18th/19th c. Calcutta was the seat of the British Raj in India. Consequently, it witnessed a fusion of the East and the West, giving birth to the Bengali Renaissance – richly evident in the works of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, and also the generation born to the educated middle-class around this time. Satyajit Ray […]
Read More Bicycle Theives (1948): The Neo-Realist Masterpiece that inspired RayApril 1917, the Western Front. A young soldier, Lance-Corporal Blake, is given a perilous mission. He has to carry a message through a “No Man’s Land” to a battalion of the Devonshires, revoking an attack planned for the next day. The Germans have put just retreated to the Hindenburg Line – but aerial reconnaissance has […]
Read More 1917: A Visual Masterpiece“Less is more.” That’s the art of minimalism – to speak less and say more. Indraadip Dasgupta has been a celebrated music director in the Bengali film industry for two decades and has scored some of the best-known songs over the years. But it was the call of the spot behind the camera that he […]
Read More Kedara: A Symphony of SilenceSatyajit Ray – a man who had the deepest impact on me when it comes to cinema, a man who taught me to understand cinema as a form of art and fall in love with this medium. Amidst these gloomy days that we are in right now, could there be any other auspicious day for […]
Read More The Hidden Gem in Ray’s Creative Crown“The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds.” The first words of “Caging Skies”, a novel by Christine Leunens, which Taika Waititi’s latest feature Jojo Rabbit is adapted from. When you put the words “Hitler” and “comedy” together in a […]
Read More Jojo Rabbit: A Satirical War Against HateAfter making 10 feature films, released over a quarter-century of filmmaking (his debut, Kicking and Screaming, came out in 1995; his other films include The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and Frances Ha), this, at last, is Noah Baumbach’s breakthrough in the dramatic genre. Marriage Story is truly a work of an […]
Read More Marriage Story: The Indelible Truth of Being Alive“A flat-out masterpiece,” “the most important film of the year,” “a wild wild ride,” are only a few accolades that Parasite has earned from the critics who just can’t stop raving about it, and this Korean film might have grabbed your attention recently after it won the Best Subtitled Foreign Film at the 77th Golden Globes. Ending up as No.1 in quite […]
Read More Parasite REVIEW: It Eats at the Mind and Grows Inside You!What springs to your mind when you hear about The Shining? Is it the river of blood flowing through the Overlook Hotel? Or the sinister Grady Twins tormenting poor Danny Torrance? Or maybe it’s Jack Nicholson crashing an axe through the bathroom door and shouting “Here’s Johnny!”? Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror strikes a chord with […]
Read More The Shining: The Art of HorrorWhen the opening chapter of a Stephen King book starts with a six-year-old talking to a clown who lives in a sewer, chances are things are going to take a turn for the worst. King’s book was bifurcated into halves, one hefty chunk going to its 1950s preteens living in a fictional Maine town, and […]
Read More IT Chapter Two REVIEW: A Deliriously Entertaining Sequel“The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Dark opens with this quote from Albert Einstein. It’s an excerpt from a letter Einstein wrote after learning of the death of his good friend and collaborator Michele Besso; it was meant to help Besso’s family cope with their loss. The first […]
Read More Dark REVIEW: Everything is Connected… The question is not how, but WHEN?
The Film Reel 