The Long Take with Akhil, Rohan & Devika

Avatar: The Way of Water has some of the most stunning visual effects ever put on the big screen, but is that enough to make up for the thin writing?

We discuss director James Cameron’s tendency to lean on tropes, the film’s relaxed second half, and the cutting-edge high frame rate technology.

We also praise Cameron’s rare ability to stage large-scale action, and speculate about the franchise’s future.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Director Antoine Fuqua seems an unsuitable match for Emancipation, the new Will Smith movie, now out on Apple TV+.

We discuss the film’s style-over-substance approach to serious themes, Smith’s undeniable star power, and its inability to flesh out its protagonist despite being a one-man show.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Qala—the new Netflix film by Bulbbul director Anvitaa Dutt—is so obsessed with superficial beauty that it forgets to peel beneath the surface.

A psychological drama about jealousy and ambition, the movie is a poorly performed, disjointed mess that disrespects the audience’s intelligence and betrays its own themes.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Kantara, the Kannada-language blockbuster—now playing on Amazon Prime Video after major theatrical success—is a hyper-masculine celebration of bad behaviour.

But more problematically, it’s a movie that undermines its own themes. Instead of examining environmentalism, caste discrimination, and authoritarianism, Kantara prefers showing you two burly guys fighting in the mud.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

We’re divided on Vasan Bala’s difficult-to-categorise Monica, O My Darling, out now on Netflix.

We discuss the film’s convoluted plot, its tone-hopping structure, and Bala’s hyper-stylised filmmaking.

And we also talk about the overbearing soundtrack, the dubious perspective, and the ambiguous ending.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Ayan Mukerji’s fantasy film Brahmāstra—out on Disney+ Hotstar after a theatrical run—is an outright disaster on several fronts.

It wastes its massive budget on sub-par visual effects, routinely forgets that it has to write meaningful scenes for Alia Bhatt’s female lead, and reduces Amitabh Bachchan to an exposition machine.

We also discuss the film’s failure on both a narrative and visual level, and how all of this is in service of a story that is cribbed from the likes of Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The Last Airbender.

Despite all that, Brahmāstra still has the audacity to suggest that it could spawn a franchise.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

There was a lot riding on House of the Dragon, the first Game of Thrones spin-off, which ended its 10-episode debut season last week.

We discuss how the show succeeds independently of not just its predecessor, but also when it is held up in comparison with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

We also talk about its slow-burn palace intrigue, how deftly it establishes its characters, and its apparent dedication to not providing easy heroes and villains for the audience to latch on to.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Dobaaraa, a sci-fi remake that takes the plot of a mediocre movie and somehow makes it worse, is probably the worst film of Anurag Kashyap’s career.

We discuss its unnecessary comedic scenes, the illogical plot construction, and the filmmaker’s lack of faith in the audience’s intelligence.

We also wonder—again—how Taapsee Pannu is still considered a movie star, despite exclusively appearing in terrible films over the last couple of years.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

It’s difficult to dislike Laal Singh Chaddha—the new Aamir Khan movie, now out on streaming—when it’s trying to be such an uplifting, anti-hate epic.

We discuss the film’s unwillingness to deviate from Forrest Gump, Khan’s divisive central performance, and the manner in which it cherrypicks the moments from history it wants to include (and those that it doesn’t).

Chapters

(00:24) Review: Laal Singh Chaddha

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].

Blonde is just as divisive as they say. And we are torn, as well.

Is Andrew Dominik’s unconventional biopic of Marilyn Monroe an irresponsible and dishonest act of exploitation, or is it a deeply immersive horror film in the vein of Mulholland Drive and Hereditary?

We discuss the film’s epic length, its precise tone, and Ana de Armas’ central performance. We also wonder if it would’ve played differently on a big screen.

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Hosted by Akhil Arora and Rohan Naahar, The Long Take is fully bootstrapped. Please consider donating if you enjoy our work.

The Long Take is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Gaana, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Follow The Long Take on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at [email protected].