Your destination before or after you complete your journey at the movies
Imbuing what are essentially very conventional potboiler-y Bollywood plots – the mistaken delivery of a dabba to a lonely person who turns out to be the dissatisfied wife’s soulmate in “The Lunchbox,” and the chance encounter between two complete lonely strangers through a photograph here – with a European art-house sensibility doesn’t sound like a […]
The recent surge in auteur-directed “mainstream” films offer tremendous insight into these filmmakers’ directorial abilities as opposed to their storytelling chops. The plots here are the least important thing, as the question of what is going to happen in the film is already answered for the viewer if they are aware of the typical underdog story, love […]
Major Spoilers for Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (Only if you have not seen the trailers) The emergence of a large number of mainstream Hollywood LGBT films in recent years, like “Love, Simon,” (2018) “Milk,” (2008) and “Battle of the Sexes,” (2017) has led film writers to question the relevance of New Queer Cinema – […]
Operating in a similar vein to Cristian Mungiu’s neo-realist masterpiece “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days,” Ivan Ayr’s expertly crafted directorial debut gets so many things right to create a lived-in experience of the ghost-town-like dreary atmosphere of a wintery Delhi that I felt that his technical prowess might actually hamper my engagement with […]
Minor spoilers for Unbreakable (2000), Split (2016), and Glass (2018). Films based on comic books tend to gravitate towards displaying a sense of grandiosity on screen. Even the supposedly more grounded blockbusters, like Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Trilogy,” exaggerated certain aspects of filmmaking, like the actors’ performances, the visual scope of the action scenes, and […]
Nowadays, the prospect of watching (another) patriotic film made by Bollywood seems like a daunting one. My skepticism for these types of movies churned out very regularly in India (almost all Akshay Kumar vehicles in the past five years) stems not from the fact that I do not share the same respect, and pride that a majority […]
This is an academic paper on the way in which postmodern films like Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007) and Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance (2009) juggle between celebrating and critiquing Bollywood. Major spoilers ahead for both films. Coined in the 1970s when the film industry in India – constituting not only of Hindi language films but […]
This is an academic paper on the way in which Ramesh Sippy’s iconic Indian Western – Sholay – borrows from the historical context of 1970s India, and from the Western genre to create the quintessential Bollywood “masala” film, whose appeal has endured ever since its release in 1975. Major spoilers ahead. The image of men in commercially […]
From “Black Friday” to “Raman Raghav 2.0,” the majority of Anurag Kashyap films never attempt to conceal their fondness of exploring the dark side of the human psyche. They revel in interrogating the morally grey nature of their characters to suggest that even the seemingly most unhinged people may have reasons, valid or invalid, to […]
This is an academic paper on the analysis of Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s career, persona, and films (with a significant focus on her recent feature “You Were Never Really Here”), and how all these factors define her personality as an indie or independent filmmaker. Within the context of American cinema, writer Michael Z. Newman proposes […]
@ Terminal Cinema 