Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

twinkle-piyush Story 1: Anurag Kashyap Radhika Apte is superb. She is a college teacher who is trying to woo her student (Sairat's male lead). most entertaining story of all four. story2: Zoya Akhtar Worst of all four. A guy is having sex with her maid. No information other than this. whether the sexual act is frequent? has the guy made fake promises to maid? Is maid in love with him?story 3: Dibakar One of my favorite hindi film director. Here, he made a story so boring I literally slept. Can't tell anything abt it apart from I saw Manisha Koirala and she looks good.Story 4: Karan Zohar Only story with a real potential. Over the top dialogues and forced comedy ruined it.with a series having "stories" in its tiitle is devoid of any in it. Shame.

xuruzako Don't waste your time watching this. it is just an air balloon with "lust" written over it. government should also adopt a policy to rate movie title to save our youngsters falling into such traps. Maybe out of curiousity some teenager would watch a movie. director has not done justice to any of the stories. The movie makers don't even want to get involved in the subject. This is what happens when big corporates with a huge corporate bureaucracy make something.

aparajitam-18981 Every story in Lust Stories is unique in its own way. Lust, like love, has so many interpretations. We express our sexual feelings, be it the interest or disinterest, in different ways. Like Kalindi/Radhika Apte in Anurag Kashyap's story. Kalindi wants to be a sexual free bird. Her husband has given her permission. She finds two men/boys who are ready and willing. Yet, she seems to be caught up in a whirlwind of her own. If you hear her monologues carefully, you realize how she isn't able to give permission to herself to be free from possessiveness, codependent behavior and the usual trappings of a love affair. Her obsessive behavior towards Tejas is exactly what she warns him against. Her almost-psychotic actions would have been expected from a younger, more naive girl in her first love affair, but appears jarring in an older, more worldly woman who seems to want to have a casual affair. You feel irritated, yet sorry for her mental state of affairs. Like Sudha/ Bhumi Pednekar in Zoya Akhtar's story. Sudha is pretty much in a domesticated wife-like relationship. She cooks, cleans, gives the towel, touches the parent's feet, and of course, performs the wifely duties in the bedroom. Yet she is not the wife. She's the maid. Everyone 'loves' her but nobody even registers her presence. Then comes the good girl. The educated, modern, career girl who is the 'right' fit for the man and his family. The would-be bahu is the good girl, which is sort of reinforced by Sudha being called 'gandi ladki' in an earlier scene. You are left guessing what exactly her state of mind is, because she doesn't utter a word. But I would imagine confusion and betrayal would be some of them. On her way home, she meets her friend, a fellow maid, who shows her a beautiful dress. The pure silk kurta with full embroidery. It looks perfect till you see the tear in it. It's a hand-me-down, an uttaran in colloquial terms. That's when you see Sudha smile. Probably because deep inside her, she knows. What the good girl is getting is after all, her hand-me-down. Like Reena/ Manisha Koirala in Dibakar Banerjee's story. She has already achieved sexual freedom. She escapes her emotionally abusive marriage to spend time with her lover, who is also her husband's best friend. She is, by far, the most sorted character in the movie and the only one who is truly in control of her sexuality. She panics for a second at the possibility of her husband finding out but then goes on to own her truth. It's only then that she discovers how codependent the two men in her life are. The fact that the husband chooses to live with her infidelity and in fact cares more about facing his friend doesn't faze her at all. She makes sure both men know what the other did, and the truth seems to set her free. I honestly felt bad for her for a moment but then applauded her strength. Must be great to have no guilt. And finally like Megha/ Kiara Advani in Karan Johar's story. Her's is the most amazing journey of discovering her sexuality. Imagine being in a world where nobody talks about sex. Where your mother says that you must get married to go on a date with a guy. Where your mother in law says that children are a woman's only desire and that sex is an exercise that needs to get done with ASAP. Where your husband hasn't even been able to fully understand his own needs, let alone yours. Megha and Paras have spent their entire lives in silos, where having no interaction with the opposite sex is considered to a virtue. They have never had friendly conversations with the opposite sex, and do not know how to even bring up sex, except though alligator analogies. What follows after many count-of-five sessions, correction of spellings in Lolita and a library fantasy is a sudden, rather public coming of age of a married woman. You really can't help cheering her on. I felt very happy for Megha, and even Paras, at the end. Two people who just want to have ice cream together. I must add a few words about the direction styles of each story. Karan Johar and his OTT, pun-filled, over-explained, almost comedy skit (where he actually borrows from his own roast by Tanmay Bhat') stands out amongst the four, probably not for all the right reasons. Anurag Kashyap 2.0 goes for the mockumentary style but the final product seems largely unscripted and improv-ish. Dibakar Banerjee has the most believable characters with believable relationship problems, who behave like flawed humans and make it difficult for you to side with anyone. I personally luuuurrrved Zoya Akhtar and her nuanced characters in a story about a topic that lots of people joked about till Shiney Ahuja happened. I have been a fan of her movies with their detailing, subtleties and deep understanding of characters. This short just seals my love for her. This review is mostly about the female characters, probably because I have the frame of reference. I might just write one about the male characters. That should be fun.

