By Murtaza Ali Khan
Italian filmmaker Salvatore Allocca’s award-winning comedy film Taranta on the Road tells the story of a Tunisian man and a woman, Tarek and Amira, who have illegally come to Italy with the hope of a better future, after having closely witnessed the revolution in Tunisia.
By Prashila Naik
Bhumi Pednekar, a generally fine actress, does wonders with this role. The scene where she serves tea to the two sets of parents and then walks towards the bedroom to serve the younger ‘couple’, is a stunning indictment of how deep-rooted class-divides will continue to remain, even if physical and sexual boundaries are crossed.
By Nabanita Sengupta
Anindya Banerjee in ‘Watchmaker’ does not entertain. He provokes the audience to think. Together with his actors, he raises uncomfortable questions regarding the extremely intangible notion of time and leaves the answer open. ‘Watchmaker’ does not answer any question; it opens up many new ones and therein lies its success. The film is multi-layered, and a brave attempt in Indian cinema to represent the abstract.
By Anjali Bhavan
Perhaps the main problem is that the film celebrates this romance – VC is a lovable hero, and Leela our delicate heroine. This is an abusive relationship that mustn’t be romanticized, but we are instead shown dance sequences and VC sliding his finger down her nose, her face, her neck, then further down.
By Murtaza Ali Khan
Shades of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cold detachment are evident in the way certain scenes are framed. Consider the scene, shot in a long continuous take, wherein a man hurts a woman’s private parts, just as we see the her begging him to go easy, the camera suddenly takes us outside the house into the everyday monotony as her screams become more and more distant, before returning to the house with the woman now sitting alone on her bed, writhing in agony.
By Nishi Pulugurtha
In what could be a wonderful film that talks about dementia, the problems associated with it, and the troubles that concern a caregiver, Mayurakshi misses the mark. It misses it not in the portrayal of someone in whom dementia is slowly setting it or in the depiction of the changes that become apparent in the person or in the way people around him react to it or in the way people try to find ways and means of dealing with it. It misses the mark in that it does not refer with greater emphasis to the condition clearly and categorically.
By Sanjay Kumar
As rightly depicted in the movie, it is the power of Muslim women which is in the process of becoming a force multiplier. Three generations of women but all of them one way or the other resent the hold of patriarchy and associated claustrophobia.
By Rituparna Sengupta
Between portrayals of angry young men and flamboyant characters representing an apparently monocultural urban India, Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s ‘cinema of conviction’ challenged and nuanced such constructs.
By Nishi Pulugurtha
In the era when Telugu films, released in the late 1970s and 1980s, were characterized by outlandish costumes and glaring colour, meaningless violence and absence of good plots, Viswanath’s films stood out by their sensitivity and concerns. Viswanath’s films successfully negotiated the chasm between offbeat/parallel cinema and popular films.
By Srirupa Dhar
Indian film director Kaushik Ganguly’s Bengali film, Bastu-Shaap (2016), is a psychological drama that gives us an insight into the complexities of both human minds and relationships. Role-playing is portrayed as a major component in retaining these relationships. And the politics embedded in this role-playing powerfully betrays the true human being beneath the façade.
By Kouser Fathima
Though the movie starts on a high note, it later fails to live up to the mark. This is a usual story of one workaholic spouse and another supportive spouse. However, the difference is that the wife is the workaholic one, while the husband acts as the waiting spouse at home.
By Riti Das Dhankar
12 Angry Men deals with a dozen people’s anger and, in the process, tosses a question at an equally angry world. A simple question which can never be answered without being ambiguous: what is real?
