The title Junoon—”obsession”—can refer to a passionate, elegant 1970s film about India’s 1857 rebellion against British rule, starring an internationally famous cast under one of Hindi cinema’s most highly regarded directors. Or it can refer to a 1992 creature-ish feature about the deranged spirit of a jungle cat […]
[Content warning: suicide.] While flipping through the new options on an Indian streaming service I subscribe to*, I discovered Shakeela, a film that actually managed to release in cinemas in December 2020. Almost all of the Indian films that I heard discussed with any vigor in 2020 were […]
When I last investigated this film in the early 2010s, it wasn’t on youtube, and I was distraught: when you hear that there is such a thing as a 1983 disco karate movie, you need to see it right now and then immediately share it with an appreciative […]
Released in 1967, Farz is Hindi cinema’s first spy movie—well, it probably is, depending on how you define “spy.” Police inspectors in Bombay movies had been gathering information about criminal masterminds for years, but as far as I can tell, none of them is an agent of a […]
I don’t know if the people responsible for this film were trying to make a throwback to the 1970s, but that’s sure how Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja seems to me. That they succeeded is one of the highest cinematic compliments I can give. Plot intricacies, big […]
Chori Mera Kaam (Theft Is My Job, dir. Brij, 1975) is one of those movies that nobody talks about when hailing the masala golden age, but everybody should.
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The Cultural Gutter 