Latest news with #SamBahadur
Hindustan Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Fatima Sana Shaikh shares what makes OTT more ‘liberating' for artistes
Last seen on screen in 2023 in the film Sam Bahadur, actor Fatima Sana Shaikh has a busy year ahead with multiple films including Aap Jaisa Koi, Gustaakh Ishq and Metro... In Dino. But apart from that, she would also be making her web series debut with a social drama titled Nyaya. Ask her about what made her decide to make her foray into the space with this show and Fatima Sana Shaikh shares, 'I really liked the story. I liked that my role was interesting, and I am playing a cop for the first time, so I am excited for that. The story has an intention; a cause and it talks about something. So, I really enjoyed being a part of a show which is larger than just a topic.' Asserting on the merging of the mediums of films and OTT, and the interchange of the biggest names between them, Fatima says, 'The line has blurred, and today everyone just wants to make good projects and have them reach people. Medium doesn't matter much at this point. The charm of cinema is there, and you miss that on OTT, but there is so much great stuff on the web, because there is no pressure of box office. People are making what they want to make, and there is a freedom in that.' She adds, 'The beauty of the medium is that you put your work out there, and whether to see it or not is the audience's wish. There is liberty in that, and thus, even an artiste stays stress free.' But in this gap of almost two years from screen, did she miss it? 'I didn't because I was working. I did four projects last year, so I was so engaged and consumed in my work, that I forgot about everything around. I register such things only when I have no work,' she ends.
News18
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Ankush Bahuguna, Shehnaaz Gill And Fatima Shaikh In One Frame. Courtesy: Karan Veer Mehra
The group appears to be enjoying a relaxing evening, as seen in the selfie taken inside an auditorium. Is a new project in the works with Karan Veer Mehra, Shehnaaz Gill and Fatima Sana Shaikh? A recent post by the Bigg Boss 18 winner has left fans speculating. On Tuesday, Karan shared a picture on his Instagram Stories featuring Ankush Bahuguna, a popular content creator, alongside the trio. The group appears to be enjoying a relaxing evening, as seen in the selfie taken inside an auditorium, where they pose with wide smiles. For the casual outing, Karan Veer Mehra kept it simple in a black T-shirt, while Shehnaaz Gill looked effortlessly beautiful with a no-makeup look. Fatima Sana Shaikh also went for a laid-back vibe in a white comfy tee and loose, flowing hair. Upon closer inspection, one can spot tiffin boxes and snacks on the chair, adding to the relaxed atmosphere. The picture has since sparked online buzz, leaving fans wondering about their hangout. Talking about Karan Veer Mehra, the actor seems in no mood to slow down since he clinched the title of both Khatron Ke Khiladi 14 and Bigg Boss 18. Since then, he has been spotted at various events and shows, winning fans' hearts with his effortless charm. Notably, when Karan took home the winner trophy, Shehnaaz was among the celebrities who cheered for the actor. She posted a picture with him on Instagram Stories, wherein the duo shared a candid moment. Along with the photo, she wrote, 'Victory suits you, Karan!" On the Salman Khan show, Karan Veer Mehra also found love with Chum Darang. In a recent exclusive interview with Zoom/Telly Talk India, the actress opened up about her relationship with the actor, describing it as 'undefined." Meanwhile, Fatima Sana Shaikh was last seen portraying the iconic role of Indira Gandhi in Sam Bahadur. Her upcoming projects include Metro… In Dino, a romantic ensemble drama, and Ul Jalool Ishq, an offbeat love story. She will also appear in Aap Jaisa Koi alongside R. Madhavan. As for Snaya Malhotra, the actress earned critical acclaim for her role in Mrs., currently streaming on Zee5. Up next, she'll feature in Mani Ratnam's Thug Life, marking her Tamil cinema debut with a cameo. She also has Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari, Toaster, and an untitled project by Anurag Kashyap on her upcoming slate. First Published:
Indian Express
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Mahesh Manjrekar dismisses Vicky Kaushal's contribution to Chhaava's success: ‘Vicky can never say people came to see him'
While the Hindi film industry has been going through a slump, Vicky Kaushal 's Chhaava emerged as a surprise hit, becoming the highest-grossing Hindi film of 2025, earning more than Rs 800 crore at the box office. While many have credited Vicky's power-packed performance for the film's success, actor and filmmaker Mahesh Manjrekar has a different view. He credited Maharashtra's audience for the film's success, not Vicky. Vicky plays the historical character of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, on whose life Chhaava is based. Mahesh, in his interaction with Mirchi Marathi, argued that audiences thronged theatres not to see Vicky, but to see the life of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj play out on the big screen. The filmmaker-actor said, 'Vicky Kaushal is a very fine actor. His film Chhaava collected Rs 800 crore. But Vicky Kaushal can never say that people came to see him. Because then they would have come to see the previous five films as well. The audience came to see your character. His previous five films did not work.' He added, 'So my Maharashtra has saved the Hindi film industry, remember this. Today, Chhaava is doing well, and 80 percent of its credit goes to Maharashtra. In fact, 90 percent of the credit goes to Pune and the rest goes to other parts of Maharashtra. Maharashtra can save the industry.' While Chhaava was a success at the box office, Vicky Kaushal's last two films – Bad Newz and Sam Bahadur – weren't major box office successes.
