Tag Archives: Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Movie Review: Anuja (2024)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Anuja on Netflix

Two sisters in Delhi face a difficult choice when one of them is offered a potential way out of poverty. Filmmaker Adam J. Graves uses Anuja‘s brief 22-minute runtime to make a meaningful critique of child labor in this Oscar-nominated short drama film.

9-year-old Anuja is played by Sajda Pathan, who herself lives in a Delhi shelter for children. Anuja and her older sister Palak (Ananya Shanbhag) are orphans who work 14-hour days in a garment factory.

Word of Anuja’s illegal employment has gotten around, as has her natural talent for mathematics. A teacher named Mishra (Gulshan Walia) comes to the factory to invite her to take a placement test for a boarding school, though she’ll have to find 400 rupees to pay for it. But the factory’s owner Verma (Nagesh Bhonsle) isn’t keen on letting one of his employees get away.

The invitation presents a real dilemma for the girls. Palak’s old enough to accept the limits of her own prospects and to understand that this may be her sister’s one chance at a better life. But they are the only family each other have, and it’s not easy to give that up for an uncertain future. Anuja doesn’t even know what a boarding school is, so why would she want to leave her sister to go to one?

Both Pathan and Shanbhag do a really nice job playing the sisters, who are hard not to care about. Much of the film’s short runtime is dedicated to showing their fondness for one another, as well as their protective instincts. Though it makes logical sense for Anuja to pursue her education, the emotional cost for both sisters is very clear.

The most effective moment in Graves’ narrative — which is produced by a host of industry notables including Mindy Kaling, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Oscar winner Guneet Monga Kapoor — is a fleeting one. As Anuja runs through a fancy clothing store fleeing its security guard, she spots a mannequin dressed in one of the garments she sewed. It’s a powerful condemnation of the exploitation underlying the fashion industry, and a it’s a reminder for the audience to become more informed consumers. Ignorance of the plight of workers is no excuse for supporting child labor.

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Series Review: Citadel – Honey Bunny (2024)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Citadel: Honey Bunny on Amazon Prime

A streaming franchise with multiple international spin-offs is intriguing in theory, but not so much in practice, at least in the case of Citadel: Honey Bunny. There’s barely enough material in the new Indian spin-off to support a feature-length film, let alone a six-episode series with a nearly five-hour runtime.

Citadel: Honey Bunny is a prequel to the original series created by the Russo brothers and an origin story for Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s character. Surprisingly, Chopra Jonas doesn’t make a cameo at the beginning or end of Honey Bunny to make that connection explicit. Instead, the show creators count on you to remember her character’s name: Nadia.

This new series flashes back to India in 2000, where 7-year-old Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar) is on the run with her mother Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu). Honey is a former spy waiting for her past to catch up with her, training Nadia to fight, hide, and run when the time comes.

Honey’s own entry into the world of espionage happened in 1992. With her Bollywood acting career floundering, a stuntman named Bunny (Varun Dhawan) hired her for an unorthodox gig: distract a rich guy in a hotel bar long enough for Bunny and his colleagues to grab something from his room. When Bunny’s crew fails, she offers to nab the item herself, and thus a spy is born.

That’s about where Episode 1 leaves off and the descent into boredom begins. Episodes 2 and 3 are primarily filler, cutting between the 1992 and 2000 timelines. Real forward momentum resumes in Episode 4, continuing a slow build until a very entertaining finale with some truly exciting action sequences.

It’s not just that little happens through the middle of the series. It’s that there’s nothing fun about it. The action scenes are forgettable, as are the settings. The 1992 timeline sends Honey & Bunny’s crew to Belgrade to recover a piece of all-powerful tech. Given the geographical, architectural, and cultural diversity within India itself, taking the action out of the country is a disappointing choice.

Worst of all, the acting is monotone from an impressive cast that — besides the two popular leads — includes Kay Kay Menon as Baba, head of Bunny’s spy organization; Saqib Saleem as Baba’s flunky KD; and Sikander Kher as the rival spy Shaan.

The most obvious explanation for the show’s flat tone is network interference, because the cast is much better than they are allowed to be (at least until the last couple of episodes). There’s a generic “OTT spy drama” feel to Honey Bunny, as if the cast and crew were shoved into a mold with no room for them to utilize their unique talents.

Same goes for Raj & DK, who directed the series and co-wrote it with Sita Menon. There’s little of their signature wit until very late in the proceedings. It feels like they created the show in reverse, making sure to end with a great finale but running out of time to flesh out the rest of the story. Subplots and character development points are introduced but not explored, despite long stretches where not much happens.

Another big reason why this isn’t Raj & DK’s best work is that the whole series is terribly lit. They rely on natural lighting that often leaves the actors in shadows or backlit. It’s frequently hard to make out character’s faces, even during pivotal emotional moments. I kept squinting at the screen, not that it helped.

The (probable) network-mandated homogenizing squashes a lot of what could have been good about the series — and a lot of what would have made it feel very Indian. Though the 1992 timeline starts on the set of a Bollywood film, the location is abandoned after the first episode in favor of the Belgrade jaunt. How fun might it have been to imagine rival spy agencies operating within a film industry that was the domain of organized crime at the time?

