In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
Read More
Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
Read More
“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
Read More
In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
Read More
Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
Read More
In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
He is the casting director of films like Lootera, Shanghai, Shor in the City, LSD and more. And also the man who has created extensive workshops for the cast of NH10, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, Daawat-E-Ishq, Queen, Ladies vs Ricky Bahl and counting. In an industry largely driven by stars, he is a technician who […]
In the mid 90s, Waheeda Rehman was negotiating a cusp in her life. After spending a few blissful decades in Bengaluru with husband Kanwaljit (with whom she had starred in the 1964 film Shagoon) in a sprawling hacienda called ‘Gharonda,’ raising two children, initiating an organic cereal brand with friend and neighbour Asharfa Sattar, she was […]
In Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951), Shashi Kapoor was a cherub with the eyes of a little devil. As the disadvantaged child of an impoverished mother, you see him brutalised by a cruel world, lose his innocent faith in life, in goodness and turn to petty crime to survive. This shift could not have been easy […]
Working with acclaimed art director Suzanne Caplan Merwanji (whose work in Farhan Akhtar’s film Dil Chahta Hai gave Hindi cinema, a new design template) in the capacity of a photographer, Meenal Agarwal never really thought she would get sucked into the world of creating multi-dimensional cinematic contexts. Contexts where stories can live, breathe and […]
Director Navdeep Singh’s journey through the Hindi filmscape has been a bit like the perilous road trip in his latest film NH10. He uses words like ‘crash’ and ‘burn’ to describe the years that followed his first film Manorama Six Feet Under (2007). This moody and atmospheric interpretation of Polanski’s Chinatown won critical acclaim […]
Like all good actors, Aamina Sheikh is a chameleon. Her strong, striking face exudes both resilience and quiet simplicity in Pakistani soaps like Maat and Shikkan (now playing on Zee Zindagi) and yet when she wants to play a global citizen, she transforms herself in a second into a woman who drips effortless pizzazz. Born […]
There is very little talk in Navdeep Singh’s NH10 but there is one chilling conversation summing up the heart of the darkness that India loses itself in ever so often. A cop is talking to Anushka Sharma’s Meera, almost as if, she, an urban woman, is an alien who must be educated about the laws […]
Purple Skies, a documentary about lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders was recently screened at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival and the film’s director Sridhar Rangayan, also a profound thought leader of the LGBT movement and a conversation starter as far as gay rights go in India, was in town. When the award-winning filmmaker, editor of India’s […]
Even in his seventies, Pyarelal Ramprasad Sharma of the legendary musical team of Laxmikant Pyarelal has the cherubic innocence of a child and the effusive humility of a waterfall. He was in the city to helm a musical night organised by the Rotary Club, and when he masterfully conducted a 30-piece orchestra, memories of […]
A ripple of nostalgia courses through you at the sight of stacks of cassettes in a recording shop. The kind of a shop in the bazaars of your hometown, where an obliging attendant took a playlist scribbled on a piece of paper and gave you back a cassette brimming with sweetness. And you tried to […]
One thing a Sriram Raghavan film does not ever lack is atmosphere. Remember the menacing rats in 2004’s Ek Hasina Thi or the crazily inventive heist in Johnny Gaddaar (2007) or the shootout that starts from a baby’s pram in Agent Vinod (2012)? In Badlapur too, the home of a young couple is inhabited by […]
In Milan Lutheria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, a female protagonist relived the ultimate male fantasy of the 70s by wearing a knotted and polka-dotted Bobby blouse. The nostalgia for Bobby is so strong that when Twinkle or Tina Khanna was styled for her debut film Barsaat, she wore minis and blouses inspired from […]