Voice of the People
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In 2024, a lowercase, sans serif “b” in stark black was set against a lurid neon-green slime background of an album cover — and suddenly, Charli XCX was everywhere. For more than a decade, Charli existed in that peculiar pop-star hinterland: too influential to be obscure, too experimental to be fully mainstream, a hitmaker whose […]
Yet another crime thriller in the OTT space, but without a feeling of deja vu or excess of familiarity. Swedish series ‘Blodsoffer’, ‘Blood Sacrifice’ in English, by creator George Kay, the maker of heist drama ‘Lupin’, doesn’t just take you into the blood-soaked killings on the streets of Stockholm, but also into the minds of […]
Anthony Bourdain, best-selling author of ‘Kitchen Confidential’ and the celebrated host of ‘Parts Unknown’, may have died a tragic and controversial death at the age of 61 in June 2018, but the life he led until that point, though troubled, had lessons for us all. He became a celebrity exposing the seedy underbelly of the […]
Debutant director Uday Chauhan’s Telugu film ‘Pallaburusu’ deserves a wide audience. It is tragic and humorous, sometimes simultaneously, as we follow the film’s 68-year-old protagonist Shambu Guddappa, played by Sudhakar Reddy, an unalloyed cent per cent natural, just like Nallandi (Mayandi) in the Vijay Sethupathi Tamil film ‘Kadaisi Vivasayi’. Like Nallandi, Shambu is stubborn and […]
Many of us have seen Asghar Wajahat’s poignant and widely staged play ‘Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya, O Jamya E Nai’. And most of us have seen Sunny Deol create ‘Gadar’ in cross-border love stories. So what happens when the two come together? Well, in Raj Kumar Santoshi’s ‘Batwara 1947’, Sunny Paaji’s dhai kilo ka haath […]
Horror film specialist David Robert Mitchell’s sci-fi survival thriller ‘The End of Oak Street’ is a fairly fun entertainer if you can overlook the plotting bloopers scattered around the narrative. Better known for the 2014 cult horror hit ‘It Follows’, Mitchell makes a meal of this Spielbergian JJ Abrams-produced dinosaur thriller, despite it being diametrically […]
Vedant Chandel All humans carry stories, many of which outlive them. They are carried forward through the threads of memory, narrated and cherished by those who come after. But in the intentionally absurdist world of debut director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, memory becomes a fistful of construction-waste dust, waiting to be gobbled up by vacuum cleaners. Even […]
Ten minutes. That’s what a young pilot struggling to balance his personal and professional lives is asked to focus on during a coordination exercise. It is a speech reminiscent of Shah Rukh Khan’s monologue from the 2007 classic ‘Chak De! India’. And that’s just a small facet of ‘Operation Safed Sagar’, that chronicles the eponymous […]
An all-time classic from the pen of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is etched in the annals of literary history. The magnum opus that explores the history of Colombia with a multi-generational family story has traversed continents since it was written in 1967. Translated into over 40 languages, the Spanish […]
This Japanese animated rom-com fantasy is an ecological fable about a mermaid princess and her love for a human. The film straddles comedy and drama in equal measure. The screenplay by Saku Konohana and Hanasaki Kino is ambitious enough to explore interspecies relationships, capitalism’s impact on environment, and romance engineered by destiny. Set in a […]
“They grabbed my dreams. Now they want to take away my assets,” exclaims inventor-visionary Gopalswamy Doraiswamy Naidu (GDN), with not a shred of self-pity or remorse. This was a man who could see tomorrow — he fought the British, pushed for women’s education and turned Coimbatore into an industrial hub. Lamentably, we have forgotten him […]
Marvel Cinematic Universe’s brand new sequel is a tough one for Spider-Man and therein lies its entertainment value. This film is a fun-filled, adrenaline-fuelled, stuffed to the brim, roller-coaster ride. Spider-Man has consistently delivered high-quality thrills and this one is no different. It may not have a brand new story but it is designed to […]
‘Ishqnama’ promises to be a poignant ode to love beyond borders; a tale of the two Punjabs, divided by history but stitched together with poetry. Sadly, that logline appears never to have been shown to the people who actually made the film. What arrives instead is a blood-soaked, thoroughly ordinary saga of toxic masculinity masquerading […]
