Our cinema has historically been in love with the spy as national fantasy: the lone ranger, an undying patriot, who single-handedly and willingly risks his life every time to save the country. 'The Family Man' punctures this bubble.
About The Author
Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.
Watching Ershadi, you understood what Kiarostami meant when he said that cinema was about looking, not showing.
Instead of being shown through the narrative, most major plot points this season are told in a monologue, breaking the cardinal rule of screenwriting: show, don’t tell.
Geeta Gandbhir’s film, which swept the recently concluded Critics Choice Documentary Awards, places Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws under a microscope, showing how these statutes disproportionately benefit white defendants while endangering Black victims.
Vince Staples’ latest is an unsettling allegory about how Black creativity and trauma are often consumed as entertainment; how the spectacle of Blackness is commodified even in spaces supposedly meant to honour it.
He may not have lived to see his genius acknowledged in his own lifetime, but in the century since his birth, Ritwik Ghatak’s work has become exactly what he wanted it to be: a bridge between history’s deepest wounds and art’s attempts to heal them.
With Rituparno Ghosh, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, was emotionally naked. With Sanjay Leela Bhansali, she’s theatrically divine. With Ratnam, she’s human and very much fragile, furious, and fascinating.
The show, streaming on JioHotstar, is a missed opportunity. It had the chance to say something about the perils of being a girl in modern India; instead, it settles for the safe familiarity of a procedural chase.
Despite its cinematic clumsiness, ‘Dahini’ matters. The very act of putting this violence on screen—of demanding visibility for a horror that thrives in silence—is political.
The tonal range between slapstick, satire, and cringey awkwardness is what keeps Splitsville on its feet.
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