Shoot at sight. Point blank. In different ways that's exactly what Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) and his characters do in Department . While his cop heroes Sanjay Dutt, Rana Daggubati and their hazily sketched compatriots (one of whom looks like Deepak Tijori) go on a cleansing rampage against socio-paths, RGV goes on his own trip, shooting characters at angles you've never seen them being shot. They don't always look fetching with their stained teeth and dirty nails showing up in embarrassing close-ups. So, who said life in cinema is about postcard pictures? Welcome to RGV's world of muck and mayhem. The one definite thing that must be said about RGV is that his exploration of the nexus between the law and the underworld is ceaselessly seeking new modes of storytelling. Department is one breathless surge of aggression and violence. Shot with cameras that capture the actors at their quirkiest and most candid, the film is not for those who think cinema is all about style. RGV left his stylish days behind in Rangeela and Company . Repeatedly and mercilessly RGV dismantles all conventions of pretty storytelling and aims for the jugular. The camera angles are often much too casual to be considered 'cinematic'. But breaking rules is a given in RGV's cinema. He breaks them in Department in a noisy rush of agitated images that go well with the edgy fidgety characters. Not all the characters work. Vijay Raaz as a whiny dhoti -clad gangster and debutant Madhu Malini as a tartish sharp-shooter are a scream. The talented Abhimanyu Singh has a tough time trying to maintain an equilibrium between the two unintentionally comical evil doers. The dialogues these gangsters exchange try so hard to be real they end up being howlers. It's like eavesdropping on a conversation between two pathologists. The camera, manned by no official Director Of Photography (and it shows), goes through the character's legs, into their nostrils, over their armpits…in this film about cops who do their own thing. Department is a brutal film. There's no room here for emotions. Even when Sanjay Dutt playing a senior cop goes home his wife, played by Laxmi Manchu, speaking in a strangely loud tone, he talks to her in unsentimental tones. There's more feeling in the two cops, Sanjay and Rana's buddy-buddy talk, in the line of duty. There's a long history in cinema of cops striking a rapport on the beat. Sanjay and Rana are no Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. But then this is no Lethal Weapon . The action here is a strange mix of street aggression and stylized stunts. While scenes of Rana chasing goons through claustrophobic crowded areas of Mumbai are vintage Varma, the climactic fist-to-fist between Rana and Sanjay proves a battle of unequal titans. One of the two actors being just too agile for the other. What grabs your attention in this oft-told tale of the cops resorting to extra-constitutional means to 'cleanse' the city is the frenetic pacing. The characters are constantly on the move. Even Amitabh Bachchan, while taking sardonic jibes at a 'system' that is corroded, is seen restlessly circling Sanjay or Rana, depending on which of the two the wily wizened politicians is provoked into action. Not surprisingly Amitabh's netagiri provides the liveliest interludes in the proceedings. He seems to be having the most fun even when saddled with dialogues that must have sounded far funnier on paper than they do in their delivery. Among the rest of the cast, Rana with his restrained ruggedness stands tall. What Department delivers is yet another RGV product that takes Hindi cinema's crime genre away from conventional storytelling. There are no punctuations except exclamation marks, no speed-breakers except songs, which are terribly screechy and grating with Nathalia Kaur's item number hitting rock-bottom, and no way out for these restless law-enforcers than to take the law in their own hands. The world of Department is anarchic, destructive and apocalyptic. The narrative format imposed on the world of gangsterism is freewheeling almost chaotic. Violence and death are written into the DNA of the characters. Department tells a virile story with no patience for sappy humbug. It's not meant for those who think lovers laughing their way into death, as they did in Ishaqzaade , are the last words in ruinous relationships. In Department , the characters share a far more intimate bonding with their guns than with their friends.  

