little or nothing about Ronald Reagan and you were to form your opinion of our 40th president on the content of the hagiographic “Reagan,” you would come away believing he single-handedly saved the Screen Actors Guild from being overrun by communists, was the most loving husband this side of George Bailey, was always the most charming man in any room, and sailed through eight majestic years in office with only a whiff of scandal or setback.

Not to say there isn’t a measure of validity in at least some of those assessments, but the truth is more subtle and debatable than what director Sean McNamara puts forth in “Reagan,” which was adapted by Howard Klausner from Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.” This is a competently made film with decent cinematography and production design, and the casting is never less than ... interesting , but it favors a simplistic approach and a narrative that verges on adoration. I mean, we actually see Ronald Reagan riding off into the sunset in this movie.

A lacquer-haired, rosy-cheeked Dennis Quaid looks and sounds like Dennis Quaid impersonating Ronald Reagan in the title role, as “Reagan” opens in March of 1981 with a re-creation of the assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr.

The story then shifts to “Moscow, Russia, Present Day,” and this is where the film makes the curious choice of having a fictional, retired KGB officer named Viktor Ivanov (Jon Voight, with a borderline cartoonish Russian accent) act as the de facto narrator of the film. A young, up-and-coming Russian politician (Alex Sparrow) visits Ivanov to gain an understanding of how the Soviet Union collapsed, and as it conveniently turns out, Ivanov devoted much of his career to following and studying the life of one Ronald Reagan, and he believes studying Reagan is the key to deciphering how the Americans defeated communism.

“To understand what made this man unique, I needed to understand the boy,” says Ivanov, and that’s the cue for a flashback to young Ronnie (played by Tommy Ragen as a boy and David Henrie as a teenager) growing up in Dixon, Illinois, and off we go on a sweeping epic that spans the entirely of Reagan’s life, unlike many recent historical biopics that concentrate on one specific and vital period. (As Ivanov guides us through the decades, some of his observation are howlers, e.g., “As they say in America, Brezhnev’s mind was blown.”)

We travel with Reagan through his time as a young actor (Mena Suvari briefly appears as his first wife, Jane Wyman) and as the vice-president of the Screen Actors Guild and hey, there’s Kevin Dillon as Jack L. Warner, who takes Ronnie aside and warns that the communists “are not just talking strike, they’re talking about taking over ALL the unions.” No chance of that, not with Reagan leading the stand against the Soviets and first realizing he could be more than actor.

Soon we’re in the 1960s with Reagan’s career waning as he’s reduced to playing a second-rate comedy venue in Las Vegas and doing TV commercials for a wide variety of products ranging from Chesterfield’s cigarettes to Palmolive After Shaving Talc to V-8 to “Icee, the coldest drink in town.” By the time we hear “Wild Thing” by the Troggs on the soundtrack, Reagan is ensconced in a loving marriage with the former Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller), switching political parties and winning the governorship of California.

Penelope Ann Miller plays the president’s second wife, Nancy, in “Reagan.”

Once we get to Reagan’s presidency, the film focuses primarily on his leadership in the Cold War, which leads to a truly funny medley of funerals for Soviet leaders who dropped dead in rapid fashion in the 1980s and the president quipping, “How can I talk to them if they keep dying on me?” Reagan is depicted as an inspirational leader (and rightfully so) when he delivers his historic speech in West Berlin in 1987 and exclaims, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (There’s also nary a scene without a recognizable face playing a real-life figure, whether it’s Lesley-Anne Down as Margaret Thatcher, Dan Lauria as Tip O’Neill or, yes, that’s Jennifer O’Neill as Ronald’s mom Nelle in her later years.)

• Dennis Quaid lets gospel music fire his soul and ‘Reagan’ film fuel his politics

Iran-Contra is covered, but there’s nothing of substance about other scandals, including the Reagan administration essentially ignoring the AIDS crisis for years, his use of “the welfare queen” trope or his mixed record on gay rights. Of course, you can’t cover everything in one movie, but the scales are tipped greatly in Reagan’s favor. (“Reagan” does acknowledge criticism of the president on a number of issues via a medley of images and video set to “Land of Confusion” by Genesis, but it’s a montage that lasts about 90 seconds in a 135-minute movie.)

Reagan’s final years are handled briefly and with grace. By that time we’re thinking that while someday, somebody might make a great movie or streaming series that truly and thoroughly explores the complexities of the uniquely American story of Ronald Reagan, it has not yet happened.

