Review
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My friend Praba Ram and I had a lovely discussion about Maharaja, and it brought up a number of interesting points, some of which I felt merited a separate blog post. VERY SPOILERIFIC, so don’t read this unless you’ve watched the film or don’t plan to. First, the dustbin. My first thought was that it
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Nithilan Swaminathan’s Maharaja is a curious film. It does a heck of a lot to earn your admiration, but very little to earn your emotional involvement. It is thanks to a magnificent Vijay Sethupathi performance that the latter quality is not to its detriment.
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A boy is brutally thrust into adulthood when his parents go missing and he has to care for two younger brothers and an infant sister. When you see him as an adult, he appears to be a man whose expends so much energy suppressing his rage against the universe and doing what is required for
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A few weeks ago , when my daughter asked me to tell her a bedtime story, I narrated Peter Bischel’s A table is a table to her. Bedtime isn’t exactly ideal to introduce a preteen to existential angst (2 pm on a Tuesday afternoon works better, FYI), so I tried to lighten the tone a
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Mr and Mrs Mahi is a curious mixtape of a film. At one level, there’s little that feels original except the specific plot device of a husband who wanted to be a cricketer discovering that his wife could be a great one. There’s a bit of Dum Laga ke Haisha and Bawaal in how a
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The first thing you hear when you watch Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill is the theme from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai that plays over the Dharma Productions logo. If there is a greater red herring in the history of red herrings, I do not know it. (This is not to say that Karan Johar only produces
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An intrguing premise – elements of the Mahabharata are reconfigured into a dystopian sci-fi story – is let down by an underwhelming film.
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A superb two-character drama about death, love, agency and doing the right thing.
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Kiran Rao’s sophomore feature Laapataa Ladies begins at a bidaai (a farewell to the bride as she leaves to go to her in-laws’ house). The bride’s face is covered with a veil so all-encompassing that she can barely see anything past her feet. There is a moment of brief panic in her face when her
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A few days after watching Merry Christmas, I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out why it worked for me. The film is a slow burn, to the point where there isn’t really an end to the burning. You don’t see the quiet desperation of a character who has committed a crime and is
24 frames per second 