Sunny Pawar Before knowing that Garth Davis was a successful commercials director, I stood up from the screening of his first feature movie, Lion (2016) telling myself, “well now, that was nice, but rather commercial”. Not everything is bad about commercialization:...

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It seems appropriate today to speak about Firaaq, a 2008 movie which is Nandita Das’s debut film venture, based on the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim riots, in which Indian PM Modi had been suspected of biased non-intervention. Today, because the pressure of...

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Thanks to Anu Warrier’s Conversations over chai, I have just been the fortunate viewer of Astitva, by Mahesh Manjrekar, a film which was shot in 2000. If you haven’t read her review, please do, it’s a thoughtful, well-balanced commentary of the movie,...

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Shyam Benegal generally explores the forces which can endanger or wreak human communities, and what happens to individuals in the process. The result is often pitiless. Hopes are crushed, and ties bruised. Instincts are hypocritically presented as virtues...

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I wasn’t sure I would have the patience to sit for 2 hours and a half and watch a “Bollywood” movie once again…But somehow the old passion revived, and the magic was still there: Rab ne bana di jadoo! Let’s say, to start with, that what caught me by the...

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"I wish I could start from scratch. I have done good, bad and indifferent films. I wish I could erase it all and start afresh like the Professor of "Ek Din Achanak" who walked out on his family in a rainy day without even as much as informing anybody....

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There isn’t much of a story in Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi (the Adversary, 1970): because of social and economic disruption in Bengal, young Siddharta (Dhritiman Chatterjee) and his family (mother, uncle, sister and younger brother) find it hard to cope...

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Umrao Jaan (Muzzafar Ali, 1981) belongs to the genre of tragedies which describe the destiny of a doomed character in a beautifully told narrative such as will bring out the pity and sorrow necessary for spectators to be cleansed of their own sins. And...

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I think I can safely say that Satyajit Ray all his life tried to fight for individual rights and a critical outlook on traditions. If you have in mind the film Ganashatru (An enemy of the people) , where a Western-looking scientist struggles against the...

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One cloud-capped day, somewhere along the bank of a Bengali river where waterfowl chirp their little bedeep, bedeep, a young woman clad in white walks out of the canopy of some century-old oaks that spread their gigantic branches all the way to the river...

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(Could this be this what happened to the great RK???) For Raj Kapoor the director, Bobby appeared in 1973 between Mera naam joker (1972) and Satyam shivam sundaram (1978) and so I was rather interested to have a look at it in order to bridge that gap....

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Rishte Naate (family relationships) is a 1965 Gopalakrishnan movie, with Raj Kumar, Nutan, Nazir Hussain, Jamuna and Ameeta as main actors. It does seem like I’m exhausting my reserves of Nutan movies, because while this film has more than a few qualities,...

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Reading about Mr. & Mrs 55, Guru Dutt’s 1955 sparkling romantic comedy on the net, in order to prepare this review, has been very pleasant; this devil of a director has produced some insightful commentaries from many of my blogging friends, along with...

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The Brave New World of Naya Daur (New Era, BR Chopra 1957) opens with a striking quote by Mahatma Gandhi: So from the start we know that the film is going to be about the biological (bios = life) relationship between men and the Earth, and that this bond...

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This 1954 film by M. Sadiq has qualities I wasn’t expecting. With movies that no one is reviewing or speaking about, you are faced with the unnerving problem of wondering whether you aren’t giving value to a work of art out of an idiosyncratic feeling...

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