This is a Yash Chopra production and the story has been co-written by Aditya Chopra, but no love story could be more unlike a Yash Raj Films romance than Ishaqzaade . It revolves around two small-town lovebirds (or call them what you will), who are neither as meek as songbirds nor do they speak the lingo of soft romantic love in the splendour of solitude. Their passion grows in the shadows of life-threatening violence. So what's new? Not much really, except for the grungy, downbeat treatment that writer-director Habib Faisal brings to the table for this oft-told story of impossible love played out in a nondescript north Indian town. But that might militate against the core YRF philosophy: Ishaqzaade isn't the sort of gossamer-coated crowd-pleaser that the banner specialises in. The lovers in Ishaqzaade belong to two families that are divided by both politics and religion. The boy is a Hindu, the girl a Muslim. The patriarchs of the two clans, Surya Chauhan and Aftab Qureishi, are fierce political rivals engaged in a see-saw electoral battle in a town called Almore. Hatred is the dominant emotion in this part of the world and street violence is always only a gunshot away. In this grimy milieu dominated by the two warring groups baying for each other's blood, love is low priority. Cloaked in the violent love story that is Ishaqzaade is a message that could not have been better timed. The film has opened in the multiplexes hours after a senior Uttar Pradesh police officer declared in front of TV cameras that he would shoot his daughter dead if she were to elope. That very mindset is deeply entrenched in the world that Habib Faisal depicts. The boy, Parma (debutant Arjun Kapoor), and the girl, Zoya (one-film-old Parineeti Chopra), have hated each other ever since they can remember. Things come to a head when Parma and his cousins, Dharma and Karma, storm a party at the Qureishi mansion and zip away with a dancing girl, Chand Bibi (Gauhar Khan). To avenge the humiliation, Zoya confronts Parma outside her college and slaps him. The boy plots revenge. The act of vendetta – he literally sleeps with the enemy to teach her a lesson – has tragic consequences. Parma loses his widowed mother in the aftermath. As circumstances go out of hand and the two patriarchs begin to worry about their political fortunes, Parma finds himself on the run with the girl, with both families in pursuit like a pack of hungry wolves. No escape, no retreat, no surrender: they are up against a dead-end where hope dies quickly. Sadly, Ishaqzaade isn't quite as pulsating as the plot line might suggest. The script throws up some surprises all right, but the story of inter-religious love does not have legs robust enough to gallop all the way through to the end with sustained energy. After a startling end to the first half, the film's pace drops several notches in the second half as the lovers seek refuge in Chand Bibi's brothel. “There is peace here,” Zoya retorts when Parma reminds her that they cannot live in a whorehouse forever. The boy replies: “Do you want the whole country to be turned into a brothel for peace to reign?” Well, well! This cinematic plea against honour killing lacks crackle and fizz for want of true intensity. However, Faisal Habib creates the small town environment with an eye for detail, with many of the interactions between the young foes-turned-lovers taking place in and around a train station, in abandoned coaches and decrepit yards.. It is a typical upcountry semi-urban space – dusty, crowded and cacophonous - with genuine and tangible dimensions. The main characters, too, are by and large believable, especially because the roles are essayed by young actors who look real. The hero isn't a sculpted hunk; the heroine is, at best, a pretty girl next door. However, the supporting cast, with the exception of Gauhar Khan, make little impression. That leaves too much of a load on the inexperienced leads. If only Arjun Kapoor's dialogue delivery had greater punch and Parineeti Chopra could pull off the emotional moments without going shrill, Ishaqzaade would have been a markedly better film. 

