Hindi movies
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I suppose I ought to begin this review with a disclaimer of sorts: My views on God and religion are nobody else’s business but mine. A while ago, I wrote about Terry Pratchett’s Moving Pictures, and how his strategy for satire was to approach our world through the eyes of characters in a very different
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This blog post probably won’t make much sense to someone who hasn’t read Hamlet and watched Haider, for which I apologize in advance. For the record, both are worth doing, and an infinitely better use of your time than reading this. It helps, I think, to think of Haider as not so much an adaptation but a re-imagining of Hamlet. Sort of
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I have to confess that I only watched the last 15 minutes of Kai Po Che. My wife was watching it, and she gave me a 3 minute synopsis so that I could understand what was going on. And yet, I found myself moved by the closing shot of Ishaan’s face, just before the end credits started
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Spoilers ahead! Does that bother you? For a Rohit Shetty film, no less? Really? WhoWhat are you? It helps, I think, to think of Chennai Express as a Hindi film set in Tamil Nadu for the benefit of non-Tamilians. The film often feels like a distilled cinematic expression of the benign bewilderment with which the
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Beware: Here be potential spoilers! It’s not a bad movie by any stretch, but it’s not a brilliant one either. But if Race 2 is a hit, this one deserves to be the blockbuster it has turned out to be, so there you go. I don’t have the patience to write a full-length review of
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The last time Neeraj Pandey made a movie was nearly 5 years ago. It was a taut, two-character drama called A Wednesday and gave its stars — Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher — such good material to work with that their sheer joy at playing these characters shone through. The film was not without its flaws,
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At this point, I suppose, I should define “we”. I refer to peole like me, born in Madras in the nineteen-seventies and ripening into cinematic awareness in the decade that followed, in Mani Ratnam’s decade. We are possibly the most qualified to write about Mani Ratnam. We might also be the least qualified. — Conversations
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There is so much in Student of the Year that falls in the spectrum between blech and meh that it is a pleasant surprise when something manages to grab me by the short hairs. That moment comes towards the end, when Kayoze Irani lets his teacher have it with both barrels. It’s not so much
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You know that black screen with white lettering that appears before nearly every movie these days? The one that tells you that smoking and drinking is bad for you? Cocktail is the first one I’ve seen where, not only does it say there for a while, there’s actually a voice-over that reads it out. And
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For a while now, I have been meaning to write a blog post on Rowdy Rathore. But just when I figured out what I wanted to say, Baradwaj Rangan beat me to it. To be fair, he does it better than I would have. So let me speak of a couple of peripheral observations that I
24 frames per second 