Then there’s the waste of talent. Especially given how slow and dull Citadel: Honey Bunny is through its midpoint, I can’t imagine it winning over many new fans who only watched because of the Citadel name. Will they be inspired to seek out any of the actors’ other projects? Will they watch Raj & DK’s other Amazon Prime series — Farzi and The Family Man — after this? I doubt it.

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TV Series Review: Citadel (2023)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

This review covers the first two episodes of the Amazon Prime series Citadel.

Amazon’s newest spy series Citadel is fun and totally watchable, thanks to a great cast and a fun, high-concept plot setup.

Citadel is the name of an international spy organization that works for the global good, independent of any single nation. Their efforts are thwarted by an evil spy ring called Manticore that has its tendrils in governments around the world.

Citadel agents Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Mason Kane (Richard Madden) — who was destined from birth to be a spy with a name like that — are doing reconnaissance on a train in Italy when they realize they’ve been set up. Manticore blows up the train as part of a coordinated worldwide effort to destroy Citadel once and for all.

Mason survives but has total amnesia, except for visions of a beautiful woman in a red dress: Nadia, wearing the outfit she was wearing on the train. His American passport has an alias, so he doesn’t even know his real name.

Eight years later, Mason has a wife and a daughter, but he’s still troubled by the void of information from his past. When he sends a DNA sample to an ancestry company, it alerts one of Citadel’s surviving operators, Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), who tracks down the missing agent and upends his life.

Of course, Nadia survived the train explosion as well, but she doesn’t play a major part again until Episode 2.

The series does a nice job balancing its action, drama, and humor. Tucci’s role is dryly comical and everything one would hope from from Stanley Tucci, The Spy. Madden does a lot of the heavy lifting in the first episode, and he does a very solid job.

From what I’ve seen of Chopra Jonas’s forays in Hollywood to date, they haven’t fully captured what a good actor she is. Citadel does. She gets to showcase a wide emotional range and an impressive set of fighting skills, demonstrating why she is a global star.

The series — which is intended to eventually spin off into global versions set in India, Italy, Spain, and Mexico in languages native to each country — does enough in its early episodes to set up a compelling first season. Bernard gets Mason up to speed while forcing him to resurrect his old career, thereby uncovering the remaining threats to Citadel, its personnel, and the world. It’s a fun setup that balances the personal consequences for the agents with wider, more nebulous dangers that hooked me right away.

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Movie Review: The White Tiger (2021)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch The White Tiger on Netflix
Buy the novel at Amazon

“Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste.” So says a driver who realizes he has one chance to break out of the master-servant paradigm that has defined his life and kept him trapped in poverty.

Balram (Adarsh Gourav) narrates the story of his success via a series of emails written to Wen Jiabao ahead of the Chinese Premier’s visit to Bangalore in 2010. Ever the opportunist, Balram hopes to align himself with what he believes is the world’s rising power, as the influence of the West recedes.

The emails paint a clear picture of how social, economic, and political systems in India concentrate power and wealth. Balram’s family comes from a sweet-making caste in a small village north of Delhi. A third of the money everyone in town earns goes to the landlord, a stern man called The Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar) with a violent son known as The Mongoose (Vijay Maurya). Apart from a few rupees for incidentals, the rest of the money earned by the men in Balram’s family goes to Balram’s grandmother (Kamlesh Gill) — the only member of the large clan who doesn’t go hungry.

Through patience, observation, and quick wit, Balram secures himself a position as the driver for The Stork’s youngest son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), recently returned from New York with his Indian-American wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas). The gig allows Balram to finally utilize the English language skills he picked up as a precocious kid. Ashok, Pinky, and Balram move to Delhi in order to facilitate some bribery on behalf of The Stork, with the threat that any misstep on Balram’s part could cause The Stork to murder Balram’s whole family.

In Delhi, it becomes apparent how the entrenched master-servant system limits the imaginations of those involved. Ashok doesn’t like when his brother and father hit Balram, but doesn’t try to make Balram a full-fledged employee with rights either. The expectation is that Balram will work hard for Ashok’s family for minimal pay until they decide to get rid of him. That’s it.

Even Balram starts to see how his upbringing has filtered his expectations. When Pinky asks him what he wants to do in life, it seems like an absurd question. He already achieved his goal of getting out of working at his family’s tea shop when he got this job. What else is there? Even if Balram had a bigger dream, he has no money or connections. The only people he knows who could help him are Ashok and his family, and they’ve made it clear they’d never do that.

Dangerous circumstances force Balram to choose whether to continue viewing himself as disposable the way that his bosses do, or to assert his right to self-determination. In order to overcome what he calls the “servant mindset,” Balram needs the fortitude of the rarest of creatures: the white tiger.

Director Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Arvind Adiga’s novel is thorough in its world building but lets Balram’s particular viewpoint set the tone of the film. Balram is a loner, so something like collective action never crosses his mind. His choices, for good or ill, make sense for who he is, especially as defined by Gourav’s terrific lead performance.

Chopra Jonas — who co-produced the film — hits it out of the park as Pinky, a woman who wants to do good but doesn’t have the full context for the situation or the agency to make significant changes even if she did. With Rao’s history of playing likeable characters, it’s all the more frustrating when Ashok won’t stand up to his dad and brother to demand better treatment for Balram. Then again, he’s as much a product of his environment as everyone else, which is exactly the problem The White Tiger examines.

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