Gulf Today
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Bollywood star Fatima Sana Shaikh finally opens up about her ‘love affair'
Bollywood actress Fatima Sana Shaikh has finally opened up about romance in her life and revealed she is having a full-blown affair with sarees. Fatima took to Instagram, where she shared a monochrome picture of herself looking stunning in a saree. The actress looks every inch gorgeous dressed in the nine-yard wonder with a V-necked blouse and earrings. She captioned the post, 'I have a full blown love affair with sarees And @raw_mango keeps the spark alive.' On the work front, Fatima, who was last seen on screen in the biographical war drama film 'Sam Bahadur,' based on the life of India's first field marshal, Sam Manekshaw, will next be seen in filmmaker Anurag Basu's anthology, Dino'. The release date of the film was announced on March 12. Along with Fatima, the film also stars Aditya Roy Kapur, Sara Ali Khan, Anupam Kher, Neena Gupta, Pankaj Tripathi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Ali Fazal, and Fatima Sana Shaikh. The makers had made the announcement on Instagram, and it read, 'When love, fate, and city life collide, magic is bound to happen! # Dino brings the stories of heart from the cities that you love! Experience it on #July4th in cinemas near you.' 'Metro... In Dino' is the spiritual sequel to Anurag Basu's previous critically acclaimed hit film Life in a... Metro, which was released in 2007. The anthology will feature four different heartwarming stories of contemporary couples. She will also be seen in 'Ul Jalool Ishq' alongside Vijay Varma. Vijay Varma has cemented his position as one of the most sought-after stars in Bollywood with his recent releases. Expressing his desire to continuously challenge himself with diverse roles, the actor was quoted saying, 'I constantly feel like whatever I have achieved in my roles is because somebody saw something in me. It's not me creating this character, but somebody saying 'you can play this person also, you can play that person'. So, I want to be challenged that way. I desperately want to do a comedy, and I want to do a zombie movie, one of my favorite genres.' Meanwhile, Fatima began her acting career as a child artist in the 1997 movie 'Ishq,' a romantic masala film directed by Indra Kumar, starring Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgn, Juhi Chawla, and Kajol in the lead roles. The 33-year-old actress also featured as a child actor in the Kamal Haasan-starrer 'Chachi 420.' Directed by Kamal, the film was an official remake of the 1996 Tamil movie 'Avvai Shanmughi.' It featured Haasan, Nassar, Tabu, Amrish Puri, Om Puri, Johnny Walker, Paresh Rawal, Rajendranath Zutshi, and Ayesha Jhulka. As a child artist, she worked in movies like 'Bade Dilwala,' 'Khoobsurat,' and 'One 2 Ka 4.' She gained recognition for her portrayal of freestyle wrestler Geeta Phogat in the 2016 biographical sports drama film 'Dangal,' directed by Nitesh Tiwari. Indo-Asian News Service
Telegraph
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Film lovers hate ads – so why do cinemas show so many?
To the ever louder cries that films are getting too long, I'm here to add a further howl: so is the wait for them to hurry up and start. Adverts have never been lengthier, more numerous, or less worth seeing on the big screen. Statistically, this tends to be denied – surprise, surprise – by cinema advertising agencies, who have time-honoured ways of fudging the issue. Everybody else knows it to be true. Forget about your 7pm showtime so that you can be tucked up in bed at a reasonable hour. If the film is, say, Wicked, you won't escape the auditorium these days until 10.15pm. Berate Universal for the film's bloat, by all means, but don't let your chosen cinema chain off the hook. You might happily tolerate 10 minutes of trailers, even if those too have lost any virtue of brevity they once had. But long before you're whisked off to Oz, you can rest assured that at least 15-20 minutes of arbitrary commercials will first be holding you hostage. (The average wait, according to trade body Digital Cinema Media, is 24 minutes.) We've always been expected to put up with this. Much like Cillian Murphy at the Oscars, who stood to one side waiting, and waiting, for Adrien Brody to stop speaking, most filmgoers are resigned to having their time egregiously wasted in this way. But not Abhishek M R, an Indian film fan and lawyer from Bengaluru, who last month was awarded damages against the country's largest chain, PVR Cinemas. The film he was seeing, a 2023 war biopic called Sam Bahadur, was scheduled to end at 6.30pm, but ran half an hour behind, according to the plaintiff, because of 'trailers, advertisements and other fillers'. Arguing that he was caused to miss subsequent appointments, he decided to complain to the Bangalore Urban Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, who ordered PVR to pay him the equivalent of £270 in compensatory damages, as well as £890 in regulatory fines. All told, Abhishek has done pretty well off his three tickets, totalling £8. But most filmgoers have surely felt his pain at some point. Industry spokespeople always counter that lead-in reels remain an 'integral part' of going out to the cinema, allowing latecomers to shuffle in and find their seats without disrupting the rest of the audience. They even point to customer research which claims to show a majority of viewers (70 per cent!!) consider the pre-amble to be desirable. Trailers usually