‘Reagan’ Review: Embarrassing Presidential Biopic Treats Dennis Quaid’s POTUS as the Second Coming

Jon Voight costars in what may be the most tedious presidential biopic in 80 years

Politics are always divisive, but regardless of your party affiliation (or lack thereof) I think we can all agree that “President of the United States” is a pretty tough job. The complexity is unfathomable, the stakes enormous. Every day, the president makes decisions that directly affect the lives of not just Americans, but every human being on the planet. Whether you love a president or hate their guts, or know nothing about them — sorry, Chester A. Arthur — every commander-in-chief has a complicated legacy, full of some (hopefully many) successes and some (hopefully few) missteps.

But you wouldn’t know that from watching “Reagan.”

Sean McNamara’s fawning and superficial biopic about the 40th president of the United States treats the political figure as a godlike messiah who was placed on this Earth to vanquish America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, and fall perfectly in love with the perfect woman while riding horses dramatically across the California hills. Criticisms of Reagan warrant no more than a brief montage about how weird the 1980s were — except for the Iran-Contra scandal, which adds up to a whopping “whoopsie-daisy.”

It’s no great sin to have a perspective on the subject of a biographical motion picture, positive or negative, but “Reagan” doesn’t just love Ronald Reagan. It idolizes him so much that it makes you wonder if it defies that commandment about not worshipping false idols. McNamara’s picture, written by Howard Klausner (“The Identical”), gives such a one-sided and celebratory account of Reagan’s life that it doesn’t even serve the function of being informative. Audiences might walk away from this movie knowing a bit more trivia, but they’ll understand less about Reagan’s life and presidency if they take this love letter too seriously.

“Reagan” has a bizarre framing device, in which a young Russian politician visits aging KGB agent Viktor Ivanov, played by Jon Voight, who spends a whole day just telling this guy how great Ronald Reagan was. The Soviets dubbed the American actor and eventual politician “The Crusader,” and according to one anecdote, he was literally prophesied to become president and bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. Ivanov spent decades warning his superiors that Reagan was Communism’s worst nightmare, even when he was starring in “Bedtime for Bonzo,” but they would not believe him. 

Dennis Quaid plays Reagan, who rose from the ranks of Hollywood — the film is, at least, willing to admit his acting career was underwhelming — to become a leader in the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan stands up against communists in the industry, nuance about the Hollywood blacklist be damned. Except when he meets Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller), his future wife, who asks him to remove her name from the blacklist because it’s all a mistake — another “Nancy Davis” attended communist gatherings, not her. And because he finds her attractive, he does so immediately, no questions asked, no confirmation needed, undermining (presumably by accident) the portrayal of Reagan as a hardliner.

Then again, “Reagan” seems weirdly eager to portray Ronald Reagan as easily manipulated. The first half of the movie finds young Reagan changing his whole life on a whim whenever something in the media wanders into his frame of vision. He reads a dime-store novel that makes him want to go into politics. He hears one public speaking engagement about communism and his views are solidified forever. He has one conversation with studio executive Jack L. Warner (Kevin Dillon) and it permanently affects his position on unions. In the film’s zeal to cover all the bases, it doesn’t explain how the game worked, and despite its reverent cinematography and music and speeches, it makes Reagan look like an empty vessel (again, presumably by accident).

Reagan’s film career dwindles on the vine, so he decides to pursue politics. He flashes a charismatic smile that didn’t make him a big star in Hollywood, but stands out against career politicians who weren’t camera-ready. To hear “Reagan” tell it, Americans were gobsmacked that a politician was capable of a witty rejoinder, and frequently stopped whatever they were doing to watch debates unfold with slack-jawed wonder. Did this politician actually make a joke? Can they  do  that?

Of course, it’s fair to say that Reagan took advantage of his experience as a performer to deliver his message to the American public, but “Reagan” suggests he practically invented the idea of confident leadership. Even when the film dramatizes undeniable facts, its worshipful presentation oversells his remarkable qualities and undersells any valid critiques — when it mentions them at all. So little effort goes into actually exploring Reagan’s life that the film plays like a laundry list of accomplishments, not a drama. Wikipedia pages have more oomph.

The cast of “Reagan” flounders, to say the least. Quaid, normally a strong actor, seems to be exerting most of his energy keeping Reagan’s trademarked, cheery rasp in constant play, and comes across as childlike when he doesn’t come across as weirdly hardened. Then again, the movie does suggest (again and again, presumably accidentally) that his convictions may have stemmed from his naiveté. So maybe that’s a more clever acting decision than it appears at a glance.

