The year was 1974 and a young twenty one year old was fiercely pitching his capabilities to producers at Universal Studios about bringing Peter Benchley’s smash hit book named Jaws to the big screen. This ambitious young man was none other than the legendary Steven Spielberg. Producers Dick Zanuck and Dave Brown had gone around…
Loving Vincent | Review
Writer Aldous Huxley once brazenly described the cost of an artist’s life in these words – “Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy ? Would he ever want to do anything ? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life ?”…
Mulk | Review
The history of Religion is fraught with violence. A definitive set of tenets can only work when you can boast of a massive population that follows them. However, not everyone would be sympathetic to your beliefs so war became a method for powerful regimes to impose their religious doctrines on relatively secular states which held…
Karwaan | Movie Review | Irrfan | Dulquer Salmaan | Mithila
Any road trip movie across Bollywood and Hollywood uses the serene vista through which the characters travel as an element to braid together sequences, characters and landscape into one effortless narrative. Hollywood regularly produces good Road trip movies like Little Miss Sunshine, The Motorcycle Diaries, Rain Man and even Zombieland. Each movie is an exercise…
5 Reasons why Westworld is Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton is one of the most prolific writers of our generation. Some of the most outrageous, yet plausible, ideas in speculative science fiction came from the pages of his books. In the 1990s, Crichton talked about Geneticists and DNA Engineers extracting fossilized DNA into their petridishes and reconstructing animals which had gone extinct long…
Mission: Impossible – Fallout | Review
By the time the first Mission: Impossible film came out in 1996 Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond had already become a legend with no less than nineteen films in the franchise with eight different actors playing the titular spy extraordinaire. Despite the characteristic appeal of Fleming’s universe with its suave protagonists and ravishing Bond-women,…
Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind | Review
Some of my formative childhood memories have been spent watching films like Hook (1991), Jumanji (1995) and Flubber (1997). It was back then that my mind associated Williams with that funny, loving, child-like character who stood out from anyone else I had seen on screen. For some reason, I would see him as one of…
Soorma | Review
If you are a chest-thumping die-hard fan of the Indian Cricket Team, you already know what it feels like to be the nation that dominates one of the most popular sports played across the globe. Now multiply that tenfold and imagine how it would have felt to live in India from the 1930s to the…
TVF Yeh Meri Family | Episode 1 & 2 Review
Owens Lee Pomeroy described it perfectly when he said ‘Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson, you find the present tense, but the past..perfect!’ Ruminating over the idyllic summers of our childhood is entrenched in human nature. It gives us permanent moments of self-satisfaction and fond memories to carry us through any tough day. For fleeting…
Why Stop-Motion still exists in 2018
There used to be a simple time when we lived with limited technology and so did film-makers. In a world which had not yet been introduced to computers, Animators would tediously draw and re-draw pictures several times with slight variations to show. Then a primitive camera-slider would be rolled fast enough so that 24 frames…
Sacred Games | Review | Nawazuddin Siddiqui | Saif Ali Khan
Yayati was a Puranic king and an ancestor of the Pandavas. Legend has it that he was cursed with old age during his prime by Shukracharya, the priest of the Asuras, which he later exchanged with his Son Puru to regain his youth. The season Finale of Sacred Game is titled ‘Yayati’ and it is…
Sicario : Day of the Soldado | Movie Review
Denis Villeneuve’s filmography is a painter’s canvas but there is an interminable thread that weaves through the myriad of genre-defining films that he has made so far. Prisoners (2013) and Sicario (2015) were both crime dramas, albeit of significantly different tonalities, whereas Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) re-characterized how science-fiction movies could be…
