Trailing the Artisans of Oneiric Worlds in Anand Pandian’s ‘Reel World’
Reel World reconciles the recondite with the banal, the sublime with the quotidian, and the real with the mythological.
Kumuthan Maderya
Singapore’s ‘1965’ Sacrifices a Good Story and History at the Altar of Nationalism
Conflations, copouts, and confusions turn 1965 into a kitschy commemorative paean that will struggle to shrug off accusations of being propaganda.
Birdman v Uttama Villain: Portrait of the Artiste As an Older, Wiser Man
Making their films resistant to easy consumption and demanding respect for the artiste is essential to the spirit of Birdman and Uttama Villain.
How Representative of India Is Bollywood?
Axiomatically, Rachel Dwyer’s Bollywood’s India is a survey of the collective dreamscape created by a billion desires and dreads.
Does the Title of the Bollywood Blockbuster, ‘PK’, Actually Stand for Performing Kulturkampf?
In the kulturkampf between India’s intelligentsia decrying the ‘cultural terrorism’ of extremists, a film like PK has me wondering, how long can secular liberals retain the moral high ground?
Tamil Horror Films: Madness, Modernity and of Course, Misogyny
While Hollywood horror thrives on the anxieties over the persistence of evil, emanating from a malevolent source, Tamil horror films deal with the prevalence of social injustice.
The Defiant New Postmodern Tamil Cinema
Fed up with the empty rhetoric of utopian ideology and highfalutin discourse, the new generation of filmmakers take their frustrations out on the grand narratives of Tamil cinema.
The Myth of the Global Brown Messiah in Kollywood Cinema
Recent films from the action-masala genre project India as a global sheriff, replacing a toothless West as an expression of muscular nationalism.