Drama
IC814 – Gripping
ALL CLICKABLE LINKS IN RED Genre – Drama (true story) Time: 6 episodes x 45 minutes Platform: Netflix Language: Hindi Director: Abhinav Sinha On a monday morning in 2003, one of my colleagues came back after watching a movie and joyfully said “I saw a great movie.” Zameen”. I went goggle eyed…
Read MoreThe Assassination of Trotsky (1972) – Interesting
All clickable links in red Director: Joseph Losey Genre: Spy Drama (True Story) Time: 1 Hour 38 minutes Platform: You Tube Cast: Richard Burton. Alain Delon. Romy Schneider. French Superstar Alain Delon, personified French cool in his best period during the 1960s and 1970s, where he played a wide range of interesting roles that ranged…
Read MoreMr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) – Scenes from a Spy marriage !
Director: Multiple directors Genre: Spy thriller. Drama. Time: TV series – 8 x 55-minute episodes Platform: Amazon Prime Cast: Donald Glover. Maya Erskine. Wagner Moura. Parker Posey. (Hopefully Ingmar Bergman fans will forgive me for that title) . A mysterious agency gives two strangers new identities. “John” (Donald Glover) and “Jane” (Maya Erskine) Smith…
Read MoreThe Death of Stalin (2017) – Black comedy meets grim reality
Clickable link in red Director: Armando Iannucci Genre: Black Comedy (true story) Time: 1 Hour 42 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime Cast: Steve Buscemi. Simon Russel Beale. Jeffrey Tambor. Michael Palin. Andrea Riseborough Three men are in a Soviet Prison. They compare notes why they are there. 1st Man: I am here…
Read MoreMissing (1982) – Poignant and relevant
Director: Costa Gavras Genre: Drama – True Story Time: 1 Hour 57 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime (rent) Cast: Jack Lemmon. Sissy Spacek. John Shea. After the Watergate scandal broke, there followed a series of disclosures about the American government that had the ordinary American , shaking his head in disbelief. The CIA had not…
Read MoreDie Gustloff (2008) – Slow but poignant
All clickable links in red Director: Joseph Vilsmaer Genre: Drama – WW2 True Story Language : German Time: 1 Hour 41 minutes Platform: You Tube Free – with hard coded English subtitles Cast: Kai Wiesinger. Valeri Niehaus. Heiner Lauterbach. Which was the world’s biggest maritime disaster? With three movies on this topic, it…
Read MoreCrew (2024) – Somewhat bittersweet
Genre – Drama, Comedy (Dramedy?) Time: 2 Hours Director: Rajesh Krishnan Platform: Theatrical Release (Soon on Netflix) Divya Rana (Kriti Sanon) is a pilot turned air hostess who has concealed the truth from her family that she didn’t get a job as a pilot but only as an air hostess. Jasmine Kohli (Kareena…
Read MoreDunki (2023) – Bittersweet
All links in red. Genre: Drama + Comedy Platform: Theatrical Release Duration: 2 Hours 35 minutes In the concluding chapters of my book on Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films, Human Cinema, I mentioned that Rajkumar Hirani was a worthy inheritor of the Hrishida school of filmmaking, where the most serious subjects would be handled in a…
Read MoreNapoleon (2023) – Grand yet underwhelming
Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Joaquin Phoenix. Vanessa Kirby. Rupert Everett. Tahar Rahim. Genre: Biography and War Drama Platform: Theatrical release Duration: 2 Hours 38 minutes Ridley Scott’s range of film subjects is enormous. His genres include almost all types of films. Some of his most famous films include Blade Runner and The Martian…
Read MoreKillers of the Flower Moon (2023) – Superb drama
Dir: Martin Scorsese Cast: Robert de Niro. Leonardo di Caprio. Lily Gladstone. Nothing needs to be said about Martin Scorsese’s track record. In the guise of thrillers, period dramas or crime sagas, Scorsese always held a mirror to American society and, at times, presented the “zeitgeist” of that era. Almost all his films still…
Read MoreOppenheimer (2023) – Brilliant !
Writer, Producer, Director : Christopher Nolan Cast: Cillian Murphy. Matt Damon. Emily Blunt. Robert Downey Jr. Josh Hartnett. Florence Pugh. Let me say that I went to the theatre purely by the hype surrounding the movie. I was also hesitant in that this is a Christopher Nolan movie where you spend most of…
Read MoreOn The Beach (1958) – Humanity loses.
The 1950s saw The Cold War take off spectacularly. The two sides kept staring at each other and made worldwide alliances based on ideology. For all its talk of “Democracy”, the US supported unpopular dictatorships with terrible Human Rights records (Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, Zaire, etc.). The Socialist Bloc wasn’t far off, often crushing democratic dissent…
Read MoreBrief Encounter – 1945 – Love hurts (and how)
World War 2 had just ended. Chance sexual encounters between men and women during the war were rampant, fuelled by the “tomorrow may not come at all” feeling. Some ended happily in marriage. Others sadly with as the men went missing or died during the war. But what does one do now that war…
Read MoreThey Shoot Horses Don’t They (1969) – Harrowing watch
“We have become a race of peeping Toms. Instead, we should go out and look inside at ourselves”. This is an excellent quote from one of the greatest thrillers, Rear Window(1954), essentially about human voyeurism that is integral to our basic instinct. Modern “reality” and “game shows” have only taken these aspects, far ahead.…
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