“It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever,” remarks faded rocker David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean). This Is Spinal Tap is a film that manages to occupy both sides of that line, being as it is a clever movie about stupid people. It is an enormously funny, well-crafted comedy, one of the very best ever made. From the first frame the film blurs the lines between fiction and reality, opening on Marty DiBergi, the director of a documentary about rock band Spinal Tap, played by Rob Reiner, director of This Is Spinal Tap.

Welcome to the world of film noirs – a world infested by two-bit thugs and crooked cops, anti-heroes with a thing for cynical wisecracks, platinum blondes ready to take a good man on a bad ride, femme fatales in the garb of damsels in distress, shabby joints where men of dubious intents plot shady deals over cheap whiskey and cigarettes, seedy hotel rooms where love is just another word. This is a dark, dark world where you get greed, lust, betrayal, double crosses and murder in plenty – a world devoid of the so called good things of life.

Looking at Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography, which spans fifty years and just as many films, Notorious arguably stands as its centerpiece. Filmed in 1946, the movie is filled with what would become known as Hitchcockian themes and trademarks, but does it so subtly that it’s debatable whether he was nervously experimenting with them or injecting them right into the spine of the film in a way they’d remain almost undetected. Set in 1946, the film opens in Miami where a doctor Huberman is convicted of being a Nazi spy..

Revolutionary Road brings Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet together once more and they make you wonder why it took so long after Titanic to have them share the screen again. Nobody who’s seen Winslet in the likes of Iris or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and DiCaprio in, say, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or The Aviator, needs to be told anything about the incredible talents of these two actors individually. Their candyfloss relationship in Titanic never really brought their magic to the fore…

1984 is nothing short of a classic and a must read. At times it’s frustrating because of over-simplified, and often unnecessary, clues to the reader. While the metaphor and allegory in the text are certainly complex, sometimes one wishes Orwell trusted his readers to do a little more thinking for themselves. Nonetheless, Orwell’s prose is powerful and brimming over with deeper underlying meaning. While the story is political in nature, and the plot is incredibly intricate, 1984 never stops reading as an entertaining novel. One can’t help but marvel at Orwell writing..

Empathy, according to the dictionary, is the identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives. It is neither a common occurrence in life nor in films. Definitely much rarer than apathy. The emotion or the lack of it that make us look the other way most of the times. That is why your heart both shrinks in shame and swells up in warmth to see it in such abundance in a movie. Barah Aana by Raja Menon is a tragic-comedy about three migrants from Uttar Pradesh who share a kholi in Dharavi.

With its pedigree both in front of and behind the camera, Blindness has all the makings of a dystopian masterpiece, a resonant commentary on the dangerous underbelly of our supposedly stable society. Unfortunately, despite the wealth of talent involved, Blindness fails to connect in any meaningful way and makes for an almost unendurable viewing experience. It begins promisingly enough but before the first hour is even up, it becomes excruciating to watch, a passionless orgy of all that is foul in human nature.

I’ve seen a lot of films about marriage, but Scenes from a Marriage may be the best. Written and directed by the late Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, the 1973 drama is filmed on sets less sophisticated than most sitcoms, with camerawork equally simple, but in its writing and acting it is more passionate, more scorching, and more intimate than any film of its kind I can think of. It presents the dissolution of a marriage as only the beginning of a love story built on pain, lust, cruelty, anger, and affection…

There’s a title card at the end of “All About My Mother” where director Pedro Almodóvar dedicates his film to “all the people who have wanted to be mothers”; the fact that he doesn’t say “women” but “people” is enough to capture the essence of this wonderful work of art. Trying to do justice to her son’s last wish, Manuela travels to Barcelona looking for her “son’s heart” and reveal the whole story to his father. Tinged with overcoming melancholy and heartache, Almodóvar’s movie deals with the roles we have to play in life.

Cormac McCarthy’s tale of a post-apocalyptic America opens on a road where a father and his son trudge along pushing a shopping trolley filled with their earthly belongings in a world all but destroyed, where the dying land is burnt black, forests defoliated and ashened, the sky perpetually gray. It is always cold, dark, damp and gloomy. There is nothing beautiful about the rain falling in this story because it only adds to the prevailing sense of sorrow that weighs heavier and heavier as the story unravels. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007.