Category: Film Reviews
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The Coldest Spielberg
I made a pact with myself (a post from 22 years ago) in a dark living room a long time ago, right around the time the bicycle in E.T. left the ground. Any film Spielberg makes, I watch it first day. With Jurassic Park I renewed the pact and Schindler’s List made it permanent. I…
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Nayakan – The first masterpiece
This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Nayakan. Watch the retrospective tomorrow on youtube. My maternal grandfather, was the most righteous man I knew. He saw the world in clean lines. You were either good or you were not. Yet for all his black-and-white convictions, there was one name he spoke…
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Thalapathi: A Brother in the Dark
This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Thalapathi. Watch the retrospective on youtube. Shakespeare wrote three great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. The last of these, a bleak study on age, inheritance, and madness, was reimagined by Akira Kurosawa into Ran, a Japanese war epic where…
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Retro: A Genre-Spliced Krishna Trip
There’s a scene in Jigarthanda DoubleX that doesn’t just whisper Karthik Subbaraj’s philosophy; it flaunts it. Caesar, the gangster-turned-gun-slinging film junkie, watches a Clint Eastwood western in a crumbling theatre, transfixed. Then, as if summoned by Eastwood himself, he walks not beside the screen but through it, literally exiting via a door carved into the…
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Bombay: Notes from a Burning House
This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Bombay. Watch the retrospective on youtube. It’s hard to say exactly when the house began to burn. Was it the moment Shaila Banu and Shekhar first exchanged glances on a quiet boat ride in Tirunelveli? Was it when their love, innocent…
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