Student Of The Year Movie Reviews

Karan Johar is back on the director's chair... and back to romance, conflict, song-n-dance and of course, college campus [KUCH KUCH HOTA HAI]. Only thing, it's minus the stars this time. The absence of stars notwithstanding, the curiosity to watch a KJo film remains intact. This colossal film is being looked forward to like any extravaganza that stars A-listers. The three newcomers [Sidharth Malhotra, Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt] couldn't have dreamt of such

With a fun outing like 'Student of the Year', Karan Johar has proved once again that he can fluctuate between making a relatively serious film like 'My Name Is Khan' and come back to candy floss youth entertainer in the mode of 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai'. Okay, so the high drama of many a Shahrukh Khan-Kajol films is indeed missing here as the film never gets into an overtly serious 'a family that weeps together stays together' zone

It's KJo-Wala Love! Served fresh and piping hot from the Dharma college canteen of romance. And it's a high (class) school that you'd never want to miss a lecture of, ever. Except that it has its own set of Karan rules. Read the prospectus: 1. Leave your text-books at home but ensure you're carrying your designer bags and heels. 2. Drive a Ferrari to school, or if you're poorer, take a bike. 3. Dating, mating, separating and love lessons shall be part

Smile awhile. An entire scene — silent but for piano music — is made up of stolen glances and cloaked feelings. That’s romance, the kind that’s been long-forgotten in this era of hyper-aggression. Karan Johar’s Student of the Year catches the director in a youthful yet introspective mode. Plus, he has broken free of Bollywood’s necessary evil — mega-star actors. Clearly, he demonstrates that he no longer requires Shah Rukh Khan in the credit titles

Smile awhile. An entire scene –silent but for piano music – is made up of stolen glances and cloaked feelings. That’s romance, the kind that’s been long-forgotten in this era of hyper-aggression. Karan Johar’s Student of the Year catches the director in a youthful yet introspective mode. Plus, he has broken free of Bollywood’s necessary evil – mega-star actors. Clearly, he demonstrates that he no longer requires Shah Rukh Khan in the credit titles

Karan Johar does what he is best at; create a glossy fairytalish world revolving around love, friendship and mush. Infact, KJo manages to steer clear of heightened melodrama and actually packs in a little message, floundering on the logic once in a while but never on the slick production qualities. The film is quite obviously inspired by Mansoor Khan's classic 'Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar', where the inter-school competition has been replaced by an intra-school Triwizard Tournament

Review: Two boys, one girl and a high-school romance… going by the trailers you may have thought the story is simple. In reality it......

Karan Johar's forte is excess. He creates fantastical worlds brimming with beautiful people and expensive things and yet anchors them in high emotion. His films work as both designer porn and soap opera. The pleasure you derive from his films is directly connected to your tolerance of candy floss. I've always been seduced. But the danger of candy floss is that it can quickly become vacuous and over-designed

The hardest job on a Karan Johar film set must belong to the cleaners, who I imagine spend most of the day on their knees scrubbing floors, dusting furniture, and basically making sure everything is spotless. The director’s new film, Student of the Year, is set on an impossibly chic campus where good-looking teenagers are invariably breaking into song or breaking into fights. Yet you’ll never spot a carelessly strewn cola can or even a stray sheet of paper

A lot has changed since I wrote my first ever piece, the music review of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. I was still a student that year (1998) when I penned down my thoughts on Jatin-Lalit's soundtrack for Karan Johar's directorial debut in a rough note book while listening to every song over and over again on my prized Discman. In KKHH, which came out in the third week of October, a substantial portion is set in college, sharing its name with my alma mater St Xavier's

When one was in school, the day progressed from one class to another. I think most schools are still run the same way. Not in Karan Johar’s universe though. Here, life is a party. In the film set in a boarding school, you get to hear the word ‘academics’ only after the intermission. There is only one classroom sequence and even there the protagonists are seen exploring the Hindi translation of the female anatomy

Karan Johar is back to school, 14 years after Kuch Kuch Hota Hai made him a Bollywood top draw. Candyfloss rules again, designer hunks and PYTs preen and pose, and if this film was made in 4D you could probably smell the bubblegum flavour all along. Alia Bhatt, Siddharth Malhotra and Varun Dhawan- Bollywood's latest babe and babas- have also been amply touted as the next big things during the film's run up to release. If Karan was out to create a package

Think of a quintessential Karan Johar film and opulence, grandeur, style and candy floss emotions come to mind. Not to forget, the song-and-dance extravaganzas with a lavish sprinkling of stars. And Student Of The Year is just that albeit the stars. But that doesn’t seem to affect the film because Karan manages to engage you from the word go with the right dose of humour, emotions and drama. Student Of The Year (SOTY) traces the life of Abhimanyu Singh

Freeze any frame and it will look like a page from Vogue or GQ. Sheen is queen and punch lines are witty-mean, but content is lean. St Teresa’s School is uber chic with a great divide between the snooty-rich and the scholarship students for whom life’s a bitch – most times. Until debonair Abhimanyu (Sidharth Malhotra) who’s quite dabang, ambushes the well-heeled and wins them over. The grand stand-off between Tata, represented by billionaire’s son

Too long by about twenty minutes, the film could’ve done with some tightening – perhaps the clunky treasure hunt sequence could go? Nitpickings aside, this is a breezy, enjoyable film by a director who knows his craft.

