Page 2 - Reel View

J Jagannath: The Titli effect

Truncated run of the Kanu Behl debut at cinemas doesn't bode well for alternative culture in India

J Jagannath: Best scenes of 2016

The year we left behind has been truly terrible

J Jagannath: Making it big

Watch 'La La Land' and 'American Honey' to understand it's not such a bad thing to dream big

J Jagannath: Horror of horrors

Babak Anvari's Under The Shadow is a supremely scary movie set in the 1980s when the Iran-Iraq war was at its raging best

J Jagannath: Strange & insecure

The just-released 'Doctor Strange' is quite possibly my most favourite movie made out of the Marvel source material

Film festival amid war

Days before the Jio MAMI 18th Mumbai Film Festival was to kick off, Karan Johar came out with a 117-second video appealing to a fringe nationalist party to allow a smooth release of his upcoming Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. This earnest, albeit soul-destroying, video sent more chills down my spine that any movie at the marquee event this year.What role can a film festival play during such testing times, when the national discourse is steeped in neighbour bashing? For one, hope springs eternal that the choicest of cinema on display would further push the limits of the mindset of the attending public.Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women is an achingly beautiful adaptation of short stories from Maile Meloy's collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. She does her reputation of being an indelible poet of rural America no harm while telling the stories of four working-class women fighting it out in and around the state of Montana. The movie is leavened with gorgeous meditations on how women deal wi

Gifts from a film fest

The former, a French-German-Belgian psychological thriller starring Isabelle Huppert, is based on the rape-without-tears bestseller Oh... by Philippe Djian

Best of the best

I have a few reservations considering how documentaries don't find a mention and neither does a single Indian movie

Blind assassin

Don't Breathe has so much craft it retroactively makes nearly every other recent studio horror movie look even lazier

Alternative Telugu cinema

This year saw a spate of smaller films ruling the roost, while the bombastic mainstream ones fell by the wayside

Through a glass darkly

Based on two short stories by Waryam Singh Sandhu, the director connects two nearly disparate stories to show the grisly paranoia that gripped the state in 1984 during the anti-Sikh riots

Great Indian male gaze

The unsettling gaze of the Indian male towards women in the post-2000 cinema has been very one-dimensional. Apart from Selvaraghavan, who has an original albeit borderline misogynistic look writ large on his protagonists' faces, almost no other film maker has gone beyond the nexus of lasciviousness and desperation.However, two recent releases, Qaushiq Mukherjee's Brahman Naman and Anurag Kashyap's Raman Raghav 2.0, suggest that Indian cinema is finally evolving. I took an intense liking especially to the former. Set in the 1980s Bengaluru, the movie's eponymous protagonist (a mysteriously alluring performance by Shashank Arora) is a quiz enthusiast in his late teens who forms a formidable team with his two equally nerdy Brahmin friends (Tanmay Dhanania as Ajay and Chaitanya Varad as Ramu).The movie, exclusively available on Netflix, harks back to the days of Bengaluru when Malleswaram and Jayanagar were hubs of activity, unlike the newfangled areas like Koramangala and Whitefield thes

Regional cinema, ahoy

I would gladly join the ship-breaking industry in Alang and risk dying of asbestos poisoning instead of watching The Nice Guys at any Indian cinema. This, despite the raving reviews in the West because our generation's cultural arbiter-in-chief, Pahlaj Nihalani, decided to sanitise this supposedly full-on blast of a movie set in the porn industry of late-seventies Los Angeles. This person threatens to do the same to what looks like the most exciting Hindi film of the year: Udta Punjab. Thankfully, the censor board chiefs in the regional cinema are exuding some sort of sanity. Here are the three movies I watched over the last fortnight:A Aa: One of the biggest tragedies wrought upon filmlovers post-2000 is that except those who speak Telugu, anyone else would find it hard to appreciate the writing genius of Trivikram Srinivas. This man is single-handedly responsible for raising the collective IQ of the Telugu audience through his rooted witticisms and acute insight on human condition. A

Trip of the year

At a time when priapic sex comedies are ruling the roost in Bollywood, Udta Punjab is nothing less than a fresh blast of oxygen

Sairat: A brave new film

This is the kind of a film we expect from Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Dardenne brothers, maybe even Bela Tarr

Time travels

It's got the perfect balance of everything that makes a mainstream movie a critical success as well

Delusions of grandeur

In Maneesh Sharma, Shah Rukh found his own version of Leni Reifenstahl who would deify him to no end

Rage machines

Anger is a primal emotion and an unfettered version of it usually puts off the person at the receiving end. I watched a couple of movies recently that threw coruscating light on what if the person on the opposite end is a beloved/spouse who has no exit route but to deal with this visceral rage daily.Sameer Thahir's Malayalam movie Kali, which is in equal parts ponderous and hilarious, has Dulquer Salmaan as the eternal rage machine who unleashes his fury at the tiniest of purported provocations. Sai Pallavi does a brilliant job of the wife who tries hard to keep her husband's anger on a tight leash. One of the movie's transfixing moments is when Salmaan urges his reluctant wife to drive a four-wheeler on a busy road. She agrees only on the condition that he will not get agitated if she goes awry behind the steering wheel. The near six-minute funny-as-hell scene shows the various forms of controlled agony on Salmaan's face. This very scene is Thahir's Chekhovian Gun that he playfully d

On-screen strategy

In Eye in the Sky, Gavin Hood gets the geopolitics right down to a T, a necessity most mainstream film-makers willfully ignore

Wow-inducing cinema

Todd Haynes' Carol is a bewitching piece of cinema told with subtleties