Even before Satyajit Ray made history with his first film ‘Pather Panchali’ in 1955, he had written a script based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novel published in 1916, “Ghare Baire” (The Home and the World) [1], that was to have been directed by a friend Harisadhan Dasgupta according to the official…
Netflix started streaming Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple from end April 2021. The film won the Best Screenplay award and the FIPRESCI International Critics prize at the Venice Film Festival. Tamhane’s first film Court (2014) too won an award at Venice — the Best Film in the Horizons category. Court arguably…
The Netflix film Mank (2020) directed by David Fincher is of particular interest to film buffs, since it revolves around the writing of the script of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane by Herman J. Mankiewicz. As much as the meaning of “rosebud” was a mystery — albeit a bit of…
Looking back at the Indian art films one has seen in the past five years, Ananya Kasaravalli’s Kannada language film Harikatha Prasanga (2016) is among the few that stand out. This movie is relatively less known hence the need for looking at it in some detail. It is set in…
Afghanistan is currently in focus now that US troops are on the process of withdrawal from there, ending the 18-year war. Pavel Lungin’s Russian film Leaving Afghanistan (2019) is a timely look at the way the Soviets freed itself from the Afghan quagmire in 1989. Lungin won the Best Director…
The legendary Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema may appear elusive even to those who have some exposure to world cinema. The following tribute to Tarkovsky by another master filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, helps to understand what Tarkovsky attempted and points to Tarkovsky’s pre-eminence: “My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like…
Bong Joon-ho is known among film buffs for a couple of excellent films he made: Memories of Murder (2003) and Mother (2009). The film, Memories of Murder, was based on the true story of serial murders. It depicted police brutality and incompetence during the hunt for the mysterious killer. Mother…
The Azerbaijani director Ilgar Najaf’s Pomegranate Orchard (2017) was one of the best films at IFFI 2017, Goa and BIFFES 2018, Bengaluru. It was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s play “The Cherry Orchard”. Najaf’s 2011 film Buta is more than just a charming film. Asif Rustamov’s Down the River (2014) is…
A Review of the HBO documentary by Alex Gibney, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) on Elizabeth Holmes and her now defunct visionary startup, Theranos
There is an iconic image of Elizabeth Holmes that keeps recurring in The Inventor… Clad in black turtleneck she holds between her…
A Review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish film ‘The Wild Pear Tree’ (2018)
In his notebook he [Anton Chekov] made this entry: “The Turk digs a well for the salvation of his soul.” -Vladimir Nabokov
For a typical youngster, returning to his hometown after graduation is the time when he…
Film Critic — Co-founded ‘Deep Focus’ a Cinema Quarterly https://medium.com/@400films https://medium.com/@thirainaanooru
