In recent years, many filmmakers have expressed their views on the death of cinema. Scorsese mentioned it in the context of the kind of films he grew up with being scarce. From David Cronenberg to Aki Kaurismaki, some other filmmakers also mentioned their discontent with the state of the currently-made films. More recently, Scorsese said that cinema is not dying but rather transforming. As it happens, several film-related artists are actively losing their jobs, making them lose their faith in…

During one of his interviews, Jordan Peele briefly spoke about the aches of writing a horror film. He finds it particularly difficult to convince the audience of his characters willingly putting themselves in dangerous situations, especially the kind that you see in horror films. Oftentimes, they do not use their common sense in a scary situation. After all, as humans, it's our natural tendency to avoid trouble and protect ourselves. So, it certainly takes genuine persuasion skills to convince the…

Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon have been two of the ever-reliable actors for a long time. They have shined in many projects that were rarely the zeitgeist from those times. "Lake George" (2024) offers them to be the dynamic central pair as versions of the classic runaway duo, "Bonnie and Clyde." However, unlike the 1967 film, this crime thriller is far more grounded. It isn’t about an angry young man rebelling against the world. Instead, it's about a middle-aged man,…

“Nightbitch” is a very compelling dark comedy about the challenges that are inherent to child-rearing, but it is unfortunately saddled with a ridiculous metaphor at its center that drags the pacing to a halt. There may have been a way to spin “Nighbitch” into a more absurdist romp that embraced visceral horror, and it also may have succeeded had it leaned entirely into the drama with an approach that felt more authentic. Unfortunately, “Nighbitch” feels lost somewhere in the middle,…

The impact of mythology on Indian art and storytelling dates at least two thousand years back to the Nāṭyaśāstra and continues to be felt strongly in the current day. While some of the most beloved and revered works of Indian cinema are rooted directly in mythology, the influence goes down to the bedrock of how cinema tells stories. Mainstream and mass-oriented cinema especially draw significant influence from epics such as the “Ramayana” and the “Mahabharata”, often wearing the association openly…

Maura Delpero’s gorgeous historical drama “Vermiglio” may take place amidst the backdrop of World War II, but the existentialist themes that it examines are relevant to any era in which a culture is faced with a moment of change. Evolution does not mean the extinction of old ideas, but societal values tend to change when the next generation decides to reshape the values that were ed down by their predecessors. There are weighty themes like this at the center of…

The erotic thriller, according to some of the old guard, is dead—murdered by a completely sex-wary generation of prudes that has turned reasonable hesitations about consent and representation into an outright dismissal of the entire concept of getting freaky in the sheets. From both ends of the debate, the positions are obviously exaggerated; eroticism in cinema isn’t dead, nor has it survived solely as a testament to the brutality of a male-dominated industry living out its perverted fantasies at the…

Stepping into "A Complete Unknown," my love and appreciation for the artist it is based upon made me approach it with a rather unorthodoxly predetermined notion. I was consciously settled into getting swayed by the filmmaking conventions that have lately enveloped the subgenre of musical biopics. After all, it was coming from a director whose aesthetics have constantly been switching over the years, at least until he crystallized the sub-genre in the public imagination with the 2005 outing "Walk the…

To say that Robert Eggers has brought us the worst of the mainline “Nosferatu” features (which is to say, excluding those in which Klaus Kinski wanders on his own to Venice) isn’t necessarily the derogatory designation implied by such a statement; F. W. Murnau and Wener Herzog have simply left such massive boots for any eager artist to fill. To say that “Nosferatu” constitutes Eggers’s worst film is, also, not quite a derogatory statement, but rather a testament to the…

The story of a tribal woman from Jharkhand, working as a data labeler to train AI models—how appealing is that premise for you? Perhaps for a film, you would expect something brimming with surface-level intrigue, or a pretentious and predictable tale of empowerment. However, “Humans in the Loop” (2024) will certainly defy all such expectations through its profound narrative. They say simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and in “Humans in the Loop,” Aaranya Sahay— his debut feature—effortlessly synthesizes intricate details…

Beverly Olevin’s "Good Side of Bad" (2024) is a brisk, moving read; the ease with which the author etches vivid portraits of her characters in stark contradiction with their messy complexity. The tangled lives of the central family situate mental health front and center, with Olevin tackling the subject head-on, but never without sincere comion. Alethea Root’s interpretation of Olevin’s work is astoundingly raw and intimate, as her “Good Side of Bad” plunges deep into the heart of pain, loss,…

Like his most celebrated novel “The Three Musketeers,” Alexandre Dumas’s iconic tale “The Count of Monte Cristo” has been adapted so often in so many different cultural contexts—from the silent era to the American blockbuster to the plethora of Indian interpretations—that it becomes easy to forget a critical element that defines the writer’s oeuvre: Dumas was, in fact, very French. Bringing the story back to its home country, directors Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte choose to remind viewers…