Favorite films

Pinned reviews

• 

  The Banshees of Inisherin 2022

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 09 Nov 2022 5

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Man's (yes, only man's) folly to not be able to find a compromise between personal and communal, solitude and friendship, thoughtfulness and dullness. It's always either this or that, never and. 

  The tragedy, then, is that when one man (understandably) turns inwards, he turns away from all outwardness, especially the kind that expresses the desire to maintain a connection. In rejecting this, the man unintentionally loses his kindness and leads the other person to question their own gestures of it.…

• 

  Decision to Leave 2022

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 06 Nov 2022

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Characters trapped within noir archetypes consistently try to transcend them via the very zig-zagginess of the plot, frequently igniting a perversely coded, digitally updated Hollywood romance. Ultimately, however, it’s a tragic endeavour, a love that can never really meet - like mountain and sea. But, the imprint of one upon the other - sound of crashing waves upon the sight of crumbling (sand) mountains - shall forever remain.

  Listen to this episode for an in-depth, spoiler-filled gush-fest about the film's formal, narrative, and emotional majesty.

Recent reviews

• 

  Rocky and Rani′s Love Story 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 30 Jul 2023 8

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  The bridge between the Old and the New, the traditional and the (post)modern, the sincere and wink-wink-fuck-that-sincerity is the favorite destination for late 90s, early 2000s Bollywood filmmakers. It's probably located somewhere near the Swiss Alps or on a magnificently overdecorated, over-lit Film City soundstage. It's where Farah Khan, Aditya Chopra & Karan Johar meet up once every 3-4 years, relive their love for Jolly Good Bollywood, and curse the times they're living in only to realize that life, like the…

• 

  Jubilee 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 16 Apr 2023

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  A gorgeously mounted show whose surface beauty (there's a lot on display here) can't entirely hide the painful wounds of the batwaara (Partition) that dominate every rectangular inch of the frame. The central one, repeatedly referenced jokingly and seriously, is Madan "bhenc***d" Kumar -- a screen persona molded, pre-partition, by Jamshed Khan (a Muslim from Karachi). This form of passing, counterintuitive as it may sound, is fluid, accommodative even. For, at least, it allows Khan to (willingly) become Kumar without…

Popular reviews

• 

  Thappad 2020

  ★★★★ Watched 28 Feb 2020 10

  The rise in production and consumption of "social-message movies" in Bollywood of late has given birth to some actors' careers (Ayushmann Khurrana), and somewhat resurrected flailing ones (Akshay Kumar). But, if there is one person, this movement has entirely changed (arguably liberated), it is director Anubhav Sushila Sinha. Take his output before the still hauntingly effective Mulk (2018) and tell me that you saw a filmmaker who wanted to use the medium of cinema to make a change or challenge…

• 

  Sardar Udham 2021

  ★★★★ Watched 16 Oct 2021 10

  Interrogations into history - both personal and socio-political - are always subjective, colored by the very form in which people express them. One can choose to look at revolutions and tragedies forensically, excavating personal facts about someone's past from documents like passports, employment certificates, and other paperwork. This form of investigation is a detached one, governed most strongly by the desire to attain some form of tangible, understandable truth. The more personal methodology is that of interviews. Here too, though,…