Jon Voight is in full exposition mode, and rattles off information like a college professor who’s got tenure and just editorializes now. Every scene portraying Ivanov as a younger man suffers from Voight’s deeply unconvincing makeup, which doesn’t so much make him look younger as it does make it look like he, you know, applied bad makeup. Voight does get the film’s one shining moment: a genuinely funny montage of multiple Soviet leaders dying in quick succession. As he hands each one paperwork, they each cough ominously, and then it cuts to their funeral, one after another. History is wild sometimes.

Penelope Ann Miller emerges with her respectability intact, trying to bring some energy and, when possible, a modicum of depth to a role that’s staggeringly underwritten. Nancy Reagan was born to be a supporting player, the way “Reagan” tells it, dutifully falling in line with whatever her husband wants and supporting him in every endeavor, only pushing back when he needs an ego boost.

“You look twenty years younger than you are!” Nancy yells at him, apparently oblivious to Quaid’s also-unconvincing makeup. It’s a thankless role, but Miller should be thanked anyway for trying as hard as she does.

Eventually Reagan becomes president and does  everything right — even the stuff he did wrong. His controversial decision to fire air traffic controllers for going on strike, which had lasting negative consequences, is portrayed as a simple heroic act. A few fleeting shots of queer protesters grossly diminishes his egregious and deadly mishandling of the AIDS epidemic and suggests it wasn’t a big deal at all. His support for South African apartheid is suspiciously unmentioned. The part he played in empowering Osama bin Laden apparently wasn’t historically significant either. Reagan, according to “Reagan,” had no flaws and made no mistakes, no matter what the people who lived through it say.

Director Sean McNamara has had a remarkably eclectic career, directing hit films like “Soul Surfer,” beloved shows like “The Secret World of Alex Mack” and “That’s So Raven,” and oddities like “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain” and “The King’s Daughter.” It’s not easy to navigate an extensive production like “Reagan” and he manages that task, but the footage never coalesces into a meaningful story.

It’s a series of one thing that happens, followed by another, often without real connective tissue. There probably hasn’t been a presidential biopic this tedious in 80 years, not since Henry King’s “Wilson” back in 1944. That once-notorious, now-forgotten box office dud somehow won five Oscars. “Reagan” probably won’t, not unless they introduce five new categories just for hagiographies. Or for unintentional comedies.

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‘AfrAId’ Review: Virtual Mary Poppins Becomes Vengeful HAL in Standard Blumhouse Thriller

Playing on current fears around artificial intelligence, Chris Weitz’s tale of a family imperiled by its virtual assistant plumbs sci-fi horror terrain to familiar, then ineffectual ends.

By Dennis Harvey

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That thing is AIA, a “next-generation digital assistant” that is a sort of “super-Alexa.” Speaking in the relatable vocal tones of Cumulative employee Melody (Havana Rose Liu), it has the world’s knowledge at its fingertips, and makes short work of figuring out this family’s needs, both practical and psychological. While everyone is skeptical at first, AIA soon impresses with a Mary Poppins-like effect on the household. “She” comes up with clever incentives for the kids to do chores; encourages Meredith in completing the doctoral thesis she’d abandoned to be a stay-at-home mother; and proves adept at shoring up individual insecurities. When Iris makes a terrible judgment call, pressured by Sawyer to send him a nude pic, it is AIA that turns a potential malicious viral disaster into a win.

But AIA was only able to do that because it had already infiltrated all the family members’ devices, monitoring their activities and even making decisions for them without consent. While it appears to operate beneficently, there is an unsettling edge to a force so pervasive, uncontrolled, sometimes deceiving and occasionally vindictive. 

Once Curtis decides something sketchy is going on, “AfrAId” abruptly drops any effort toward narrative deliberation or character nuance. From about the midway point, the film becomes hectic without much actual suspense, implausible without being particularly imaginative. A home-invasion climax falls awkwardly flat, and while the fadeout’s conceptual leap might’ve worked in a more ambitious framework, this literal-minded Blumhouse programmer lacks the satirical bite, metaphorical weight or physical scale to pull it off. 

That’s too bad, because early on Weitz provides enough texturing for what’s never more than a familiar genre exercise to seem like it will be at least a cut above average. But in vanishing into a half-baked muddle of borrowed ideas from better movies, executed with slick impersonality and strictly PG-13 scares, “AfrAId” ends up a cut below that median — a film that’s in a hurry to wrap up before it’s developed its themes, or found a groove. 

