NB: An extraordinary film by one of India’s most talented film-makers. What I saw were three visual metaphors: an eclipse of the sun which never lifted; a professor entering a dark place to contemplate darkness; and an armed woman waiting silently for something unspeakable. For me, the first metaphor signified the contemporary planetary condition; the… Read More Amar Kanwar: Such A Morning
First posted July 17, 2018 A charming new discovery (for me) – short films. I’ll keep adding to the list.. Lillete Dubey; Mohan Agashe in Puraana Pyaar: “Papa old-age home se bhaag gaye. Mrs Sharma ke saath” Naseeruddin Shah and Shernaz Patel in Interior Cafe Night Ananya Sharma in Lift – by Ida Ali Naomi Scott, Jack… Read More “Papa old-age home se bhaag gaye. Mrs Sharma ke saath”
Jafar Panahi after the ban MARK KROTOV Jafar Panahi (director). No Bears. 2022.Jafar Panahi: Interviews. Edited by Drew Todd. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. JAFAR PANAHI’S NO BEARS opens with a long, 270-degree pan around the T-intersection of two streets. We know the action takes place sometime in the post-pandemic present because in the background of the frame… Read More An Entire Society Exists Within Me
Nostalgia is tremendously shot, and terrifically acted by Favino. It challenges the idea of “nostalgia” as broadcast in the title: it isn’t simply that nostalgia is delusional, or that the past wasn’t as great as it appears when viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. It is that there is no past and present Peter Bradshaw Mario Martone’s… Read More Nostalgia review – bittersweet crime yarn also homecoming love-letter to Naples
First posted January 26, 2016 The 2015 film “Behemoth” opens with an mining explosion and closes with a ghost city. The 84 minutes in between are a wordless exploration of what connects the two — the environmental tragedy that has mirrored China’s economic miracle. Shot over several years in the Chinese provinces of Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi,… Read More Matt Sheehan: Silent documentary on China’s unspooling environmental disasters
Fatima Bhutto If recent Bollywood films are any indication, it is fair to say that India’s film industry is obsessed with Pakistan. Obsessed. Like standing outside your apartment and trying to peek through your windows at night with binoculars obsessed. If the films were smarter or more daring, Pakistan might be flattered. Instead, we are beginning to be mildly… Read More Bollywood is obsessed with Pakistan. We’d be flattered if it weren’t so nasty
RAMA LAKSHMI In a country where two-thirds of the population is below 35, it took a 57-year-old actor’s movie – Pathaan — to bring the ka-ching back to a battered Bollywood. That’s the gravity-defying, logic-defying stardom that Shah Rukh Khan represents. Not too long ago, the know-it-alls were writing hasty obituaries of Bollywood and about… Read More Pathaan is Shah Rukh Khan’s love letter to his fans. And RSVP for boycott gang
“I still believe in paradise. But now at least I know it’s not some place you can look for. Because it’s not where you go. It’s how you feel for a moment in your life when you’re a part of something. And if you find that moment…it lasts forever.” Dario Feat – Voices We sailed… Read More Dario G Feat. Vanessa Quinones – Voices
Kevin Tschierse It’s the first non-English language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” German director Edward Berger has taken it upon himself to venture a German interpretation that launched internationally on Netflix in October 2022. Some critics have praised the remake as a successful anti-war drama, while others criticize the… Read More ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ in Golden Globes race
NB: This is an interesting historical documentary; and the comments are also thought provoking. (I do not agree with everything said here: for instance the suggestion – at about 1 hr 11 m – that Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ was a way of suppressing the horror of Nazism, or that she blamed… Read More ‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Martin Heidegger & Nazism. A Film by Jeffrey Van Davis
After the truth-shower 