Tag: Review

Story Tellers’ 221B Baker Street, which debuted at the recent Airtel Lifestage Theatre fest is as much an engaging bit of slice-of-life play as it is a constant literary excavation.  The play is set in the house of noted economist Ankan Mitra, who has returned to Calcutta after a prolonged stint abroad to teach at a university. A pedantic, scholar and a proud man to boot, Mitra is as easily admired and admirable as he is easy to be disliked and…

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…

A review of the exhibition This is Unreal by RAQS Media Collective, Susanta Mandal and Yamini Nair at Experimenter, Calcutta  Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by media practitioners Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. In their own declaration, their work engages with urban spaces and global circuits in their enquiry into the ways in which meaning is made. At their ongoing exhibition at Experimenter in Kolkata, Raqs has teamed up with Susanta Mandal and Yamini Nair…

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…

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…

Shazia goes where few have gone before She was all over the Mumbai papers in the last few days speaking about what she does best — comedy. So naturally, Mumbai was waiting for her. Had she been a he, a chubby-looking white British actor with a Yorkshire accent, it would not be news. But Shazia Mirza is brown, young, Muslim, and a woman and the British Council has taken adequate care to inform us that she makes fun of all…