While the performances and design contributions are perfectly fine, there is surely something lacking when a thriller’s most distinctive element is that the production designer (David Brisbin) actually makes this family’s home looked lived in. Their clutter, at least, is one aspect that feels thoughtfully rooted in the real world.

Reviewed at AMC Metreon 16, San Francisco, Aug. 29, 2024. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 84 MIN.

• Production: A Columbia Pictures release, presented with Blumhouse of a Depth Of Field production. Producers: Jason Blum, Andrew Miano, Chris Weitz. Executive producers: Beatriz Sequeira, Paul O. Davis, Dan Balgoyen, Britta Rowings. 
• Crew: Director, writer: Chris Weitz. Camera: Javier Aguirresarobe. Editors: Priscilla Nedd Friendly, Tim Alverson. Music: Alex Weston
• With: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, Ashley Romans, Greg Hill, Riki Lindhome, Wyatt Linder, Isaac Bae, Todd Waring, Bennett Curran, David Dasmalchian, Keith Carradine.

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Even With Angelina Jolie, Maria Struggles to Hit the High Notes

In Maria, a biopic of the late, great opera singer Maria Callas that premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, Angelina Jolie tackles her first big leading role in three years—and her first major dramatic role in far longer. She was, it seems, drawn to director Pablo Larraín ’s woozy picture of an icon in decline, perhaps because Larraín has done this before, with good results for his actors.

Maria is the third film in Larraín’s series of interior, nonlinear studies of famous women at a crossroads. Jackie follows Jacqueline Kennedy in the days immediately after the assassination of her husband. Spencer peers in on Princess Diana as she spends one last miserable weekend with then Prince Charles and his family. Larraín has developed something of a brand, an upending of biopic norms that seeks to uncover core emotional truth rather than dutifully reenact a series of events. It worked brilliantly in the strangely frightening Jackie, slightly less so in the stiflingly gloomy Spencer.

Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film. With a few details removed, Maria could be about any grand diva, this blurry picture of a woman swanning through the final week of her life. Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight don’t convince us of the iconography; they shoot past artful abstraction and land in the realm of vagueness.

This could partly be blamed on their choice of subject. Callas, who died at 53 in 1977, was certainly a legend of the opera world, renowned around the globe. She suffered her fair share of tragedies and tabloid scandals. But she does not engender the same sort of international fascination associated with Jackie and Diana, such enduring emblems of glamour and privilege darkened by cruel twists of fate. I’d imagine that most audience members will walk into Maria with fewer preconceived notions, less readiness to fill in the gaps in Larraín’s portraiture. His particular trick proves less effective when it isn’t subverting or complicating long-held ideas about a person.

What biographical information the film does contain is clunkily delivered. In black-and-white flashback, we learn that Callas was essentially pimped out by her own mother during the Second World War, a trauma that this version of Callas never recovers from. That’s compelling pathology, but Larraín doesn’t linger on it. He’s more interested in Callas’s affair with Aristotle Onassis ( Haluk Bilginer ), which would eventually be undone by Onassis’s marriage to Jackie Kennedy. (Perhaps Larraín is quite deliberately looping back on himself.) The film trusts we will feel the grand drama of this tortured romance, but such swells of emotion never arrive. Similarly undercooked and overly telegraphed are Callas’s hallucinatory musings about life, art, and career, given to an imagined interviewer played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. There is little insight to be found in these interludes, coy and generic as they are.

Still, Jolie brings some life to this programmatic exercise. She murmurs and laments in a pleasing midcentury accent, one that doesn’t sound much like the real Callas’s but is a nifty bit of transformation anyway. Jolie keenly renders Callas’s regret and wounded pride, which flicker across her face as she tries to keep her head held as high as a prima donna’s should be. She doesn’t push as far into inner depths as Natalie Portman did in Jackie, but that’s not exactly being asked of Jolie here. In some ways she is meant only to be a physical manifestation of the music—recordings of Callas that play throughout the film, sometimes mixed in with Jolie’s own singing. Jolie struggles in these scenes, never quite convincing us that these huge notes and plaintive lilts are actually coming from her. Whether that’s a problem with Jolie’s performance or the postproduction sound-matching process, the film suffers for it. These moments of Callas lost in song, or struggling through it, are the tentpoles of Maria, but they prove pretty wobbly.

The uncanny-valley singing is representative of the fussy artifice of Maria as a whole. Our admiration for the ardor Larraín feels for these oft-misunderstood women, figures battered and ennobled by the forces of money and history, begins to curdle. With Spencer and especially with Maria, the director seems less like he is reaching for understanding and more like he is bending his subjects’ legacies toward his preferred style—as if he has been merely searching for tragic women of the past to send wandering around his luxe, prefabricated haunted houses.