It was only a few weeks ago that producer Vikram Bhatt unleashed Hate Story , an erotic thriller about a woman scorned in the here and now. He’s back, this time as director, with another not-so-erotic thriller about a damsel in grave distress not just in this life but also in many others. Grave is the operative word here for this tale spans across as many as five centuries and as many different stories involving the same star-crossed lady. The protagonist dies many deaths, turns in her grave several times over, and then returns repeatedly for another shot at elusive ishq . It is love unrequited, violated, denied. At the concept level, Dangerous Ishhq does have something going for it beyond the stereoscopic 3D that it has been filmed in. Hindi movie fans are accustomed to high-pitched reincarnation dramas in which characters are reborn in order to complete unfinished business a la Karan Arjun. But this one isn’t only about rebirth. It is just as much about several deaths, loves, betrayals and slayings that go all the back to 17th century Rajasthan, to an era and place where love and longing meant much moaning and groaning under the weight of feudal excesses. The heroine pines for her lover (played by different actors in different eras) across lifetimes only to have circumstances and inimical forces pull her apart from the object of her affection. Yes, you’ve guessed it, Dangerous Ishhq ventures into the domain of past life regression in a rather overstuffed narrative about a supermodel who sees strange visions and must decipher them quickly in order to rescue her lover, the scion of a business family. The guy has been abducted by a foe who has been gunning for the woman for centuries. Karisma Kapur, back on the screen after a nine-year hiatus, continues from where she left off, donning several looks, going the whole distance in justifying her return to the thick of the action, and delivering a performance that is competent, if not entirely convincing. The screenplay is consistent in its convolutions and the further back it goes in time the less sense it seems to make. Sanjana (Karisma) and her beau Rohan (Rajneesh Duggal) are the talk of the town. The high-flying supermodel nixes a prestigious Paris assignment because a whisper in her head tells her that something is about to go amiss. Her lover is kidnapped. Her life is thrown into turmoil. From there on, it is past forward all the way. Part of the time travel, one must confess, is intriguing, if nothing else. But the plot is riddled with moments that stretch credulity to snapping point. The female protagonist is subjected to hypnosis sessions in a bid to help her understand who or what is out to make her life miserable. The truth that emerges and the path that the film takes to get there is anything but hypnotic. The fact that this is Karisma’s comeback vehicle is only of academic interest. So is the film’s toying with the theme of the past living on in the present. The two don’t quite mesh seamlessly enough on the screen to make an impact. You could watch the film for one or the other reason. Karisma makes a fair fist of it. The plot is a problem. It is all over the place. 

Charlie Chaplin once said, "All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl." Debutante feature film director Ashvin Kumar applies the same principle for a horror film, replacing the park with a forest and throwing in the woman's husband, a policeman's son, and a guard, and binds them all with a man-eating leopard. Though The Forest is full of cliches of its genre, there are elements that one can really cheer for in this low-budget, independent film. A couple, Radhan (Nandana Sen) and Pritam (Ankur Vikal), come to a jungle resort in the Kumau Valley. Here they find an old friend Abhishek (Javed Jaffrey), who is a cop in the region and lives with his son. As they frolic around the forest, trying to sort dormant issues between one another, a man-eating leopard is readying for the kill. In the 1952 film The Bad And The Beautiful directed by Vincente Minnelli, filmmakers realised that what actually scares people in a horror film is not horrible creatures, but the fear of something lurking in the dark. Horror lies not in what is visible, but in that which is not and the fear of what it can do to you. That is exactly what Kumar does to good effect, using shadows and sounds instead of the actual leopard who barely occupies five minutes of screen time. The cinematography of the film, especially the shots of the jungle taken by Naresh and Rajesh Bedi, is breathtaking. And the actors do a fairly good job of what they are offered. Yet, there's hardly anything that comes as a surprise as the film panders to known cliches of the horror and thriller genre. Thus, the leopard becomes only secondary to the horror the characters' own inner selves, struggling against themselves and those closest to them. That this is not done in an overbearing manner makes one comfortable in the cliches. The major drawbacks of the film are the many lapses in writing, which forgets to close some loopholes or better explain others. There is a track of an ash-wearing mysterious woman which does not find a logical conclusion. There's even a scene where Radha sees the reflection of a woman in the mirror. The scene, it seems, was added just to lend more chill to the film and like a few other scenes, seems completely disjointed from the story. The leopard is shown to be swift and powerful enough to just carry off people magically. Agreed that these mythical elements were required to build the leopard's character, but a little more attention to detail like the addition of sound of being pulled in the gap during the person's disappearance would have made it that much more believable. The point of view of the leopard is also done very badly. One of the reasons that makes the leopard so deadly is his sight which is sharper than that of humans. To show his vision to be hazy does not make sense. The typical ending would have been where some or all of the humans, and definitely the terrorising animal, die. Though there is death, the ending is sensitive and original as the writer-director does something unexpected yet believable. This shows the sensitive side of the film whose intention is not just to thrill, but also raise issues of conservation. 

