As a tribute to Basu Chatterjee, who passed away on June 6, 2020, a look at his quintessential Mumbai film:   At the peak of his prolific filmmaking career, Basu…

And All Falls Down: Emily St. John Mandel follows up her powerful novel, Station Eleven, about a global pandemic (sci-fi is turning out to be true) with The Glass Hotel,…

When large chunks of the world seem to be tipping back into conservatism—if not complete right-wing lunacy, the web series, Mrs America, is like a pouring-ice-water-on-the-head kind of reminder that women are…

Only The Lonely:   Anne Tyler’s last two books, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance were mildly disappointing, but she is back to her A Spool Of Blue Thread form with…

As the new Sara Paretsky novel, Dead Land, is released (and immediately picked up), it leads to musings about the female detective in fiction. Paretsky created the wonderful character, V.I.…

This day in 1973, Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer was released, a film that that is indisputably a mainstream trendsetter.   There is movielore attached to the old film– which does not…

Mother’s Day : The original Marathi play, Aai Retire Hotey by Ashok Patole, was written over thirty years ago, and has had several productions since then, in multiple languages. Many aspects…

On May 3, 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, India’s first feature film, was released in Mumbai, at the Coronation Cinematograph and Variety Hall, Girgaon.  To mark the occasion, here’s revisiting…

The term ‘male gaze’ was coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema—which, to put it simply, meant that visual media are created for a heterosexual male’s point…

Mystery Of The Missing Girls: The Sundown Motel by Simone St. James moves between dual time frames as two intrepid young women set out find out just what is going…