Often it is this hold on the viewer through constant influx of escapism and pomp with magnificently choreographed songs, razzle dazzle of colours/style/design, appropriate dosage of humour and ritzy production values that distracts one from Student of the Year’s brash celebration of superficiality and obvious lack of depth.

Student of the Year is a film which has a little bit of everything. It contains drama, comedy and of course romance. It is not a ground-breaking film but it does not leave you feeling that you have made a bad investment. If anything you are left concluding that although it is not one of the greatest films to have ever been made, it was still a film that was worth the watch!

A Harry Potter locale, Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na-style storytelling, the melodious styling of High School Musical, inspiration from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar and the typical Johar drama, that's Student of the Year. Despite being an uncanny mix of all these characterstics, K Jo manages to hold your attention throughout the film. SOTY is set in St Teresa’s High School (St T’s as they call it) in Dehradun, the most reputed school in the country, where students either come from

The teen spirit that runs through Student Of The Year should have lent the film a bright and fresh feel. It doesn’t. Every little element here, from the story and the setting to the music and the packaging, is an acknowledged nod to mothballed Hindi cinema conventions. Student of the Year reeks of overwhelming creative vacuity. But Karan Johar’s latest film is zestful and frothy enough to appeal to an audience that does not seek much more

It's time to go back to school, but this is no Hogwarts. Karan Johar’s ‘Student of the Year’ will feel like familiar territory for rich brats, for whom high school is nothing less than a fashion week. If shows like ‘Gossip Girl’ and movies like 'High School Musical' make for your regular viewing experience, then this film should be on your agenda this weekend. For the rest, it's simply about witnessing a high school experience they could only have dreamt of

Rating: 2.5/5 Stars. What’s Good: The performances; the direction; the humour. What’s Bad: The unbelievable po...

Ah Bollywood. A genre so escapist, so unshackled to reality that it'd give JRR Tolkien a complex. And if the genre may be compared to The Lord of the Rings, then Karan Johar is its Gandalf. He waves a staff and sets the bar. Make no mistake, I say this with utmost reverence because this is what the world (and I mean an audience that includes and goes beyond Indians and NRIs) expects and wants when they pay ticket money for a 'Bollywood film'

First of all, it’s difficult to like a film where the female lead is called ‘brainless’ not once but several times. Even less so, when the boys saying it aren’t really paragons of wisdom themselves. But why would Shanaya mind? Her only worry when she has to visit someone in a hospital is what to wear. Sometimes she worries about which man to love: the rich one who she has been with for four years but who keeps getting physical with other girls

Karan Johar's latest directorial venture is set on the structure of JAANE TU.... YA JAANE NAA and 3 IDIOTS. It begins in the NOW with friends meeting after 10 years and goes back to THEN, keeps moving back and forth before culminating in the NOW. Abbas Tyrewala's flick worked well because the manner in which he built up the momentum to the climax was methodical. In the end, just as the girl who had never met Genelia's character was eager to meet her

I have a bone to pick with Karan Johar, who invites us once again, to witness a bunch of young students do their thing. Not because this is yet another impossibly swish ‘school’ which bears little resemblance to the posh-est educational institutions we have in the country : after the seismic shock of that first Riverdale-high-school-clone in 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai', anything was possible. Not because we are asked to believe that these beautifully-toned

I have a bone to pick with Karan Johar, who invites us once again, to witness a bunch of young students do their thing. Not because this is yet another impossibly swish ‘school’ which bears little resemblance to the posh-est educational institutions we have in the country : after the seismic shock of that first Riverdale-high-school-clone in 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai', anything was possible. Not because we are asked to believe that these beautifully-toned

I have a bone to pick with Karan Johar, who invites us once again, to witness a bunch of young students do their thing.

I don’t know why, but I get this strange feeling that the director was not fully involved or attached to SOTY. The mark of intensity that one has seen in his past films is missing. It’s like a grand wedding reception with a poor food spread.

To sum it up, watch ‘Student Of The Year’ for the debutantes. They have really pulled off a tough task of playing praiseworthy roles in a film which suffers from the lack-of-a-story syndrome.

Student Of The Year is a big film starring newcomers – a first for producer-director Karan Johar who up till now, only worked with the country’s biggest stars, namely Shah Rukh Khan. The introductions of the lead players – Rohan Nanda (Varun Dhawan), Shanaya Singhania (Alia Bhatt) and Abhimanyu Singh (Siddharth Malhotra) are done interestingly. Vintage songs set to contemporary sounds characterise the lead players as rich kid, fashion Barbie