Love Aaj Kal is a light-hearted warm film which is an enjoyable overall.
The first 5 minutes are horrible. These first 5 minutes run in these short spurts of scenes which cover Saif and Deepika's initial 2 year relationship.
After that, the film plays out its credits while playing "Yeh Dooriyan" and showing a bunch of scenes which really confuse you for it is only until after you watch a good amount of the film that you realize, they are showing shots of various scenes in the entirety of the film.
From there on, the film picks up and keeps getting better and better all the way to the end.
The film interweaves between the two parallel stories of "Love Aaj" and "Love Kal." Like a typical Bollywood love story, the film has its songs, its emotional moments, and its funny moments. And the only way these love stories turn out to be good is if they are able to present these emotional/happy/sad/funny moments in a different way and "Love Aaj Kal" is very successful at doing so.
Saif Ali Khan's acting showed its finess and he was very apt at playing both the role of a yesteryear sardaar and contemporary architect of today. Deepika was good, but her role was not anything outstanding. Giselle Monteiro played an extremely convincing small town punjabi girl. To think she doesn't know a word of hindi and has never lived in India, she fit in superbly into her role.
The music was excellent and for the most part very apt for the situations each song was placed in (except "Yeh Dooriyan"). Cinematography was good in that it properly showed both the old world and the contemporary world, but really there wasn't much scope for something outstanding. But in whatever scope there was, it was good.
I loved the "Chor Bazaari," "Twist," and "Aahun Aahun" choreography, and the way "Main Kya Hoon" was picturized.
The film falls a little bit on story line. "Love Aaj" was awfully similar to Saif's "Hum Tum" from 2004 and "Love Kal" had strong resemblances to both "DDLJ" and "Veer-Zaara."
I especially want to elaborate on the "Hum Tum" accusations. In this movie and that movie, Saif's character does not believe in tying down to one woman, the lead actress gets married to a guest appearance, they both meet each other several times in different places at different occasions of their lives, Saif hunts down the girl in the end taking trains/buses/cars/planes or whatever, one of the lead actors order the opposite's choice of tea/coffee in remembrance of them towards the end, and Rishi Kapoor's life experiences drive Saif Ali Khan to go after the girl.
Imitiaz Ali did a very nice job contrasting "kal" and "aaj" and keeping the film entertaining despite there being very little plot in actuality.
Also, I have very interesting theory: Saif Ali Khan is dating Kareena Kapoor. Kareena Kapoor is a huge fan of an American sitcom called "Friends" in which two of the main characters (Ross & Rachel) are always "on" and "off" in terms of liking/loving/dating each other. Kapoor probably showed Khan the show and he got so influenced that when Imitiaz Ali brought him this script, he came on board for the film.
The film is in a good 2 hour length which is not too long, not too short.
Finally, Neetu Singh's appearance was nice touch in the end.