where reviews, columns and essays jostle for attention
Bombay slows down when you’re alone at night. The city may infamously refuse to sleep, but it does take the occasional breather. Also, earphones help. We see the protagonist in Chaitanya Tamhane’s extraordinary film The Disciple ride a motorcycle through deserted crossings in an ungodly hour, the city allowing him to drink in lungfuls of […]
In this 2016 interview, Irrfan Khan talks about Chandrakanta, The Namesake and many a thing before and after… including Naseeruddin Shah’s back.
Were Twitter to be believed, not just is Court the finest Indian film of many years, but it has also picked up an Oscar already. Ah, sweet, sweet hyperbole. This online rejoicing — with the selection of Court as India’s official entry for the Foreign Film Oscar — is, of course, indicative of the deeper malaise […]
Old jungle saying: cast a film well. There is a lot that a film-going audience can forgive in a production – from continuity errors to script flaws, from incoherent cinematography to weak plots – but one of the hardest to overlook is when the filmmakers pick the wrong people for the principal parts. Truly remarkable […]
(Full disclosure: Masaan is produced by Drishyam Films and they are the people producing my directorial debut, X, as well.) ~ It’s devastatingly hard to crush a skull. For all its lifelong fragility, the human skull is a significantly tough nut, which is why crematoriums have assistants on call to shove a stick into a pyre […]
Half of 2015 has flown by, and it’s a good time to take stock of Hindi cinema and its latest shenanigans. Yesterday, I looked at the good stuff, the films and performers that impressed us in these last six months. Today, however, the red pen is out and offenders must be informed of their grotesquery. […]
Half of 2015 has flown by, and it’s a good time to take stock of Hindi cinema and its latest shenanigans. Today, I’ll focus on the good stuff, the films and performers that have impressed us in these last six months — while keeping the red pen ready for tomorrow’s more ominous instalment of the […]
The 16th Mumbai Film Festival starts today, October 14. The official website gives you everything you need to know, and lets you reserve tickets. But this here link (RS MAMI Picks), gives you a PDF of the schedule with my must-watch films of the festival — based on things I’ve read, heard and trailers of the […]
Action films aren’t what they used to be. Gone are the days when a girl would heat a knife on a candle and dig out a bullet while Amitabh Bachchan threw out a trademark grimace. Nowadays all the girl needs to do is shine a torch while the guy puts on a bandaid. Expecting these […]
On 23 May 1994, a film called Pulp Fiction won the Palme D’or at the Cannes film festival. Twenty years on, Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece is hailed as an absolute classic, and is arguably the single most influential film made in the last fifty years. It defied screenwriting rules, courses with wit and originality and is […]
