Category: Cinema

Yuri Gagarin, who walked the space sixty years ago this week, gave the world, among other things, an intergalactic imagination, which auteurs have managed to convert into astonishing specimens of cinema — meditations which spawn not just the Great Dark but also dystopianism, psychography, alienism and most importantly, the unending search for a soul like ours. Here is a possible list of sci-fi hall of fame. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Arguably the greatest sci-fi film ever made, 2001: A Space…

Halfway into True Grit, it would still not be clear if this film was going anywhere. A fourteen-year-old girl is keen to avenge the death of his father and take control of the finances with a determination and gnash that sits uneasily on her. She is fascinated by the eye-for-an-eye ethic of wild Arkansas as much as she relishes the public hanging of three criminals that are part of a daily spectre for citizens and wayfarers in Fort Smith. Aided partly…

The cover of the novel based on the film Sonar Kella, (The Golden Fortress, 1973) Sandip Ray has always battled the distinction of being the only son of a world-renowned master of cinema. Perhaps it goes to the skewed and myopic understanding of culture in this part of the world that considers the son of a world master blessed with similar distinctions. But Sandip Ray, a Bhadrolok to boot, has handled the pressures of such absurd expectation despite being in…

One of Samir Chanda’s last projects in Hindi before his untimely death was Delhi 6, 2009. He is just not the most well-known art turned production designer in Bollywood but is on the wishlist of Bollywood’s biggest makers. He is on first-name basis with Shyam Benegal, Mani Rathnam and most in between. There is hardly a filmmaker he has not worked with and not one Indian award that he has not won. He is a Calcutta boy, who passed from…

Salt. Sodium Chloride. A pinch more or less here and there and it can make or break anything between haute cuisine and physiological equilibrium. Even if writer Kurt Wimmer (The Thomas Crown Affair) finds the associations to close for comfort, his Salt nevertheless does the job of balancing Cold War geopolitics with the climactic possibility of a nuclear blunderbuss (Dr Stangelove, without being strange) with great stealth and panache. And no marks for guessing that the irrepressible Anjelina Jolie as Eveline Salt…

Posters of Uttam Kumar films from the collection of Mr Parimal Ray. 24th July, marked permanently in the crowded annals of Kolkata as a day when its greatest screen actor breathed his last, is also a day of reckoning for the Bengali film industry. Uttam Kumar died at 53, leaving behind an army of admirers, a whole industry that was bent in a bow and entire demography that froze on its humble legs, unable to believe that he could die,…

If a Hindi film looks and sounds seamlessly real, tells the story of a young boy’s coming of age without over-the-top sentimentalising, nonchalantly bypasses most of the endless stocks that crowd usual Bollywood fare and extricates almost flawless performance from its lead actors, it’s a cause for celebration. In those terms then Vikramaditya Motwane’s debut feature Udaan is an event and not least for being selected under the Un Certain Regard (A Certain Look) category at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Udaan is…

Still from Anjan Dutta’s Ranjana Ami ar Ashbona, 2011. Anjan Dutt’s new rock musical is low on cultural memory and high on imagined nostalgia, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury Can five ageing rockers, none of them stars but charismatic individuals, drifters and iconoclasts and dedicated to music in their real and reel life, make for successful Bengali cinema? Is the rock music scene in Calcutta that important to sustain a prolonged narrative about its many trails? Is the making of a female…

Three films that examine communism in a revisionist light that leaves the past with nowhere to hide “I would go on to cover the more punitive mood towards East Germany’s Stasi oppressors; the unending saga of complicity and blame; the arrival of the deutsche mark and the transition from “We are the people”, to “We are one people”, as unification became inevitable. It was the birth of a different Europe, free of old divisions and shackles, the one still coming…

Why an evaluation of Bengali auteur Tapan Sinha is overdue “I do not know if Atithi, is my best film. But I enjoyed making every bit of it. Atithi is about an adolescent boy Tarapada whose wanderlust makes it impossible for him to remain bound by the ties of family, fraternity and fortune. He is an eternal guest — an itinerant, youthful minstrel. And Tarapada is none other than Tagore. Tagore was a mind-wanderer, and in his many works he has pined for…