Latest in: Film Reviews

Steven Spielberg’s penchant for historico-political films began with The Color Purple (1985), for which he was panned both by the American black community and the critics. He grew up, in a big way, since this early attempt, when he tried an epic scale recreation of the Auschwitz, its background...

Abbas Kiarostami is the best known of Iranian filmmakers and it will not be out of place to assert that he put Iranian cinema on the world map. Yet, a careful viewing of his films raises questions about the validity of his methods. To put is plainly, Kiarostami’s best...

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) – based on a novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler – belongs to a genre called the ‘hard-boiled detective story’, which may be regarded as a sub-category under noir and includes films like Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). The genre has been accorded recognition as...

Review – The Dark Knight Rises I must admit that among America’s superheroes, I have a special fondness for the Batman. This is not only because he does not sport America’s colors as Superman and Spiderman do and wears stranger attire but also because the idea of a billionaire industrialist...

Every film festival has their favorite filmmakers; Hitchcock is one of Cannes’. His Psycho was screened in the sixth year since the inauguration of the Cannes Classic section, in 2010. This was followed by The Ring in 2012, The Birds and Vertigo in 2013, and Jamaica Inn in 2014. The restored version...

Although The Cabin in the Woods is nominally a teen horror film in the mold of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), it not only uses another kind of narrative – perhaps consciously derived from The Truman Show (1998) – to frame itself but also invokes whole sub-categories from the horror genre to assume the...

The new generation of Naga enthusiasts is picking up their lessons of filmmaking in this environment and have leapt into this new venture in quite a big way....

A clock with the seconds-needle soundlessly completes a circle and a half around it, setting the opening tone for Chaplin’s satirical “story of industry, of individual enterprise – humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness”: Modern Times, inhabited in the Depression years by the famished populace, jobless or underpaid...

The story of Talk to Her does not need retelling – especially since it has been so widely seen but it is divided into three major segments pertaining to the three key relationships in the narrative. The first segment pertains to the relationship between Benigno, a male hospital nurse...

Onaatah review – translated from original Assamese by Gitali Saikia   A long shot, night in a town, a huge building of a school or a college or a hospital; shadow and light draws complex pictures, through which a young girl is coming; just a moment; a car passes by,...