Critics’ Verdict: ‘Kapoor & Sons’ Is a One-Time Watch

Check out how critics are reacting to this week’s new release ‘Kapoor & Sons’

Film: Kapoor & Sons
Director: Shakun Batra
Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Alia Bhatt, Fawad Khan and Rishi Kapoor

Excerpts from reviews of Kapoor & Sons:

Rishi Kapoor, almost unrecognizable underneath all that make-up, is meant to be the jolly ol’ roguish gramps. Fawad’s Rahul is the London-based `perfect’ older son, so often called ‘hot’ by pretty women that you know exactly what that portends. Sidharth’s Arjun is the ‘loser’ who is constantly having to prove himself. And Tia (Alia Bhatt) is yet another version of the manic pixie girl dealing with past tragedy. This turns the characters into stock, and the film into a constructed thing, and you know what’s coming much before it actually does. Which is a pity because a film like this one, with a nice sense of place ( the house has a lived-in feel ; the hill town used as home, not a series of picturesque spots) and more-than-competent performers, could have been that rare Bollywood thing : a grown-up drama featuring grown-ups.

Shubhra Gupta (Indianexpress.com)

If it’s not complicated, it’s probably not real.  For families fight, they get on each other’s nerves and, sometimes, they let each other down too. It’s why we cherish photographs; they’re an ideal version of us, where in that one fleeting moment we forget all our differences and unite to say cheese.A journey into that one moment is Shakun Batra’s absorbing, impassioned and layered family drama, Kapoor & Sons. But Batra is nothing if not subtle. In Kapoor & Sons, he draws the essence, idiosyncrasies, wit and high-strung spirit of a familiar Punjabi household (holding fort since 1921) but never lets it become the highpoint.

Sukanya Verma (Rediff.com)

In Kapoor & Sons, family secrets that might have driven some people to violence or life-long therapy are delivered by gorgeous leads in picture-perfect settings. Each of the characters is saddled with a longstanding grievance that is revealed at an appropriate juncture. Kapoor & Sons is choppily shot and edited so that no moment of truth is allowed to take its entire breath, and Batra’s choice of inter-cutting between crucial emotional exchanges does not allow any of the individual strands to emerge fully. Although the nicks-but-no-deep cuts approach, also seen in Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), doesn’t help the movie realise its ambitions, Kapoor & Sons works best when it isn’t trying to wave a knife.

Nandini Ramnath (Scroll.in)