Cinema ceases to interpret reality when it begins to shape how that reality is understood. There is a reason history is easier to watch. Even when it is selective, dramatised, or quietly biased, history comes with distance.  It allows us to engage without feeling implicated. We can question it, critique it, even reject it - but we are not inside it. The present offers no such comfort. When cinema focuses on the present, it ceases to be a secure narrative space. It starts shap

Pinjar literally means “cage.” But the word can be expanded to mean more than a cage. In Rudrajit Roy’s debut film, the title refers both to birds, the bird-catcher and to other characters held captive in the larger and invisible cage called Life. “Pinjar is about captivity in its visible and invisible forms. It asks whether freedom is an external condition or an internal awakening. It does not provide solutions. It observes, reflects, and invites the audience to confront the

Legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) was shaped as much by American cinema as by Japanese tradition. American cinematic genres, be it the  film noir , gangster pictures and above all, the Western coursed through his work. As a result, some of his masterpieces proved unusually hospitable to remakes. Kurosawa’s  Seven Samurai  (1954) became ‘The Magnificent Seven’ (1960) while his ‘Yojimbo’ (1961) - itself indebted to Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel  Red Harves

If Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ (1972) is justly recognised as a staple of world cinema, Irving Lerner’s ‘The Royal Hunt...

Robert Redford was an icon of American cinema whose political courage and dedication to independent storytelling left an indelible mark...

There was a time when war films aspired to something greater than the blood-spattered grit of today or tightly choreographed mayhem. They...