To me, the films made during the decline and fall of Rajesh Khanna, India’s first movie hero to cause mass hysteria on an Elvis level, are far more interesting to watch than those from his reign as the throb of hearts and other parts. His peak straddles Hindi […]
If you don’t buy your drugs from an egomaniacal man in an orange wig, raspberry bow tie, pink ruffled tuxedo shirt, and sunglasses fitted with a metal nose cover, you’re doing it wrong. Charas is a fantastic example of what 1970s Hindi cinema does so well: packing a […]
In the “making of” feature on the DVD of The Lovers, director Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, Fat Man and Little Boy, City of Joy) describes his film as an exploration of the concept of time split across two eras, represented by “quantum physics” in the near future […]
Ajooba is one of those Bollywood movies that almost everybody dismisses—cheap costumes, awkward giant monsters, make-do special effects—until you get them to actually think about it. Released in 1991, this bank-breaking Indian and Soviet co-production features a plot that sounds more at home in the 1970s in the […]
When I was recently asked for my recommendation for the most underrated Bollywood film of 2015, I didn’t go with the high-profile, high-intelligence, period piece flops from big-name directors that I loved even though very few critics did (Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! from Dibakar Banerjee and Bombay Velvet from […]
Instead of raving about Satyajit Ray’s well-known-outside-of-India projects like the Apu Trilogy (Pather Pancahli/Song of the Little Road, Aprajito/The Unvanquished, and Apur Sansar/The World of Apu) or Jalsaghar/The Music Room (available through Criterion), I want to rave about his fantastic fantastical 1968 children’s film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne/The […]
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The Cultural Gutter 