Anamitra Batabyal

A heart-wrenching memorabilia of post-partition, poverty-stricken Bengal of the fifties, lifts the curtain with a peek into the household of a refugee family in the resettlement colony of Calcutta, comprising of six members. Nita, the protagonist, who is persuing M.A, her elder brother, a singer, unemployed, but dreams to make it big someday, a grumpy big-mouth toxic mother (played astoundingly by Gita Dey), a school-principal father who often quotes from Wordsworth and Keats, and two other self-centred siblings. Director's depiction of the impecunious economic scenario of that time is bleak and unvarnished, a middle-class household with two earning members struggles to make ends meet, the youngest brother, an aspiring footballer, can't afford to buy spikes for him, the sister doesn't have a new saree to wear it in college, they can't afford to have more than one side with their rice in the last fifteen days of a month. Nita tries to help her father doing two tutions along with her studies but the situation worsens when their father gets injured in an accident, she is forced to discontinue her study and look for a job, she opts for one leaving his M.A in the middle without a complaint and takes the financial responsibility of her whole family and her boyfriend who is doing research. She had faith in both his boyfriend and big brother that they will make big in future and she thought she is just helping them for the time being but she gets cheated by her boyfriend, her own sister and her boyfriend had an affair and they got married later. As the saying goes, those who feel for the others the most, suffer the most. The use of metaphors makes Meghe Dhaka Tara a delight for contemplation. There are two-three scenes where the train dissects the horizon signifies the partition of their ancestral land. There is a moment where we can see Nita saying "I want to live" upon hearing about her sister's son who loves to take a trip to their newly built first floor, which obviously symbolises the eternal conflict between the ambition of some vs. the survival of the mass, the last shot where the finally-famous eldest brother meets a girl with torn sandals in the market, a déjà vu of how he used to see her sister in his struggling days tells us the sacrifice and the struggle of Nitas will continue. This film is tragic, all the people who were close to Nita, whom she cared for, get success, have their dream fulfilled later in life, but Nita's condition only aggravates with time, the take away is there is no way one can achieve their ambition alone without the help of others and the whole saga probably highlights the importance of self-love, the need of Self-love over self-less care or self-harming activities.

A WW2 film by Christopher Nolan, but his signature storytelling with epistemological and metaphysical roots, wit in every dialogue, playing with the construction of time, showing the conflicts between materialistic perspective and human morality, all those things are completely missing here. But it's a different kind of film, not that brainy like Inception or Interstellar but a good watch, the second half, especially the last ten minutes gets extraordinarily better. Peaky blinders fans might get disappointed, Cillian Murphy is in the film but he has not much to do here. The colour palette this film uses might remind you of the old technicolour films. The aerial combat sequences are exactly how we used to imagine them in the childhood, pretending to be a fighter plane pilot who flies a dive-bomber.

If you watch this film, you won't look at the people with psychological disorder especially the schizophreniacs the same way you did before, each of their actions, why they act crazy everything will make sense to you.

Dreamy visuals (some of the scenes are so aesthetically pleasing, you can take screenshots and print them as postcards), an exquisite background score (modern movies don't put this much of effort on film music, it's almost like a musical without an actual song), very strong and memorable characters (my favourites are Melanie, Mammy, and of course Mr. Rhett Butler), the costumes are so chic, elegant, and plushy the film may be regarded as a fashion film). The story of the film may seem inappropriate by today's norm, there are blatant exhibits of racism, colourism, classism, misogyny, adultery and slave culture but only a fool would discard it as trash for its flaws, it's a masterpiece in its own frigging right.

Lost in translation plays with your senses with its calming background score, scintillating dialogues but mostly with whispers and silences.

Frankly, I didn't like the film much. Alvy's (played by Woody Allen) dry humour throughout the film gets a bit monotonous. But there are two great cinematic instances in the film. One; in a bumper car arena ran by his father little Alvy used to bombard other cars to ventilate his aggression, we get to see adult Alvy doing the same thing with real cars after facing rejection when he proposed Annie Hall for marriage. Two; Annie and Alvy's story didn't have a happy ending, but when Alvy becomes a play director, he transforms their last meeting into a play scene, with a little tweak at the end, in his story they live happily ever after.

The story of an extraordinary teacher, Mr. John Keating, a teacher who motivates, acts more as a therapist than a mentor (played beautifully by Robin Williams). Instead of bullying the shy, introvert students, Mr. Keating works on them, makes them express their emotion, fear, insecurities, heightens their personalities so that they can face the world standing shoulder to shoulder with the expressive and the extrovert ones. The film thoroughly exhibits his out of the box, unorthodox way of teaching and how it attracts criticism from the higher authorities that believe in discipline and honour rather than teaching an individual to learn to think for themselves. Keating in the story never loses his cool in front of the students and that puts him in an emotionally dominant position, making him the alpha of the pack. We all had come across at least one such teacher in our school or college life. This film simultaneously depicts the conflict between parent's choice and children's dream and how it can have a very dreadful ending. The backdrop is set in the 50s, the film was released in 1989, but the flaws in our education system it points out are relevant even today.

I was planning to write a lot about the film while watching it. Some films do that to you, make you contemplate. Upon finishing I realised there is no point in discussing the characters, the plot or the theme, that will just ruin the fun. It deals with certain social issues of that time (the release year is 1963) that are relevant even today. The film progresses at a moderate pace, the ending is phenomenally good. The kind of suspense and tension you feel at the end is very much Hitchcockish, but Ray's approach is more artsy and sophisticated.

The story goes something like this, a psychotic US army general orders thirty-four B52 bomber planes to carry out a nuclear bomb attack on Soviet Russia using a loophole in the system, at the same time the commies have built a doomsday machine that will destroy the whole world if their radar detects any attack on them, the whole story revolves around the idea of this doomsday machine. A doomsday machine is an automated system of nuclear bombs that will activate and detonate when a nation is under attack, and once it's activated it can't be shut down. So the objective is to plant a fear amongst the enemy nations that if they attack a country with a doomsday machine installed, it will destroy the whole world. Now it's no way a spoiler, the film has much more to offer, director Stanley Kubrick has ended it in a way nobody could ever imagine and not to mention Petter Sellers' triple roles as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, mild-tempered US president Merkin Muffley and the creepy ex-nazi scientist Dr Strangelove. It's a war thriller, but the director actually mocked the whole concept of war and the loss of human lives and resources associated with it, with comical characters, dramatic visuals and a very apt song at the end, thus one can call it a political satire too.

A tennis player named Guy Haines who's fed up with his abusive wife meets an over-friendly, clingy, talkative psychopath named Bruno Antony who's fed up with his father. Bruno makes a plan to kill his wife while Guy kills his father, culminating in a trade of some sort. The film takes numerous twists and turns thereafter, steadily maintaining rather exponentially increasing the suspense and tension, and climaxes in a super thrilling carousel sequence. Alfred Hitchcock was nicknamed the "Master of suspense" for a reason.