There is a memorable moment of flushed pain at the end of this textured film on arms and the mangled, when Randeep Hooda symbolically throws out his wife's memories from the car window.<br><br> Life's like that. Sometimes you need to just roll down the window and throw away the extra baggage that you carry around in the name of love and commitment.<br><br> Short of artificial affections Jannat 2 is easily the best film from the Bhatt camp since Gangster . Neither as gruesome as Murder 2 nor as bland as Blood Money , the movie brings forward some inspired writing and two watchable performances that lend a blend of the bitter and the biting to the proceedings.<br><br> Shot in the dark ember hues of a scorching humid sweltering May evening when all things bright and beautiful shrivel up in the heat, Jannat 2 is not for the squeamish. Once you stop wincing at the volley of abuses (some of them quite unnecessary, I thought) the movie sucks you into its murky world of illegal arms and other soul-battering deals with the devil.<br><br> Don't believe the silly promotional trailers of the movie. There is nothing funny, flippant, flighty or farcical about this film. It's a brooding intense study of the troubled relationship between a burnt-out alcoholic cop (Randeep Hooda, spectacular in his devastated avatar) and a gun dealer who turns police informer when love hits him where it hurts the most.<br><br> Emraan Hashmi as Sonu Dilli, kind of takes over the film from the first frame. He loves his character and embraces it unconditionally. He gets to play all the roles that his fans like to see him in-including the incorrigible kisser's part - and he does them all effectively.<br><br> But Hashmi is best at expressing the wonderment and self-abnegation of love.<br><br> The courtship scenes with the self-important doctor (debutante Esha Gupta) find Hashmi expressing a kind of bewildered intensity that makes you believe this guy can give up a life of crime for the girl.<br><br> But the film belongs to Randeep Hooda, make no mistake about that. Every word he speaks is delivered with a sledgehammer's impact. Playing a cop grieving for his murdered wife Hooda's angst spills out of every shot. You can't take your eyes off the screen when he is around.<br><br> The resonant writing (Shagufta Rafique) restricts the dramatic tension to the two principal male actors. These two guys love to hate each other. All the energy that the narration so effectively exudes emanates from the two main actors and then spills out into various directions. Somewhere in the mid-section the plot begins to get somewhat predictable and baggy, what with arms dealer Manish Choudhary snarling his threats so loud, you wonder if villainy in our films got stranded in the 1970s.<br><br> But then comes the end-game. The climax chase shot in a mosque's courtyard is absolutely heart-in-the-mouth. And then comes the end-game where Mahesh Bhatt's masterly touch comes into play with such luminous alacrity that that you are left finally with a film that tells us it is easier to live with hatred than pain.<br><br> Director Kunal Deshmukh demonstrates a far firmer grip over his characters and plot this time than he did in politically correct Jannat and the soggy Tum Miley .<br><br> Besides Hooda and Hashmi who bring to the narrative a rugged immediacy, the film pitches forward some brilliant supporting performances by little-known actors like Zeeshan Mohammed Ayub (playing Hashmi's sidekick) and Brijendra Kala (Hooda's right-hand man).<br><br> Delhi, the city that houses many Bollywood tales of late, is shot by cinematographer Bobby Singh in shades of grey and dusty brown. 

