Tag: Cinema

Review of A Bhattacharjee and P Dhar, Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography (HarperCollins, 2022). The Many Lives of Kishore…

প্রবল দারিদ্রের মধ্যে দাঁড়িয়েও মধ্যবিত্ত ভোগ প্রদর্শনে অকুণ্ঠ ‘ট্রায়াঙ্গল অফ স্যাডনেস’ ছবির দৃশ্য…

Geeta in the shooting stills for Guru Dutt’s aborted Cinemascope film Gouri The her 50th death anniversary, it is a good time to recall Geeta Dutt’s prodigious talent which like a river, continues to flow on in our memories.

A You Tube still from Tarun Majumdar’s cult classic Sriman Prithwiraj Tarun Majumdar’s films tapped into the everyday yearnings of people in Bengal. But his craft slipped in the 1980s.

An artwork based on the film’s poster The brazen display of animosity in Kashmir Files is part of a crafty political narrative that would further embolden polarization.

A still from Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham A look at how the director confronts and confounds genre expectations while working within the confines of mainstream Hindi cinema.

1 Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1969, hereafter Goopy Gyne)and the follow-up fantasy Hirok Rajar Deshe (In the Land of Diamond King, 1980) are two parts of a trilogy of fabular musicals for children.[1] Or so is what they have been mostly, if not always, remembered as. Ray had often felt that films for children made locally were unable to satisfactorily capture their imagination. More often than not, those films sentimentalized childhood, or treated them as part of a sealed…

A promo still from the film Uri, 2019. Once upon a time in Hollywood, socially conscious cinema would be frowned upon. It was a standing joke in Hollywood that a studio-era executive, on hearing a sober, earnest script with deep substance would swoop down on the table and say: “if you want to send a message, use Western Union.” (Westwell 2013). While the humour drives home the apathy, it also draws attention to the nature of cinema itself. Cinema…

Baradwaj Rangan has been writing on various aspects of Indian cinema for several years now. He is a Senior Editor with The Hindu but the articles collected in the book have been sourced also from his former stints at The New Indian Express and New Sunday Express. A few of them have also appeared in more serious long-form journals, like Caravan. Divided into six sections – actors, Hindi cinema, directors, music, Tamil cinema, reviews – Dispatches covers 20 years and many hundred reels of cinema in…