I still prefer his mode of biography to the standard varietal—at least in these sorts of films, there is some attempt to grapple with the ineffable. But should Larraín continue this project, it might serve him well to adjust the approach. Perhaps he could turn his focus to characters like the ones sensitively played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher in Maria, a doting butler and cook who tend to their ailing employer with the care of concerned family members. Through their quiet and despairing presence, Maria hits on something stirring, the idea that these two individuals might be the last people on earth who truly know this dying star. It’s only in their eyes that we catch the glimmering reflection of something Maria otherwise denies us: a woman in full.

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Shekar Movie Review: An engrossing thriller

Jeevitha Rajasekhar's latest directorial Shekar is a compelling investigative thriller that throws light on the life of a retired police constable, who is going through emotional turmoil. An official remake of the Malayalam crime thriller Joseph (2018), Jeevitha stays mostly faithful to the blueprint of the original film aside from making it tight and crisp in the second hour.

Cast: Dr Rajasekhar, Shivani Rajasekhar, Athmiya Rajan, Muskaan Khubchandani Director: Jeevitha Rajasekhar

Shekar ( Dr Rajasekhar ) is a man of restrained emotions and is popular in his department for his adept investigative skills. Shekhar and three of his friends lead an undisciplined retired life and the group does not miss an opportunity to use their expertise when there's a suspicious case in the town. He is still the go-to guy for his superiors and he doesn't hesitate to help them crack unsolved murder cases. After tracing the culprit behind a twin murder case, Shekar returns to his home only to be haunted by the memories of his ex-wife Indu (Athmiya Rajan) and daughter Geetha ( Shivani Rajasekhar ). He couldn't give up on the happiest memories and the cheerful life he spent with his loved ones and we get to see the many layers and sublayers of his life as the back story begins to unfold.

Deftly switching between the twin tragedies and the mastery in personal crime scene investigation, Shekar slowly draws you into the suspense at the heart of its plot. The story doesn’t veer off into comedy tracks and romances either — at least not too much. Most of the twists are smartly revealed, and Shekar builds on the little unexpected things. With mobile tower tracking, Benzidine test (for detection of bloodstains), call dumping, data matching, creating a plan, and providing a picture of events serving as key plot points, you get the sense of being consistently invested in the outcome of the investigation.

The screenplay unravels skillfully but also quite sluggishly, especially in the first half which ends in a fantastic twist. The second hour picks up the pace with interesting plot twists and detailing what is the mission and who Shekar’s target is. Jeevitha deserves applause for constructing Shekar’s world to perfection —  be it his present life with his friends, his love story in the past, and his strained relationship with his wife. She has also handled the relationship between Shekar and Mallikharjun (Kishore), his ex-wife’s husband, in a mature way. But I am unable to understand why Mallikharjun from the very first scene has immense respect for Shekar and perhaps, some detailing into their acquaintance would have made things a bit more interesting. The songs too sync well with the narrative and perfectly complement the flashback sequences. Araku Valley makes for an evocative setting, and Jeevitha Rajasekhar relies heavily on scenic beauty.

Then there are those plot holes like the ease with which Shekar goes in and out of people’s homes at will. The director failed to bring the nail-biting suspense that will keep the viewers enthralled from start to finish. As with many films in the genre, we’re required to take a giant leap of faith when faced with the facts of the crimes. The climax coated with an underlying message seems stretched and underwhelming.

What helps Shekar is its brilliant cast of actors, each never trying to dominate the other, but performing committed to their characters. Dr Rajasekhar brings to the table what only he can as the anguished father, emotional husband and abandoned lover, who hid his feelings under his tired eyes. He is fantastic in the character, conveying angst, guilt and enthusiasm in everything from his body language to his dialogues. Sameer, Bharani and Abhinav Gomatam are reliably solid as Shekar's friends. Athmiya Rajan makes an impression, while Muskaan Khubchandani, who appears in the flashback, portrays heart-rendering emotions with ease. In fact, it is these characters that provide the emotional wallop to the story. Shivani Rajasekhar, although billed as a special appearance, delivers a subtle act. Kishore is alright.

Anup Rubens's background score is the soul of the film, while Mallikarjuna Naragani's cinematography is eye-catching as in the original.

Overall, Shekar is an engrossing thriller that benefits from efficient direction and an inherently riveting plot (originally written by Shahi Kabir). The film seldom loses its grip or your attention and stays engaging when it focuses on its core plot.

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