Is old age the wait for the inevitable? But this inevitable was staring even in youth. Why is it that as we get older we get tired to try new things. And what if circumstances force us to do exactly that? Will we rediscover the zest for life or will we give up without a fight because we believe we're too old to fight? The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Shakespeare In Love director John Madden confronts these questions in a hilarious, adventurous, light-hearted and yet poignant way. It is one of the best 'exotic' films to have come into theatres in a longtime. Seven British retirees 'outsource' their retirement to a reasonably priced and exotic hotel in Jaipur, India. Here their dreams of final peaceful days are shattered as they find that the truth about this retirement home had been 'photo-shopped'. Instead of leisure, they are confronted with their own pasts and prejudices and each is forced to discover the meaning of life, a new. The first and most important thing you'll notice is its incredible wit. The writing, based on a novel by Deborah Moggach, is simply stunning with wit that is hilarious without being patronising. Sample this - an old woman says: "I don't even buy green bananas. I can't plan so far ahead." Another says: "What I can't pronounce, I don't eat." Yet another comment: "I'm your wife. Have we met?" Lines like these pop at regular intervals invigorating the soul of a cineaste desperate for such intelligent dialogues in cinema. The focus of the film, and all its sub plots, is clearly age and time. Time becomes a metaphor to entice viewers to look inside themselves and find their own relationship with time and age. Thus, it might be a film situated in the stories of 'old' people, in reality, it is about all of us finding ourselves. It will have a resonance across ages. The script is extremely intelligent and manages to find the common between India and Britain e.g. when Tom Wilkinson plays cricket with kids on the street. That scene is meant not just to bridge the gap between Britain and India, but also between age and youth. It also makes a comment on many evils plaguing the county, like the existence of caste hierarchy and the opposition to homosexuality in a very staid and gentle manner. The casting is a charm. If the world were not so preoccupied with youth and beauty, one would have called this one of the best ensemble ever. And a casting coup it indeed is, not of stars in an "Avengers" sort of way, but real actors who breathe so much life into what they play that they stop being the person they are but the part they play. Almost every one of the cast, be it Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, or even our very own Lillette Dubey are spectacular in their roles. The only 'actor' who irritates this impeccable ensemble is Dev Patel. However, one guesses that as a new representative of Diaspora actors, no British or Hollywood film set in India can be complete without him. Besides the special effects laden films, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is the type of beautiful little films with big hearts for whom big screens are made. Go watch this one. You'll have the fun, touching ride of your life.  

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are snuggled warmly in their comfort zone in the chilly horror-comedy Dark Shadows , their eighth collaboration as director and star, respectively, and their weakest by far. You don't need to know a thing about the late-'60s Dark Shadows TV series that provides the inspiration. Tonally, thematically, visually, you've seen this movie before, with its oddball characters, skies in varying shades of gray and a foreboding sense of gothic mystery. No one gets challenged here; no one gets pushed.<br><br> It's actually a wonder that Depp hasn't played a vampire before; still, his long-undead Barnabas Collins, who's been buried alive for nearly two centuries and suddenly finds himself back in his insular Maine hometown in 1972, fits squarely within his well-honed on-screen persona. He thinks he's quite the charmer, but he's actually a bit awkward, and that contradiction provides the main source of humour. Or at least, it's supposed to. The script from Seth Grahame-Smith ( Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ) allows its family full of weirdos to shine intermittently but they rarely interact with each other; each functions in his or her own self-consciously quirky bubble. Too often, Dark Shadows is crammed with hacky, obvious, fish-out-of-water gags, as Barnabas tries to make sense of this strange new world. He struggles to understand modern romance as he courts the family's delicate, wide-eyed nanny and hopes to fit in by smoking pot with the local hippies. And how is this tiny Karen Carpenter person singing to him from inside the television set? Ho ho! At the same time, Dark Shadows feels too languid, bogged down as it is with an obsessive eye for period costumes (the work of Colleen Atwood) and interior details rather than offering anything resembling an engaging story. And by the time Burton finally puts his patented flair for visual effects to its best use, in a climactic showdown between Barnabas and the witch who cursed him (the va-va-voomy Eva Green), it's too late. A little background here: As a child, Barnabas and his wealthy family sailed from England in 1750 and founded the fishing village of Collinsport in coastal Maine. They spent 15 years building the grand Collinwood Manor, where a maid named Angelique (Green) loved Barnabas passionately, but he never returned her affections. Because she felt scorned — and happened to be a witch — she turned him into a vampire, chained him up and stuck him in a coffin in the ground. Nearly 200 years later, a construction crew unearths him and sets him free. When he stumbles back to his once-stately home, he finds it falling apart, along with the fishing empire that has been conquered by a competitor named Angel (Green, again). The few family members who remain are random and reclusive: matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), the only one who knows his true identity; her weasel of a brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller); her rebellious teen daughter, Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz); and Roger's 10-year-old son David (Gully McGrath), who sees dead people. There's also David's perpetually drunk psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Burton regular Helena Bonham Carter); the home's beleaguered caretaker, Willie (Jackie Earle Haley); and the new governess, Victoria (Bella Heathcote), who bears a striking resemblance to Barnabas' long-ago love and has a few secrets of her own. That's a lot of exposition, huh? And the film itself takes awhile to get going as it establishes all those characters and back stories. Once there, it seems to have nowhere to go — out of the shadows or into the light, it doesn't really matter either way. 

