Whenever there is a discussion on Fellini’s ultimate masterpiece, the inevitable finalists are 8½ (1963) and La Dolce Vita (1960). Critics are thoroughly polarized on the former with Joseph Bennett (Kenyon Review) even calling it “The worst film made by a major Italian film director”! As for La Dolce Vita, it receives a much warmer response and is hailed as Fellini’s magnum opus almost unanimously. Along with Akira Kurosawa’s phenomenal Yojimbo (1961), it had become the zeitgeist of the 60’s…

Almodovar the omniscient knower and portrayer of all conjugating human emotions first stepped onto his now-accustomed plinth of global recognition with the release of his neurotic comedy, Women on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Starring one of Almodovar’s favorite actress Carmen Maura, this film turned Almodovar into an international cinematic sparkler. Women on the verge… frothily shows you the tragic impasses of four interrelated women, joined together with an enervating universal problem…

When cinema was in its infancy during the teens and the twenties, many pioneers sought to provide it a definite shape and even assemble various tools and benchmarks for the decades of filmmakers to come. This led to the formation of various cinematic and narrative techniques, characteristic to their country of origin, which were later used by tens of directors from that country. One such trait, expressionism, was extensively used by the filmmakers of Germany such as F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.

Wings of Desire (1987) takes off with a dedication to cinema’s three great stalwarts – Truffaut, Ozu and Tarkovsky. Indeed, elements of all the three directors’ works are present in the film. However, Wim Wender’s decidedly mood piece, released months after the Tarkovsky’s demise, is a film that is to be felt and not seen, much like the latter’s films. To quote Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) – “Your eyes, your ears, your senses, will be overwhelmed”. The movie also inspired Brad Silberling to make “City of Angels”…

Ouch! is an aptly named play. A laugh riot on the surface with a Generation-X centric theme of dreams and aspirations, it makes you go Ouch – for the simple reason that as much as it tickles your ribs with its dark, sarcastic and occasionally slapstick humor, it also pinches you to sit up and take notice of how, in our efforts to build thousands of dreams, we are eroding equally important million others as we strive to achieve fame, money and power at the cost of personal fulfillment.

Following stretched the concept of low-budget films to its very extreme. Shot in 16-mm grainy black-and-white stocks, the movie at first glance might appear to be a deeply experimental and esoteric film – something like Darren Aronofsky’s mind-boggling Pi. Thankfully, it has turned out to be a far more engrossing effort. Shot only on weekends, with a budget of $6000, with non-professionals, without the use of any artificial lighting, and by a person with little hitherto experience in this field, Following is a fascinating treatise on minimalism and efficiency.

“Innocence has a power evil cannot imagine”
It is the solemn duty of a film to transport its viewer into another dimension having interwoven layers of illusions and realities, where one can momentarily live a lifetime of happiness and fulfillment. However, it is wishful thinking to expect a movie to give a illusionary make-over to reality, and simultaneously have the surreal put on the cloak of the real. Pan’s labyrinth is one of the very rare movies that make this expectation more tangible as it takes us on a tour of dreams while keeping our feet firmly planted in reality…

Anjan Dutt falls in the category of musicians who were born in the late 50s and early 60s. He was never there in the Rollicking 50s, so he never learnt to croon like Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. Jazz maestros like Louis Armstrong or Harry Belafonte too never got to influence him. His teenage life missed the Swinging 60s by a whisker. Consequently hip-hop rock was also out of the way. Instead his formative years witnessed the most dramatic decade of music history. The 70s were not only a decade of the Vietnam War (as far as the world was concerned)…

4 weeks, 3 months & 2 days (4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile) – Sounds like an apocalyptic countdown to the end of the world. But Romanian Director Cristian Mungiu didn’t have a science fiction or Faustian theme in mind, he wanted to capture reality in brutal earnestness. To him it represented the time which an unborn child breathed inside the womb of a reluctant mother-to-be, before she decided to get rid of it, or perhaps it was the duration of a mortified girl’s agony over her predicament that could cost her everything she is working towards. Most likely, it’s both.

Iranian cinema was first put on the map when the films of Abbas Kiarostami caught the attention of the west. The avant-garde style and the peculiar yet totally fresh concept of “plotlessness” impressed the critics, invariably, throughout the world. After Kiarostami had made way for Iranian filmmakers to venture into the international scenario, it was up to the new generation to develop a stronghold and reserve a unique place for the cinema of their country without mimicking their forerunner…