Munroe is an island residing in the braids of Ashtamudi Kayal ( backwaters). From Kollam town you wake up early at around 4 AM and reach the isle at the break of the dawn. You get in a canoe, a tiny one which would tilt when you shift your mortal…

Costa-Gavras, the Greek French director known for his high octane political thrillers, crafted the complementary movies on authoritarianism, Z and L’aveu ( The Confession ). Both the movies are based on true events in Post War Eastern Europe and situated in a climate of political flux of the 50’s &…

Yi Yi (2000) The 1980's Taiwanese New Wave which rose as a protest march against the the dumping of Hong Kong cinema in Taiwan markets, narrated stories of Mondays and Tuesdays rather than fantasies. Edward Yang, the ring leader of this dissidence, with Tsai Ming Ling and Hou Hsiao-Hsien gave…

Xavier Dolan, the Quebec actor, director, screenwriter, editor,costume designer, who made his first movie when he was 19 which premiered at Cannes, is a fractious, mercurial and an unflinching personality. He should have had a terrible childhood and a rebellious adolescence, for his movies are of turbulence and fuming emotions…

Do not come here looking for anything objective or definite, it is a landscape in the mist, something that needs to be felt more than seen. Theo Angelopoulos tour de force is an immersive melancholic piece of Greek cinema that leaves you soaked in its surreal imagery. The movie opens…

Tsai Ming Ling burst into the cinematic universe with Rebels of the Neon God scripting a primal portrait of youth in a city. The movie is an achievement in arresting the most dissident and disobedient period of our life time in an earnest impersonal manner. Neon (Nezha)in Chinese mythology is…

The Arrival I reached Majnu-ka-Tilla where once the sufi saint Majnu used to ferry people across the Yamuna to meet Guru Nanak who had stayed there for a while. Today the Indo-Canadian travels a Punjabi enterprise (obvious from its nomenclature) ferries people to Himachal from the same location at a significant price…

This article is an expansion of the Slavoj Zizek critique on the lastest DC movie Joker, driven by the mercurial performance by Joaquin Phoenix and let down by the inarticulate storytelling by the Hangover director Todd Philips. I saw joker, liked it and forgot about it within 15 minutes out…

Flawed Narratives: Gully Boy Lately in Bollywood there has been an euphoria on the resurgence of socially relevant cinema which is also commercially viable. This includes Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy where she re-orients rap music from the materialist misogynist Baadshah Yo Yo forms to the social critique arising out of…