The Avengers takes all your wildest expectations and smashes them like the Hulk - it’s everything you want in a superhero film, and more. The Avengers is a result of the biggest build-up in cinema history, with the quartet of Iron Man and its sequel, The Incredible Hulk , Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger made to pave the way for an epic boss fight, and it delivers in thoroughly awesome ways. Nearly every minute of The Avengers throbs with heart-pounding fun, from the big opening apocalyptic scene at the S.H.I.E.L.D base to the gargantuan effects-soaked final battle. Director Joss Whedon combines extremely clever lines, bombastic CGI with unexpected character development, and elevates the overused superhero genre to something much more substantial. He completely resists the temptation to make a dark brooding drama, and in taking a more gregarious direction, the film becomes infinitely more refreshing. Firstly, you are unlikely to find a more likable ensemble of characters in any film anywhere. Not only do you get to witness the spectacle of Iron Man and Captain America fight alongside each other, and The Hulk and Thor smashing people together, but you’re also greeted with terrific witty back and forth banter between them all. It’s clear that Joss Whedon is crazy about comic books and he balances the large and iconic cast of characters with the passionate dexterity of a 14-year-old genius surgeon. The plot is naturally an excuse to get the big guys together. Baddie Asgardian Loki (Tom Hiddleston) arrives on earth to rule humans and has an alien army to enforce his regime. To deal with the threat, S.H.I.E.L.D director Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) assembles the motley group of Avengers to kick copious amounts of alien buttock and defend the planet. But putting all these guys in a single room doesn’t go too smoothly initially — they bicker hilariously and bombard each other with scathing one-liners. While Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is super serious and methodical, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is amusingly narcissistic, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is a vengeful foreigner, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is menthol cool and sexy as hell, and unlike in her previous appearance, she is smart and suave. There’s an interesting twist to Hawkeye’s (Jeremy Renner) character, but Mark Ruffalo brings a wonderful new shade to Bruce Banner and really steals the show as the Hulk. The special effects are colossal and eye popping, and there are plenty of bigger than life moments. In fact the whole second half is one ambitious action scene grander than all the other Marvel films put together. Tom Hiddleston makes a very interesting villain, and a scene involving him and the Hulk towards the end will leave your face with the widest possible grin. Samuel L Jackson is his usual pulpy self and Joss Whedon goes one step further and gives Agent Coulson (Cobie Smulders) a meatier role. The Avengers took almost 50 years to appear on screen together, and the wait has indeed been worthwhile. It’s one of the most entertaining films ever made - it’s total delight to just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.  

If any film should be redone in 3-D, it's Titanic . And if any filmmaker should be the one doing the redoing, it's James Cameron. He's been a pioneer in advancing this cinematic technology for years now, from his underwater documentaries to the record-breaking juggernaut that is Avatar . And so ironically, for a film that hasn't got an ounce of understatement in its three-hour-plus running time, Titanic in 3-D is really rather subtle and finely tuned. There's nothing gimmicky about the conversion process; it's immersive, it actually enhances the viewing experience the way a third dimension ideally should. It's also gorgeous: crisp and tactile, warm and inviting — until all hell breaks loose, that is. So often when 2-D films are transformed into 3-D, they're done so hastily with results that are murky and inaccessible. Cameron clearly took his time here — 60 weeks, to be exact, with a team of 300 people working on a frame-by-frame reconstruction to add the illusion of depth. So while the romantic first half of the film remains more emotionally compelling, the disastrous second half has become even more visually dazzling. If you're going to devote an afternoon to Titanic again, you want to feel as if you're on that boat when it snaps in half. And you will. No, Cameron didn't rewrite the ending, or history. The maiden voyage of the R.M.S. Titanic still goes down after a fateful collision with an iceberg. As writer and director, Cameron has stayed true to the content of his 1997 film, the winner of 11 Oscars including best picture — and that includes his clunky script filled with hokey dialogue and broad characters. No amount of 3-D wizardry can make Billy Zane's villainous millionaire leap off the screen and seem like a fully fleshed-out human being, but his moustache-twirling