Indian Cinema
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Swayamvaram / One’s Own Choice (Dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 1972, Malayalam)
Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s debut feature Swayamvaram (1972) is a stark melodrama that marked the beginning of the Malayalam New Wave, an adjunct of India’s Parallel Cinema movement. The film opens with an extraordinary six-minute, dialogue-free sequence aboard a moving bus in Kerala. Shot in a verité style, the camera roves among passengers before settling on the protagonist, Viswam Continue reading
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DUNKI (Dir. Rajkumar Hirani, 2023, India) – Home & Away
* * Many contemporary mainstream Hindi films fall short in comparison to their big budget South Indian counterparts. While the latter exhibit technical prowess, such films have regrettably started to trade in a troubling blend of toxic hyper-masculinity and nationalist jingoism. It’s likely that you’re acquainted with the specific films I am alluding to. In Continue reading
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AGRA (Dir. Kanu Behl, 2023, India/France)
There is a lot of sex in Agra; in the toilet (masturbatory self-relief), on the phone (sexting), on the bed. It is raw, unfiltered sex, rarely depicted in Indian cinema with such indescribable candour. Guru, a young call centre employee lives in what can only be described as a kind of sexual desolation bordering on Continue reading
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Chokh / The Eyes (Dir. Utpalendu Chakraborty, 1982, India/Bengali)
The eyes speak, harbouring and chronicling histories, emotional sentiments and even memories. Chokh, a stark political exercise in neorealist aesthetics, opens with the petrified eyes of Jadunath (Om Puri in blistering form) who looks directly at us with a totalizing gaze of defiance. Jadunath, a union leader, has been convicted of murder, and waits impatiently Continue reading
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KADAKH (Dir. RAJAT KAPOOR, 2019, India) [spoilers]
![KADAKH (Dir. RAJAT KAPOOR, 2019, India) [spoilers]](https://moviemahal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/kadakh.png?w=1024)
There is a dead body in your apartment but you have a plethora of guests arriving for a party to celebrate Diwali very shortly. So what exactly do you do? It is a sinister dilemma faced by somewhat ordinary people going through a tinderbox of emotions. In other words, the perfect Hitchcockian predicament since the Continue reading
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