start at showtime. If your movie starts at 12 but you get there at 11:30, that's on you. But, the pre-show and trailers need to be cutdown to 10-12 minutes. I sat through 27 minutes of ads before 'COMPANION' started. That's too damn long. @AMCTheatres — Adam Hlaváč (@adamhlavac) February 10, 2025 You can bet these stats come from bracketing together trailers and ads as if they were one homogenous block of content, which they are not. How would polled customers respond if 30 minutes or, say, 10 were put to them as alternatives? I think we know. If Pearl & Dean's market research study had a sample size of just me, I predict these results: Trailers? OK, but a maximum of three, please. Adverts? Bin the lot. Of course, cinema advertising affects the operating profits of the exhibitors showing them, or no one would bother. But that's an argument from corporate greed, dressed up as one about an enhanced consumer experience. The cinema screen is valued real estate, we're told. Because audiences are essentially captive there, all-important levels of engagement are meant to be higher than when the same commercials play on TV. Here's the problem: levels of aggravation are definitely higher, too. You can't fast-forward them, or use the time to put the kettle on. They're just eating up a chunk of your evening you'll never get back. To claim that adverts in cinema enjoy a pure claim on our attention is nonsense, anyway. Explicit or tacit, the edict to put your phone away should be crucial etiquette for the film itself. But all I ever see during the advert phase is restless scrolling on socials and rustling around for sweet packets. Who's actively 'engaging' with what's on screen? No one. Why? 98 per cent of adverts are empirically offensive to the eye and ear, according to the very reputable study above that was conducted on just me. Try to name an enjoyable one screened in 2024, and you may struggle. Even a purported list of the year's best, compiled by Campaign magazine, includes utterly forgettable campaigns for Kia, NatWest, Lego, Google Pixel and the RAF. If the point of advertising is to lodge itself in the mind, these failed totally. The last cinema advert I truly admired, and remember in detail? Jonathan Glazer's black-and-white surfing one for Guinness. That's from 1999. Senator Martin Looney of Connecticut talks a lot more sense on this subject than you might guess from his name. Looney has lately proposed a bill that would insist cinemas separately list the start times of the programme and the film itself. Advertisers would hate this to be enacted, of course – the last thing they want is everyone punctually arriving just in time for the feature. They want us tricked into rushing to our seats so that we can be treated as gormless receptacles for a solid half-hour. Looney argues, quite sanely, that our time is being abused as things stand. I'd go further: no one who has bought a ticket to see anything – anything at all – should be force-fed advertising before it starts. If advertising rightly belongs anywhere, it's to fill gaps between things we aren't paying for. Instead of getting out tiny violins about chains and their operating profits, let's imagine another approach. If you lopped 20 minutes off the programme time, all day long, for every screen in a multiplex, you'd carve out scope to fit in extra showings. For almost everything that isn't The Brutalist or Oppenheimer, anyway. There's a particular reason that cinema ads also seem more dated than they ever have. We now get targeted by advertisers with terrifying accuracy on Instagram. Somehow, they seem well aware that I'm theoretically interested in a dining room vitrine with frosted glass. So the hit-and-hope mentality of blandly bombarding entire audiences, with no specificity whatsoever, has become so outmoded as to be laughable. I have no need for Chanel No. 5, no matter how fragrant Margot Robbie looks wearing it. Sometimes we get a near-perfect mismatch. London's BFI Southbank is the capital's premier mecca for treating cinema as high art, attended by habitués who book months ahead for a rare Visconti print, or could tell you the exact duration in seconds of everything in Chantal Akerman' s oeuvre. They are rather less in the market for a life-affirming Lloyds Bank commercial, which played there routinely for years, featuring a girl on a bike growing up, with black stallions galloping alongside her on coastal paths. As this pablum would come on, I would actively look forward to the strains of Alicia Keys's Girl on Fire fading, drowned out every time by a bellowed 'Rubbish!' from a fuming denizen of the back row. In the same venue, we've been treated before to an 'immersive', four-minute long, bafflingly indulgent attempt to capture the seven flavour profiles of Hennessy X.O., 'directed' by Ridley Scott, which was capable of sending entire roomfuls of Kurosawa nerds into a bewildered stupor. The Lloyds one was finally put out to pasture, but has since been replaced by a Rolex one, with James Cameron up on screen pontificating about his quest for the cutting edge. It's even worse. I know from bitter, hilarious experience that there is no more hostile crowd you could possibly pick for Cameron's tech-bro blather than one about to settle in for the amour fou of Visconti's Senso (1954), or basically anything the BFI would ever elect to screen. So my final plea is twofold. If ads are genuinely unavoidable, at least have the courtesy to make them brief. And for all that's holy, read the room they are going to be played in.
