Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.
A decade on, what makes Kapoor & Sons still stand the test of time is not just that it addressed taboo subjects, but how it did so. For a change, it was not the “ungrateful” children, but the unwittingly manipulative parents who were under the microscope in this film.
For much of its history, Indian cinema looked at women. Increasingly, women are now looking back. And the frame has never felt more brimming with potential.
Suresh Triveni’s film, released on Amazon Prime Video, is far more interested in packaging the 69-year-old Anil Kapoor as an action hero again. The arc of the everyday man who has tolerated enough is incoherent as he does not engage meaningfully with the oppressed for most of the film.
Young Sherlock, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is more wholesome than shrewd or cynical, unlike the other renditions that have been resurrected before.
In this Frank E. Flowers film streaming on Amazon Prime, insipid and uninspired writing drains urgency from scenes that should crackle with tension.
Madhubala’s stardom was not just national mythology. In a potent illustration of pre-internet global fandom, her star image also travelled in unexpected ways to far off places like Greece.
The Hindi cinema music scene has devolved tremendously in the last decade. Where 2016 offered full-bodied albums that ranged from being emotionally maximalist to thematic, much of today’s output is engineered for virality rather than longevity.
In a TV-scape that is scattered with high-profile crime dramas struggling to justify their continuations, Kohrra does something rare and actually ups the stakes by digging deeper.
Marijana Jankovic’s Home, which had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, is an emotionally astute debut that is comfortable observing rather than being incendiary or confrontational.
In the present, the truth may get drowned out by applause but history has a longer memory. Figures like Madhavan will be remembered for what their creations came to represent at a fraught historical moment in time, technical finesse of their art be damned.
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