Film Writing

Journalist Shashi Baliga passes away: A student remembers his teacher and mentor's most valuable lessons

Shashi Baliga, a prominent journalist, was my professor at the Xavier Institute of Communication, and mentor, till she passed away on 2 May, after a month-long battle with coronavirus.

The goodbye drills of Nomadland: Rethinking the cinema of travelling, through the 2021 Best Picture Oscar winner

In Nomadland emerges the truth that we don’t travel to forget, we travel to forgive.

Another Round and the adolescence of adulthood: Why the Mads Mikkelsen film is unnerving to confront

By finishing on a high, Another Round becomes a rare film that injects the collectivism of adulthood with the individualism of intoxication.

How a sense of place and the passage of time is created in two gentle films, Bombay Rose and Ottaal

What these two films have in common is how they create a sense of a setting as something inseparable from the inner lives of the protagonists.

The mother of my stories: Neither Boyhood's Olivia nor Kapoor & Sons' Sunita, perhaps The Threshold's Rinku holds a clue

In theory, my mother is a striking hybrid of exception and norm: a rare blend of cultural independence and domestic subservience. Yet, she resembles no cinematic stereotype from either side.

The dysfunctional and the delayed: From A Star is Born to Honey Boy, there's a pattern in the symptoms of the shattered

It’s difficult to script a human who flouts the social norms of age, as opposed to a character who flaunts a sustained resistance to time.

In the Mood for Love: The romantic imposters of Wong-kar Wai’s transcendental narrative

The general consensus is that In the Mood for Love is one of the greatest love stories ever made. This is because, in many ways, In the Mood for Love is the greatest love story never made.

It’s in our blood: Thoughts on watching 50/50, and being by a friend's side through cancer

Cancer, by nature, lacks the fullness of a film. It is in fact the intermission of other films — of family dramas, workspace comedies, psychological thrillers...and silent bromances.

Dharamshala International Film Festival: Why it's an unmatched experience for cinephiles

What makes the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) different, is not the superbly well-chosen films, the infectious warmth of apple-cheeked children running around in the winter sun, or even the lung- and mind-expanding air up in the mountains, where (as the terribly youthful director Raam Reddy put it so charmingly before the Opening Night screening of his film Thithi), “the soul feels close to your body”. What really creates the vibe of the festival is the people.

House Full: Sociologist Lakshmi Srinivas looks at Indian cinema from the audience's perspective

In her book 'House Full', sociologist Lakshmi Srinivas looks at the culture of moviegoing in India, and what it says about our cinema