The Rest is Politics is a great podcast from the UK with Alistair Campbell (Downing Street Director of Communications and Strategy under UK PM Tony Blair) and Rory Stewart (ex UK Conservative Party cabinet minister). In this particular podcast Rory… Continue reading →

Spoilers ahead… All actors are in top form, though Nani gets the meatiest role and bites into it with every fibre of his being, giving a performance that is as much physical as emotional. “Everyone drinks the same alcohol, but our caste determines whether we drink inside the bar or outside.” This is something we […]

Spoilers ahead… Until now, the two-parter films we have had in India (or maybe even the world) have all been in the fantasy / history zone. This may be the first time a socio-political movie is being served in two installments. Viduthalai – Part 1 is set in 1987, and it is based, loosely, on […]

By G Waugh Kamal Haasan in one of his interviews where he expresses his disaffection with growing calls for vegetarianism, if I remember correctly used a term called “Green Blood”. It was a reference to the substance thatthe plants are assumed tolet outwith pain when we pluck their leaves or mutilate them for our own […]

Martin Wolf in the FT wrote an interesting piece in the FT yesterday talking about loose monetary policy and not to wholly blame the central banks for the economic environment today. Below are some of the main points that he… Continue reading →

Spoilers ahead… The nicest change in ‘Bholaa’ is transforming the Narain character into a woman, and making her an action heroine. She shares butt-kicking duties with the hero. Ajay Devgn’s Bholaa follows the same beats as its predecessor, Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Kaithi – but there’s one crucial difference in terms of flavour. Lokesh made a Hollywood-style […]

Spoilers ahead… Speed takes precedence over atmosphere and narrative cohesion. Who could have guessed that Hari would be the far-sighted architect of modern cinema! Obeli N Krishna’s Pathu Thala is based on a Kannada film named Mufti, and even if – like me – you have not seen the original, you know it is a […]

With the onslaught of COVID one wondered whether the jobs lost during the pandemic would “come back”. Part of the logic was that since robots don’t fall ill, bosses would turn to them instead of to people and COVID would… Continue reading →

The principle of economies of scale is fundamental to maritime transportation economics as the larger the ship, the lower the cost per unit transported. This trend has particularly been apparent in bulk and containerised shipping. Since the 1950’s the size… Continue reading →

By Vijay Ramanathan Todd Field’s excellent Tár is fundamentally a pseudo-message movie nestled within a character study that’s masked as a biopic of a fictional artist (phew!… that was a mouthful). Lydia Tár, brilliantly portrayed by Cate Blanchett, is a vehicle for Field to question what we see happening around us with art and artists. […]

By Jeeva P Hi Arulmozhivarman, There is a dialogue in Parthiban Kanavu, Srikanth telling his friends that the biggest problem in his life has been not the fact that he was surrounded by bad people who made life difficult for him, but quite the opposite. Parthiban, played by Srikanth was surrounded in fact by good […]

Spoilers ahead… Though Rajkummar Rao plays the nominal protagonist and gets a small character-growth arc, this is a film that belongs to everyone, the ‘bheed’. Anubhav Sinha’s latest attempt at movie-making / conscience-pricking / dialogue-initiating is titled Bheed, and it gets going 13 days after the first pandemic-lockdown, when more migrants began walking back to […]