Consider this – On the lazy afternoon of Diwali, you’re all gearing up for a party. All decked up, tidied house and all of a sudden, someone ends up at your door and shoots himself in the head, plastering the tiniest bits of his flesh, all-around your sparkling wall. What would you do? Would you call the police? Or would you go with the flow and have the party with all of your friends, with the dead body hidden in plain sight? Rajat Kapoor’s latest offering ‘Kadakh’ is about a bunch of people partying in a house, with a dead body hidden in it. The premise reminds you of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rop ..read more

Anurag Kashyap, the enfant-terrible of contemporary Indian cinema, is back with his latest offering ‘Choked- Paisa Bolta Hai’ on Netflix. Set in 2016, it’s based on a bank employee’s discovery of an unlimited source of wealth from her choked drain pipe as the same time, when the entire nation is forced to deal with demonetisation of 500 and 1000 INR currency notes. Frustrated with her frequently jobless and incompetent husband, Sarita, once an aspiring singer but now related to a bank employee, struggles daily to make both ends meet. While looking into a clogged drainage pipe in her kitchen, s ..read more

“Bandar baat ka khela.. khele main hai jhamele bade.. Neend main hoe hazamat, jaage toh phir tote ude…” “Bandar-baat”, aka the story of two cats fighting for a cake and a monkey offering his services to make equal shares of the cake to both of them is known to all and sundry. That the monkey eventually gobbles up the whole cake, while pretending to come up with the share, is the conclusion that everyone’s aware of. What happens next is the story that makes things interesting. After getting duped by the monkey, the cats plead to the members of the animal welfare committee who have their takes o ..read more

It’s an interesting journey for a film, especially when it goes from the script to the screen. Multiple factors weigh-in, as the transformation takes place from a spiral-bound notebook to the large screen of the cinema. It’s important to keep the writer’s view in mind because that’s what helps the director to envision the scenes on a large scale. When the director and the writer are the same people, it usually a win-win because there’s no reason for any thoughts getting lost in translation. With writer-director Prabhakar Meena Bhaskar Pant’s ‘My Client’s Wife’, things do go wrong because of th ..read more

The year 2020 was cruel to everyone including the film watchers, as it led many films to postpone their releases. Majority of the films were released on the OTT platforms. It wasn’t the usual theatrical release with fanfare, however, OTT did give them a reach to the viewer sitting at home. For bad films, it had a catastrophic consequence, as the audience literally massacred these films. On the other hand, the good films finally started to get the required attention it always deserved. We, at The Cinemawala, went through all the films that were released in 2020 and came up with a ranked list. N ..read more

Covid-19 has rendered the world inoperative. In a year where a single strain of the virus, caught the whole world off guard and forced it to its knees, mankind learnt a new way to get humbled. Forced to sit inside the house, people discovered love and rebuilt relationships. For some people, this brought doom as well. Stats say, that domestic violence increased four-folds with the lockdown. People, who had to struggle for their daily bread, this unfortunate chain of events put a pause in their livelihoods. The lockdown saw an unprecedented exodus of migrants on their feet, with the sword of unc ..read more

The axe forgets but the tree remembers. This African proverb aptly sums up the motif that runs through the whole duration of ‘Taish’ – Revenge. It’s a sordid tale of vengeance and betrayal that entangles two families into an epic tiff, that takes multiple lives into a downward spiral. Director Bejoy Nambiar’s most accomplished work till date, ‘Taish’ is huge on style as well as performance. With a non-linear narrative that goes back and forth between past and present, it keeps the viewer hooked to the screen till the last frame. Set in the UK, amidst the flourishing South-Asian diaspora, it ta ..read more

It was someday in 1995, I don’t remember exactly which though. I was ten, eleven years old and was in the early stages of the pre-teenage rebellion. Most of my opinions were considered non-opinions and usually were in the process of getting tossed out of the window. Not sure how the rest of the family liked this idea of watching Shah Rukh Khan’s film in a theatre, considering the fact that the same year he had three back to back duds in ‘Zamana Deewana’, ‘Guddu’ and ‘Oh Darling, Yeh Hai India’. Anyway, we all landed up at the Stutee Theatre in Bhubaneswar. In the days of single-screen cinema h ..read more

Shakuntala Devi. The mathematical prodigy from India, who was once hailed as the human-computer, as she beat the computer hands down, pointing out its mistake. There’s hardly any graduate-level student in India who has not solved a ‘Shakuntala Devi’ numerical problems and puzzles book, for the preparation of a competitive examination. The puzzle books were fun to solve and the lack of Wikipedia driven source material made us in awe of the woman who conceptualised these books. To be honest, my idea of Shakuntala Devi, was her small bio, which often appeared on the last page or the back cover of ..read more

The fragility of the human brain is such that, it always tries to reason facts. It wants to substantiate the triggered effects with some kind of root cause. And when the brain fails to explain, it often attributes it as supernatural, an act of greater forces, far beyond the grasp of mere mortals. If you take the pages of history, witches or demonesses have always been part of folklore, in the east as well as in the west. In medieval times, a woman of a scientific bent of mind was dubiously marked as a witch and get burnt at the stake. Probably more than the so-called witchcraft, people were af ..read more