The most interesting thing about Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal is Shah Rukh Khan and the reimagining of Raj, the lover who knew he could not fail at life or love. The film shows us what would have happened if Raj had lost Simran after that fateful train journey through Europe and shrunk into […]
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Tag: anushka sharma
Yes, Ms Aniston, We Are All Fed Up!
In a country where a mother of three babies is a five-time World Amateur Boxing champion, has represented India at the Olympics and won a medal, we recently had the director of Sultan defending his decision to show a pregnant wrestler meekly giving up her Olympic dreams while her husband hops from one international success to another. Because, […]
The Year Of Sheroes
Rebecca Ferguson in a gold gown, climbing towards a precarious vantage point so that she can disrupt an opera with a stray bullet. Yes, the camera lingers on those sculpted legs, the sinewy shoulders but it is to drive home the fact that this woman is liquid steel. When someone calls Tom Cruise the manifestation […]
A Languid Cruise Through Chaos
Why would a woman whose marriage is a painful farce stay with her husband for 30 long years? Perhaps for the joy of chatting up her son on a luxurious sofa in a beautiful home that resembles a Balinese resort and where a leaf falls noiselessly in a pool. She is Neelam (Shefali Shah) and […]
Bombay Velvet: Inspired Madness
The closest we came to hearing jazz in a Hindi film in the ‘70s, was when Amitabh Bachchan’s dock-worker turned underworld apprentice Vijay, smoked away his foreboding in a bar; and Parveen Babi in a red gown slithered close to him with ‘I am falling in love with stranger’ playing in the background. The film […]
Sudip Sharma: NH10 Addresses Caste Politics
Cinema in the hands of Sohrab Modi, K Asif, Mehboob Khan, Kamal Amrohi and Salim Javed was pure verbosity and dialogue driven bravado. Gulzar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Rahi Masoom Reza, Sai Paranjpay, Manu Bhandhari and Basu Chatterjee made cinema less confrontational and more conversational. Now cinema is driven by images and emotion that is […]
Navdeep Singh: Man Of The Moment
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 […]
NH10: Fury Without Closure
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 […]
PK: Question Everything
Perspective. That sets what we see apart from what really exists. Like the blind-folded men who touched different parts of an elephant and proclaimed that a trunk was the whole elephant or perhaps the tail was, we see the world in our likeness. When in reality, as Rajkumar Hirani’s PK reminds a religious absolutist, “You […]
Jab Tak Hai Jaan: Fearless Sentimentality
There was a bit of Yash Chopra in every one of his heroes. Like some of them he believed in an ever-after. In the integrity of emotion. Whether that emotion was hate etched like a tattoo on a wrist or anger over the betrayal of a father. Or lost love that a poet mourned […]