where reviews, columns and essays jostle for attention
Twenty Decembers ago, Woody Allen’s underrated Everyone Says I Love You had the director dance with the striking and cherubic Goldie Hawn on the banks of the Seine, by moonlight. As Allen clumsily kept pace, Hawn began suddenly to float — as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and her black […]
I wonder what films Aditya Chopra watches. I wonder who the reclusive filmmaker meets and speaks to in real life, and what on earth he imagines lovers and romantics to be doing. Perhaps he, who obviously watches his own iconic success Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge a million times over, believes (and hopes) they do the […]
Sujoy Ghosh knows flavour. Few directors are as adept at creating atmosphere so swiftly and effectively, and Ghosh soaks his cinema in a seemingly authentic world. Authentic smelling, even, given the way his new film shows us Vidya Balan shielding her nose before entering a humid crowd, and the stains of sweat around her armpits […]
The intermission is a nightmare. This is true for the format in which Hindi cinema is traditionally exhibited, as the interruption creates a narrative chasm that messes up both filmgoer and filmmaker, but it is doubly true for Dear Zindagi, which ingeniously uses a bad dream to slap recess upon us and allow us out […]
The film opens with Ranbir Kapoor’s character, Ayan, talking to an interviewer. She commends the singer on the fact that he’s broken through and found a foothold in music, “that too non-film,” and in a couple of lines, he calls his love “aamir” — which is to say the kind that cannot die. It is […]
Tom Hanks is not Nicolas Cage. This, for the most part, is a good thing. Academy Award winners both, Hanks and Cage first made their bones with off-kilter comedies where Hanks played the wonderful regular guy gone a bit wonky, while Cage played the wonky guy with just a touch of regular. As they moved […]
The first time it is suggested that Mahendra Singh Dhoni try his hand at cricket, he breaks into that grin we know so well. What good is a sport with such small balls, he laughs to a schoolmate, shrugging off the idea. A pre-teen boy playing football at the time, goalkeeping is more his thing […]
An old man stares ferociously at a girl in the park. The girl — white Apple earbuds in place, out on a jog, sweaty and out of breath as she does her stretches — stares back, unblinking. She looks wary of the stare but not afraid of it. It is an uncomfortable moment with the […]
I wonder if Katrina Kaif is good at poker. In Baar Baar Dekho, Kaif wears an all-encompassing blankness, looking like a striking but not altogether realistic waxwork. She’s a vision, albeit one whose accent-soaked Hindi — more unbearable than ever — gets in the way of possible appreciation, and I wager she’d be an unnerving […]
The good thing about casting Tiger Shroff as a superhero is that, thanks to his fluidly lithe movements, it does sometimes become hard to spot where the actual moves stop and the wire-work begins. Watching Shroff, an endearing, almost unbearably earnest performer, reminds me of those early Salman Khan days when he was a lanky […]
