Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.
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.
Catherine O’Hara was and will continue to be loved because she played women who carried history in their posture, enjoyed power and moved through the world with a sense of entitlement rarely portrayed by female performers from her time.
Daldal could have been a sharper critique of how institutions fail vulnerable children, how complex trauma and gender bias shapes our lives. Instead, it ends up reinforcing some of the very associations it seems to interrogate.
The escalation is steady, old-fashioned, and deeply satisfying if you’re someone who misses commercial thrillers that trusted audiences to keep up.
The History of Sound manages to handle grief and loss with lilting grace, particularly in its refusal to dramatise pain. However, the film remains far too emotionally restrained for its own good.
Through Manto’s lens, Bombay and its creatures went beyond what postcards or myth-making would have us believe. On his death anniversary, here is revisiting Manto’s Bombay of underpaid writers, inflated egos, drunken nights and studios that extracted labour while pretending to nurture art.
Ambiguity sets the tone for a season that thrives on misdirection, fake deaths, femme fatales and the familiar pleasures of the espionage genre where the world is burning, but the spy looks fantastic.
A hundred years later, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin reminds us that the most effective propaganda does not announce itself. And perhaps that is exactly why, even now, some would rather we didn’t watch it at all.
The missing women trope in Indian crime drama could, in theory, foreground structural injustices and institutional complicity. But in practice, these stories repeatedly retreat into the comfort of the simpler police procedurals.
If there was an award for the nicest, least terrifying serial killer, then Mrs Deshpande would win it hands down and this is sincerely meant in a derogatory sense.
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