Great scenes
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When people are faced with a tragedy they cannot make sense of, they try to explain it to themselves in terms of things they understand and can control. They just need something to pin it on, something to channel their frustration into. Very often, a movie will concentrate on selling one of those explanations to
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First things first. If you haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption so far, please do the following: Compulsory: Find a DVD of the movie and watch it. If you happen to live in a small town where the only available copy of the DVD is with a curmudgeonly octagenarian neighbour of yours who insists on watching
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I watched Quiz Show on TV eons ago and thought it was a wonderful film. But over the years, my memory of it faded to the point where I could only remember one scene with clarity. Recently, when it came on TV again, I stuck around to watch that scene and then zapped on to
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There is nothing extraordinarily memorable about the movie, but if I’m stuck between watching Citizen Kane and Love Actually, I am likely to choose the latter as often as not. To quote what is probably the best line in Some Like It Hot, nobody’s perfect. I very often don’t watch this movie in one go
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I remember watching Pasumpon years ago on TV and thinking, there’s no earthly reason why this movie should work. The son (Prabhu) of a zamindar is estranged from his mother (Radhika) for two decades because she remarried after her husband died. He grows into adulthood and still carries around that resentment, although by now it
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Right at the end of Pineapple Express — which follows Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle into the annals of the Improbably Good Stoner Movies — the three heroes have breakfast at a diner and unwind. I am no homophobe, but I believe that the only plausible human reaction to their conversation would be to
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I confess to not being overly enthusiastic about watching Taare Zameen Par when it came out. I have no idea why. When I finally did see it a few months ago, I kept wondering why I had waited so long. It’s a wonderful movie about a dyslexic kid having trouble in school until a sympathetic
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A man stands at a street corner with his guitar, singing. During the day, when people pass by and are likely to drop a coin or two into his box, he sings popular numbers that they may have heard. It is after dark that he starts singing his own stuff. Whether or not his music is to
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Something interesting is happening to Tamil village cinema these days. It is as if a bunch of directors have decided to throw away the Nattamai — Morai Maaman playbook and write a new one instead. This new cinema is defined, above all, by real characters. I could spend ages in the interiors of Tamil Nadu
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Most people, when they think about Juno, automatically smile because they remember some witty one-liner or the other. Me, I always end up remembering the scene that moved me to tears when I first saw it, and still manages to make my eyes glisten when I catch it on TV. No, not the scene in
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