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Review: Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya
Public recitation is as fine an art as poetry itself, and — like in a magic trick — so much depends on the reveal, on teasing the audience into expecting a certain completion to the thought, a certain...
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Review: The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis
1961. The sixties but not quite The Sixties just yet. America had picked up a revolutionary new guitar but was only beginning to learn how to strum, plucking at it tentatively as genres and heroes and...
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The best Hindi films of 2013
Well done, 2013. It’s been a truly solid year, one where we don’t just have ten movies worth applauding — compared to most years where I have to cobble together lists full of caveats — but, incredibly...
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Review: David O Russell’s American Hustle
I feel like writing this review in slow-mo. In emphatically big hammer-thuds of the keyboard, shot beautifully and kinetically, while lurid but lovely songs play, on the nose with every changing...
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Review: Sohail Khan’s Jai Ho
Like with Alok Nath jokes, it all began with Maine Pyar Kiya. That Sooraj Barjatya hit had characters (with “friend” written on their baseball caps) moronically state that friends don’t thank each...
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Review: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave
Strange Fruit will never quite sound the same again. The old poem — immortalised in song first by Billie Holiday, though Jeff Buckley’s live cover remains a haunting personal favourite — tells us of...
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Philip Seymour Hoffman: Goodbye, Master
That fat guy. The first time I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman was in Scent Of A Woman, playing an uppity prep-school bully. I vividly remember that floppy hair falling onto his round face, scrunched up all...
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Your favourite PSH film?
Philip Seymour Hoffman has left us. But his films will endure. Which is your favourite PSH performance? Take Our Poll
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Review: Saving Mr Banks
Before this film came along, the only Mrs Travers I knew was Bertram Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, a wildly impractical and deliriously stubborn woman with loony ideas and a masterful chef. The only aunt...
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Review: Spike Jonze’s Her
I love Her. Once in a while a film comes along that is so original, so inventive and so graceful, so clever and so immaculately built, that being smitten is obvious. But this is no trifling affection;...
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Review: Ali Abbas Zafar’s Gunday
Gunday is the sort of film some people may mistakenly call a bromance. There is, however, nothing bro-tastic at all about this loud and slow-motion actioner, a film that tries hard to be old-school but...
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Harold Ramis: So long, beloved Ghostbuster
There is a cycle, and the sight of a man falling from it is often hilarious. Writing about it, on the other hand, is less so. Explaining a joke — especially a bit of timeless slapstick, as with the...
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Review: Dallas Buyers Club
Somewhere around the middle of Dallas Buyers Club, the protagonist slips on a clerical collar, his moustache gravely weighed down to cover what may unmistakably be declared a sinner’s grin. A man...
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Review: Alexander Payne’s Nebraska
Uncle Albert likes to watch the road. He takes a weatherbeaten deckchair and kicks back after meals, sitting by the side of the road to watch cars go by. It doesn’t seem that absurd a pastime for a man...
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Everything about The Oscars, 2014
In which I collate everything I’ve written about this year’s Academy Awards, and then present you with a singularly weird column. But we’ll get to that. First, the links: Previews: Can American Hustle...
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Review: Vikas Bahl’s Queen
This is a story of girl meets girl. The girl, a pink-sweatered doll showered with sticky compliments by her mithaiwallah parents, is all set to be married. She wishes she could learn the dance steps...
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Review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Marvel Comics is known as The House Of Ideas. Many a memorable character lives at Marvel, and scores of writers and artists — of unquestioned eagerness but varying degrees of talent — are given cracks...
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My first review ever: Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2
The thing about spiders is: We don’t like them. Either creepily hairy or disconcertingly spindly, they refuse us even the common decency of being stealthy, commonly wallowing in out discomfort as they...
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Review: Amole Gupte’s Hawaa Hawaai
It is a rare and wondrous thing when students genuinely admire a teacher. I remember sniggering cruelly many years ago when my kid brother, extolling the virtues of one of those self-aggrandising heads...
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Review: John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo
John Turturro is not a beautiful man. Which isn’t to say that he’s unsightly. Elegantly dressed and greying at the edges, he looks a bit like Al Pacino from Godfather 3 had he been walloped as a kid,...
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