Bicycle Theives (1948): The Neo-Realist Masterpiece that inspired Ray

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 […]

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Expressive Cinematography at its finest

There are two films in the Harry Potter franchise that I have a bi-polar appreciation for. Previously, I have said why I think Prisoner of Azkaban is the best one of the lot, because of the brilliant direction of Alfonso Cuaron, even though I don’t like that some of the important plot points from the […]

1917: A Visual Masterpiece

April 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 […]

Kedara: A Symphony of Silence

“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 […]

Why should Films be Taught in School?

Okay, hold your horses! Calm down and listen to me before you get all riled up about the futility of this. Now instead of jumping into it directly, let’s take a step back. Let’s talk about that form of art that is already being taught in schools around the globe – literature. So why do […]

The Hidden Gem in Ray’s Creative Crown

Satyajit 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 […]

Jojo Rabbit: A Satirical War Against Hate

“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 […]

Marriage Story: The Indelible Truth of Being Alive

After 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 […]

Parasite REVIEW: It Eats at the Mind and Grows Inside You!

“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 […]

Subrata Mitra: The Forgotten Master of Light

“We Indians do not celebrate our genius, that’s why we need a Richard Attenborough to present our Gandhi to the world. And, we do not appreciate technology as an art, that’s why Subrata Mitra’s retrospective is celebrated in Italy, not here” Ashok Mehta, National award-winning cinematographer of films like Bandit Queen, Moksha and 36 Chowringhee Lane […]