Tanuj Poddar A since the turn of the century, there have been quite a few mainstream anthology films in Bollywood. One of them was Bombay Talkies that was released around Bollywood's centenary year, directed by 4 mainstream directors. The same directors come back together to deliver 'Lust Stories'. While that was pretty much a compilation of stories from different parts of Mumbai, this a step ahead trying to tie stories based on an emotion. Though we did have movies from RGV camp like Darna Manaa Hai and Darna Zaroori Hai, that had Horror as the binding theme, and among them only Darna Zaroori hai had stories from multiple directors, but an attempt like this is a rarity in general. So it was good to see an attempt to bring together different director's take on an emotion, that too one which is understood pretty linearly, but has complicated impact on us as beings.What I find interesting is that while the stories are not connected to each other, the directors chose to not give a name to their stories. So let's explore these segments further.The first story by Anurag Kashyap, shows a college lecturer Kalandi, who has gone through her adolescence without having a fling and is married to someone much older than her and has had more than his share of those. She is encouraged by her husband to be open to explore beyond her marriage and have more stories to say about her life. So to achieve that, she utilizes her authority to become intimate with a student, Tejas. She is trying to be promiscuous, but her behavior is not driven by lust as it is with others. Thus, she can't just have a fling with Tejas without being utterly possessive about him and ends up stalking him, while making her attempts pretty obvious. She realizes her irrationality as she tries to be hopelessly hopeful of being something that she is not, lustful. It was a great script helped by a couple of beautiful songs by Amit Trivedi. Wonderful take on the emotion, or on trying to feign it.Second segment by Zoya is certainly a surprise offering from her. She breaks away her mold to tell the story of Sudha, a household maid of a middle class bachelor Ajit, who is physically intimate with him. Amidst the mundane chores of daily life, she gets her spark from these moments, something she probably looks forward to. Much of the screen time shows her mental state as she crumbles within while holding her composure, assisting in hosting the family of the girl that is going to marry Ajit. In her silence, she curses herself for harboring any feelings of comfort and security, while having always known that this relationship was only defined by Ajit's lust. I think the last scene is the defining moment where she accepts she can't break away from her fate, and is content to accept whatever she was able to get from her relationship that was possible only because of lust. Kudos! to Bhumi, for her portrayal of Sudha.The third segment by Dibakar is a mature take on how lust and other circumstances define how we choose our relationships, which in turn define our lives. As we face existential questions in our lives, we tend to look beyond the quest for excitement that our lust drives and assess how to manage it viz-a-viz our other aspirations in life. While coming of age stories show emancipation through acceptance of the emotion, this one shows emancipation through being able to look beyond it. It is an attempt to put into 30 minutes what could have been a great 2 hours film, thanks to many layers that it unfolds. This brevity snatches the opportunity for character development, leaving a lot to be conveyed through unspoken words. While it tackles the emotion with maximum depth, it was probably not mean for depiction through this medium.The fourth segment by K.Jo has the trademark style of dharma productions written all over it. It is straightforward and loud in tackling the subject, has Neha Dhupia and Kiara Advani driving up the oomph factor in the way they dress up and carry themselves. There isn't much creativity in the depiction of a newlywed wife that wants to satisfy her libido, a naive husband that is oblivious to it and a society that thinks lowly of such urges and a funny scene, adapted from 'The Ugly Truth', incorporated for entertainment. A superficial take on the subject, packaging the obvious connotations that one would attach to the emotion in general conversations in our society.All in all a great attempt to piece together an anthology film, on an emotion that is often depicted with corrupt connotations and vulgarity, thanks to its attachment to one verb that I was able to avoid throughout this review, 'Sex'.