machinations are still amusing. What also remains intact is the earnestness of Titanic , the absence of snark or irony, and the sensation that you're watching a big, ambitious, good-old-fashioned spectacle that can withstand the test of time. Sure, a lot of the 'present-day' framing device material looks dated — that's a sweet mullet and earring you've got there, Bill Paxton — but the budding, forbidden love affair between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet is as infectious as ever. Let's recap the plot real quickly: Paxton's character and his crew are exploring the underwater remains of the shipwrecked Titanic looking for the rare, priceless Heart of the Ocean pendant. Its original owner, Rose (Gloria Stuart), who's now about 100 years old, comes forward to say it belonged to her and share her story of survival. Flashback to April 1912, and the launch of the world's biggest and most expensive cruise ship, one that's supposedly unsinkable. Young, well-bred Rose (Winslet) is on board with her smarmy, controlling fiancé Cal (Zane) and her condescending, old-money mother (Frances Fisher). But so is the poor but resourceful artist Jack (DiCaprio), who's made his way onto the ship with a winning poker hand. Rose is more free-thinking than she looks, Jack is more charismatic than he looks, and in no time he's sketching her naked and they're doing it in the back seat of a car in the cargo hold. We're condensing a bit here. Anyway, you know the story by now, but the 3-D actually makes it seem new in some ways. The costumes look more refined, the sense of vertigo feels more severe, the rushing water feels more immediate. And it's just fun to see the buxom, feisty Winslet and boyish, charming DiCaprio in the roles that made them superstars on the big screen once more. That's another thing: If you're going to see Titanic in 3-D, see it with people who loved the movie the first time; I have to admit I was not one of them back then but found myself surprisingly more engaged this time around. It's so familiar, so full of lines and moments that are ingrained in the culture. Take DiCaprio's joyous exclamation "I'm the king of the world!" for example. You know it's coming but it's just so tantalising, you may feel compelled to shout it along with him. You may even want to stick around through the credits to belt out the film's anthem, My Heart Will Go On , right along with Celine Dion. No one here will judge you. Besides, it's going to be stuck in your head for days afterward anyway, so you may as well have some fun with it.  

There’s a short anxious scene in the new film The Hunger Games when its 16-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), races through a deep, dark forest; falls down a hill; and rolls and rolls, only to rise up and thrust herself again into the unknown. Katniss, the lethally tough linchpin from Suzanne Collins’s trilogy and now a rather less imposing film heroine, is a teenage survivalist in a postapocalyptic take on a familiar American myth. When she runs through that forest, and even when she falls, there’s something of the American frontiersman in her, as if she were Natty Bumppo reborn and resexed. For as long as this brief scene lasts, it seems possible that Gary Ross, the unlikely and at times frustratingly ill-matched director for this brutal, unnerving story, has caught the heart-skipping pulse of Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans if not that film’s ravishing technique and propulsive energy. Alas, Mr. Ross, the director of the genial entertainments Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, and whose script credits include Big , has a way of smoothing even modestly irregular edges. Katniss, who for years has bagged game to keep her family from starving, was created for rough stuff — for beating the odds and the state, for hunting squirrel and people both — far rougher than Mr. Ross often seems comfortable with, perhaps because of disposition, inclination or some behind-the-scenes executive mandate. It may be that Mr. Ross is too nice a guy for a hard case like Katniss. A brilliant, possibly historic creation — stripped of sentimentality and psychosexual ornamentation, armed with Diana’s bow and a ferocious will — Katniss is a new female warrior, and she keeps you watching even while you’re hoping for something better the next time around. (Mr. Ross is onboard to direct the follow-up, Catching Fire .) For some fans of the three novels, the screen version will inevitably be disappointing, especially for those keeping inventory of the details, characters, grim thoughts and cynicism that have gone missing. For others the image of a girl like Katniss taking up so much screen space with so few smiles may be enough to keep faith. The screenplay by Mr. Ross, Ms. Collins and Billy Ray hews dutifully close to its source material, at least in wide strokes. Katniss lives in District 12 of Panem — as in panem et circenses, Latin for bread and circuses — a totalitarian state that has risen from the postwar ashes of North