Category: Cinema

Bombarded with an endless rain of stupid kitsch every week, we have gradually come to expect very little of the Hindi film industry.That has meant that when Bollywood has churned just decent, watchable fare, we have risen in collective applause, we have stretched ourselves out of our balcony seats to show them how many bagfuls of gratitude we are ready to part with for giving us what is otherwise very basic fare. Madhur Bhandarkar’s cinema is a classic example of…

Poster of Tapan Sinha’s Kabuliwala, 1961. Tapan Sinha has been just happy making movies all his life, remaining more attentive to his childlike imagination and his attachment to literature rather than to laurels and recognition, both here and abroad. The Dadasaheb Phalke award given to him this week is just one more in his crown, and that too a belated one. In the mid-1950s, middle-of-the-road cinema was largely unheard in the catalogue of Indian cinema. The “art cinema” movement was…

Satyajit Ray, by Nemai Ghosh. Image under copyright. The idea of commercially re-releasing three of Satyajit Ray’s films by Sony Pictures is an inspired idea. Ray remains, despite Bollywood’s repeated efforts to ‘showcase’ itself in respectable film venues like Cannes and Venice — the most enduring icon of Indian cinema. The release, thankfully, does not include the umpteenth rerun of his Apu Trilogy, for which he is feted the world over. The films being screened were made between 1968 and 1970…

So much has already been said about The Namesake being about finding one’s home both within and without, that I saw it as incumbent upon me to go and see the film, more so since it was about my home and my city. The novel had not made my heart melt, but then I read it when I was not ‘outside’ my home. So I thought the film might provoke those emotions that the novel did not, especially after Mira Nair’s insistence…

Guru is a parable of many things, real and imagined.   After years of shepherding him through the pitiless jungle of Bollywood, and sustaining him through dud after dud, Amitabh Bachchan finally has a chance to bellow openly about his cub Abhishek’s performance in Guru, which can be called Dhirubhai Ambani’s ‘unauthorised’ biopic. It is hard to miss the full-page ads in the dailies, sponsored by the proud father who imperiously salutes his son for having finally matched his greatness. He has the…

The super successful Disney Franchise Pirates of the Caribbean’s new episode On Stanger Tides, which released in India within days of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, carries some of its stock characters who reboot themselves gladly for the fourth adventure, this time for the Fountain of Youth. But this time the film is helmed by Rob Marshall (Gore Verbinsk directed the first three), the director of enervating musicals such as Chicago and Nine. The movie hence carries the signature of the choreographer-turned-director’s…

This year the Oscars look more like a line-up for Cannes’ The Palme d’Or or Berlin’s Golden Bear, which in keeping with Europe’s matured celluloid culture and modernist (or post-modernist) appeal, have a fetish for films with a political or psychological edge. Hollywood is exactly the opposite and as its most discernible collaborator, so is The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. Assembly line production, simple, triumphant storylines that are uplifting and widely appealing, and profits have more or less…