However, the direction, frequently evoking Monsoon Wedding, keeps things family-focused, with a moving camera and characters in meltdown. On the downside, the music's forgettable and Alia plays yet another boho-chick, with chic but predictable charm. Alongside, small, silken touches - the shoes of someone who's gone, the chemistry of Alia and Sidharth, an old-world small town, a new world where children and parents comfort and confront - make Kapoor & Sons special.

Fawad and Sidharth make terrific contrasts, Sidharth vulnerable, yet loving, Fawad, slick, yet asking with pain, 'Aap ko mere jhoot bolne ka gham hai - ya meri asliyat ka?'Īnd Ratna Pathak Shah seals it with a fabulous performance that evolves from angry edginess to calm grief. In a wheelchair, Rishi Kapoor runs away with the film, smashing it with hilarious lines - an 'apology' goes, 'Sorry, bhains' - and his dirty old man portrayal, lusting after Mandakini's wet sari and using his grandson's 'I-Papad' for porn. Ooty', whose bosom jiggles on command) and cinematography that captures lush Coonor with frames where you can, well, almost smell the plentiful grass. There are subtle touches - Sunita making bhindi which Rahul loves, Arjun hates - bizarre cameos (aspiring 'Mr. This is a family with its make-up off, screaming through hilarious situations - a sequence involving a plumber is side-splittingly good. This is an entirely real family, full of uncomfortable secrets, awkward jealousies and sharp pain, where brothers steal, parents cheat, siblings suspect and 'perfect bachchas' don't have perfect love-lives.

Kapoor and sons subtitles