Vishal Chaturvedi has turned a deeply personal spiritual story into one of 2026’s biggest box-office surprises. In an industry where films routinely arrive with star salaries running into crores, lavish sets and multi-crore marketing campaigns, Hanuman Ansh is a striking anomaly. Made on a shoestring budget reportedly in the region of Rs. 2 crore, the ‘spiritual’ film opened last month to a modest box-office collection. Within weeks, however, audiences began taking a shine to

Peter o' Toole in 'The Night of the Generals' (1967), which remains vastly underrated despite its trenchant probing of the Nazi psyche. This week marks yet another anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The dating of the twentieth century’s most cataclysmic war, always a matter of controversy, has definitively begun to shift in both popular and academic histories to underscore its global dimensions. In the past two decades, the war’s historiography has

Khilawadi, a short fiction film directed by the young and sprightly Shobhita Thakur, alumnus of the FTII, Pune, is making news wherever the film is being screened. Why? The subject of the film is shocking in its inhuman brutality. Through a brief but powerful narrative, the film tells the story of the 12-year-old Sapna who is good in studies and dreams of becoming a doctor one day. The term “Khilawadi” is a locally used word associated with the Banchada community in Western

The Hindi film industry’s old formula of sanitising Pakistan and demonising Indian society is now facing a box-office challenge from films putting national security and historical memory at the centre of the story. There have always been two distinct, divergent streams in the so-called Hindi film industry or Bollywood, often derided as a lame replica of Hollywood or derogatorily referred to as ‘Urduwood.’ One stream that promoted an agenda-driven, ‘left-liberal’ hypothesis wa

For India’s film stars, the leap from screen fame to political power has been a journey of triumphs, reversals and occasional second acts. From Thalapathy on screen, Vijay has taken political centre stage as Tamil Nadu's current Chief Minister. For an Indian film star, politics can look deceptively familiar. Both trades depend on visibility, crowds and the ability to turn a personal following into collective enthusiasm. But the resemblance ends there as the actor works to a s

A still from Peter Brook's 'The Mahabharata' (1989) Every time Hollywood drops a blockbuster movie based on one of the foundational epics of the West, a collective groan seems to arise from a significant section of Indian cinephiles and the Indian audience at large: If they can do it, why can’t we? Yugo Sako’s brilliant Ramayana, the Legend of Prince Rama (1993) Be it Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024), or Christopher Nolan’s latest Odyssey (