EXCLUSIVE: Amid UAE ban and PIL controversy, Sanjay Dutt starrer Aakhri Sawal heads for special screening at Rashtrapati Bhavan today

In a major development surrounding one of the year’s most talked-about films, Sanjay Dutt starrer Aakhri Sawal is set to hold a special screening at Rashtrapati Bhavan today, Bollywood Hungama has exclusively learned. The screening comes amid mounting controversy around the film. Over the past few days, Aakhri Sawal has been making headlines after reports surfaced of the film being banned in the UAE, while a PIL was also reportedly filed against the project in India. Despite the storm surrounding the film, the makers appear unfazed and are moving ahead with an aggressive rollout strategy. Sources close to the development reveal that preparations for the Rashtrapati Bhavan screening have been underway quietly over the last few days, though details regarding the guest list and attendees remain under wraps. Directed as a hard-hitting social drama, Aakhri Sawal features an ensemble cast led by Sanjay Dutt, the film has already generated substantial curiosity because of its subject matter ...

Christmas Karma review – Dickens adaptation has as much Yuletide spirit as a dead rat in the eggnog

Gurinder Chadha’s leaden update of the hardy seasonal chestnut with Kunal Nayyar is joyless and nausea-inducing

Keen though I always am to indulge any and every new riff on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and keen also to hear from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, this cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog. It’s the worst Christmas film since last year’s Red One, in which Dwayne Johnson played the head of security for Santa Claus and more or less had us all rooting for anyone who could beat up Father Christmas.

In this one, Big Bang Theory star Kunal Nayyar lifelessly and joylessly plays a Scrooge variant called Mr Sood, part of the Ugandan south Asian community expelled by Idi Amin in his childhood, and embittered by early poverty. An early romance soured because of his obsession with money, and he has become a grasping and unpleasant old guy in London (cue stock footage of the London skyline) in the rather quaintly imagined business of moneylending, with his now dead partner Jacob Marley, played by Hugh Bonneville. But after petulant displays of boorish meanness with his nephew, employees and the cheerful Cockney Christmas-jumper-wearing cabbie played by Danny Dyer (surely Mr Sood knows that Ubers are cheaper?), he is visited by Marley’s ghost and then the spirits of Christmas past, present and future (played by Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and Boy George).

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