Mainstream Hindi cinema doesn’t particularly gravitate towards making superhero films. It hardly needs to, given what physical feats the average film hero can pull off anyway. But like many parts of the world, Indian audiences certainly have a taste for American-style superhero films, so home-grown characters pop up, […]
Readers of this website will hardly need a special occasion to watch a snake film, but since the Hindu festival celebrating snakes, Naag Panchami, generally falls around this time of year, I couldn’t resist. Snake movies are made by many different Indian film industries, and they tend to […]
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 […]