If there’s one thing Christians, Muslims, and orthodox Jews agree on, it’s that gays aren’t welcome. Of course, each group believes the other two are eternally rejected by God too, so what are you gonna do?
Director Malcolm Ingram’s compassionate 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar isn’t about religion, per se, but it takes place in [...]

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.

The film industry, in the form we understand today, is approaching its centenary. The first attempts to organise and standardise production, distribution and exhibition date from around 1910/11. A few years later, the first Hollywood studio majors began to appear in nascent form (Universal and Paramount in 1912). But it was not until 1927 [...]

A British director with a British screenplay telling an Indian story based on a book by an Indian author, using predominantly an Indian crew of mixed nationalities - Sound like a global film?
There are certain films and filmmakers that become associated with the zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the times’. The release of Slumdog Millionaire [...]

Shakespeare’s plays have become an endless pool of resource for the filmmakers of the world. Their universality of themes and emotions has intrigued a range of directors and has prompted so many adaptations and retellings. One of them, King Lear, distinctly stands out. Romeo and Juliet may have become one for the classrooms and Macbeth may still be classified as a terrifying legend, but King Lear seems to grow with age and feels immensely relevant and profound now more than ever.

If you thought Salvador Dali and Walt Disney had nothing in common except the ‘D’ in their surnames, get prepared to be proven wrong. Destino – a five-minute animated short film was the child of Dali’s feverish imagination and Disney’s singular storytelling. But it’s one of those rare cases where the story behind the film is almost as surreal as the film itself. Welcome to arid plains, vicious eyeballs, melting clocks, unrequited love and a wait that lasted 58 years. Read about a “Destino” 58 years in the making…

Every now and then, when people start saying “Indie is dead”, there comes a filmmaker, who contradicts them and redefines the course of cinema – both mainstream and parallel. John Cassavetes had ridiculed the American mainstream cinema and its incessant thriving on extravagance with his Shadows (1959). Cut to the 1980’s when gangsters were ruling Hollywood. Enter Jim Jarmusch with the short film Stranger Than Paradise (1982) which humiliated Hollywood with its normal characters and simple situations. Independent cinema was never…

American underground cinema has undoubtedly been boosted by the arrival of John Cassavetes whose freedom and fluidity of characters and their emotions felt as a lease of oxygen in a studio driven defunct industry. However, not everyone has able to accept his works with arms wide open. It seems as though the whole of Cassavetes film can be summed up in the term – self-indulgence. What is self indulgence? Is Cassavetes work so alien that one is not able to accept them?

Andrei Tarkovsky’s whole new percept of cinema helped discovering newer boundaries to the medium and aided the formation of some of the greatest directors of the future. Though Andrei Tarkovsky’s canon consisted of only seven features, three student films, one documentary and a couple of stage plays and there were more unrealized projects than filmed ones, each of the ideas that were completed were gems and remain unparalleled to dateLooking back, each one seems hand picked and “sculpted” second…

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…