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…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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It was a moment of vindication though she was not looking for one when Kalki Koechlin walked across the stage in Rashtrapati Bhavan to accept a well-earned honour for her role in Margarita with a Straw. This was a film that normalised and mainstreamed a cerebral palsy patient as a full-bodied, ferociously intelligent protagonist. The […]
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 […]
Sayani Gupta is the young, brave, literate face of Hindi cinema. Someone who is keenly interested in the craft of acting. The actor who starred most prominently in Tasher Desh in 2012 and recently in Margarita, With a Straw, will also appear in an important role in Anurag Basu’s forthcoming Jagga Jasoos. She spoke […]
Margarita, With a Straw continues its triumphant journey across the world, taking director Shonali Bose to assorted festival podiums and vindicating her belief in her brave, little film, again and again. In an interview, Bose recounts the loss, the pain and the cathartic emotions that led to the making of the film. The tragedy […]
Director and writer Shonali Bose after the painfully direct Amu (2005), a film that revisited the 1984 Sikh riots, is back with another story that is close to her heart. Margarita With A Straw draws from a personal tragedy and also the life of a close relative who suffers from Cerebral Palsy ( A […]
“Film kitni bhi hatke ho, log dekhenge to baith ke hi,” says Govinda’s fading superstar to an author suffering from writer’s block in Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s Happy Ending. The hero adds for good effect,”don’t try to teach people the meaning of life after they have bought a ticket for Rs 300.” So the […]
She is hard to classify or sum up in stock phrases that are usually used for a mainstream female actor. She strains against the tyranny of preconceptions about women and their bodies in cinema and in life. She speaks passionately against misogyny at every level. In language that does not sound like sloganeering but […]
“Mere uncle ki life pe bhi ek picture bana tha..Albert Pinto..unko gussa bahut aata tha,” says Prateik Babbar’s Pinto and this is one of the few genuinely funny lines in My Friend Pinto. Director Raaghav Dar is obviously inspired by the bumbling, golden-hearted Chaplin who runs into vases, people and disasters and somehow emerges unscathed, […]
In Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, we first see Kalki Koechlin melting away in milky sweetness, pouty and wide-eyed, smiling and dewy with joy next to the man she is going to marry. As jokes are cracked, a toast given and a cloyingly sweet song sung, she looks blissfully happy. Just moments later, she […]
It is hard to say if Anurag Kashyap Inc is intentionally subverting the vocabulary of romance in Hindi films but there is no deference towards it, either. So the sepia memory of Dev Anand running across glades and slopes under an open sky to the tune of Khoya Khoya Chand becomes a remix in Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan. The […]