America. Every year a boy and a girl ages 12 to 18 are chosen from each Panem district to compete in the gladiatorial games of the title, a fight that owes something to that ancient Roman blood sport and something else to the Greek myth of the Minotaur, the part man, part bull that devoured Athenian youths given in tribute. The Minotaur is eventually slain, but that’s getting ahead of Katniss. The film takes off at the selection ceremony, or reaping, a nationally televised event complete with armed soldiers and a bubbly bubblehead M.C. (Elizabeth Banks), during which Katniss’s younger sister, Primrose (Willow Shields), is chosen. Katniss quickly volunteers to take Prim’s place, becoming, with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), District 12’s tributes. The two are whisked off to the Capitol, where they’re plucked and primped by a team of gaudily hued stylists (overseen by a gilt-lidded Lenny Kravitz as Cinna), a potentially razor-sharp sequence that should underscore the Capitol’s decadence but here comes across as a variant on Dorothy’s cheery wash- and brush-up when she enters the Emerald City. Katniss may not be in Kansas, but neither does she seem in palpable danger. That changes once she and Peeta are transported to the outdoor arena where, with wits and weapons, they battle the other tributes and assorted perils generated by the game makers (including a dandified Wes Bentley), who dole out death via computer touch screen. There, in a rapidly cut massacre that pits boy against girl and finds youngsters killing and falling and dying in a frantic, fragmented blur, Mr. Ross and his editors, Stephen Mirrione and Juliette Welfling, set the stage and stark mood. For her part Katniss, though frozen in fear, follows the advice of her and Peeta’s mentor, Haymitch (an overly cute Woody Harrelson), and runs in the opposite direction. It’s a strong, visceral scene that quickens the pace and pulse, and distills the story’s horror — suffer the little children to enter the arena — in blunt visual terms. Nothing else in the arena comes close to that initial fight in its sheer primal impact. Working with Tom Stern, Clint Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer, Mr. Ross tries to find mystery in the forest, in its canopy of trees and thick undergrowth, but never locates a deeper dread, despite the computer-generated fireballs and hounds, and especially the other tributes. Part of what makes the Hunger Games books so effective is that they literalize the familiar drama of adolescence, translating the emotional assaults, peer pressure, cliques and the tortured rest into warfare. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did the same on television, except there the villains were supernatural demons. In The Hunger Games the real enemies are adults, including, of course, the parents catching the show on TV. Fans of the Japanese cult film Battle Royale may see some overlap with its allegory about students sent to an island to fight to the death, and others may be reminded of Orson Scott Card’s science-fiction novel Ender’s Game, about children trained to battle an alien species. If you’ve seen the pint-size assassins in the recent action flicks Kick-Ass and Hanna , which feature prepubescent girls who lock, load and shoot without batting a lash, you may think you’ve also seen it before. You haven’t, not really. Although the girls in those movies are vaguely sexualised, their age exempts them from the narrative burdens of heterosexual romance. They don’t have to bat those lashes at the boys, and they don’t need to be saved by them either, as in the Twilight series. What invests Katniss with such exciting promise and keeps you rapt even when the film proves less than equally thrilling is that she also doesn’t need saving, even if she’s at an age when, most movies still insist, women go weak at the knees and whimper and weep while waiting to be saved. Again and again Katniss rescues herself with resourcefulness, guts and true aim, a combination that makes her insistently watchable, despite Mr. Ross’s soft touch and Ms. Lawrence’s bland performance. One look at District 12, which Mr. Ross conceives as a picturesque old-timey town — filled with withered Dorothea Lange types in what was once Appalachia — and it’s clear that someone here was enthralled with the actress’s breakout turn in Winter’s Bone as a willful, resilient child of the Ozarks. A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission. The graver problem is a disengaged performance that rarely suggests the terrors Katniss faces, including the fatalism that originally hangs on her like a shroud. What finally saves the character and film both is the image of her on the run, moving relentlessly forward. Unlike those American Adams who have long embodied the national character with their reserves of hope, innocence and optimism, Katniss springs from someplace else, a place in which an American Eve, battered, bruised and deeply knowing, scrambles through a garden not of her making on her way to a new world.