mint • 24th February 2026

Berlinale: ‘Members of the Problematic Family’ introduces new grammar to Tamil film | Mint

A new dissenting voice emerges in Tamil cinema. R Gowtham’s debut Tamil feature, Members of the Problematic Family, premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival last week in the Forum section. Everything about this film is distinct yet unfamiliar, beginning with its title. The Tamil title, Sikkalana Kudumbathin Uruppinargal, a literal translation, rolls off the tongue. For decades we’ve had the word kudumbam (family) in Tamil film titles that have often alluded to the spotless, divin...

OTTPlay • 1st February 2026

Mayilaa: Semmalar Annam's Debut Feature Intertwines Work, Faith & Fury

IF YOU POSSESS above average knowledge of contemporary Tamil cinema, Semmalar Annam might be familiar. Maybe you cannot place the name, but you will recall the face, a face unfortunately stereotyped by Tamil filmmakers. She is an actor with such ferocious presence that if you give her half a decent role, she will single-handedly lift a film. Films like Leena Manimekalai’s Maadathy and Jaikumar Sedhuraman’s Sennai are a testament to this talent, but my favourite Semmalar performance came in a sho...

The Polis Project • 20th June 2025

Tees Is A Searing Critique Of The Indian State

When you think of the enfant terrible of Hindi cinema, a name like Anurag Kashyap might spring to mind. Dibakar Banerjee is not synonymous with release troubles. The filmmaker, who changed the language of Hindi mainstream cinema in the late 2000s, is prone to awe more than shock; his films operate in the popular spheres even as they gently question rigid social entities in modern India. 
He began with satirical comedy that poked holes in the post-liberalization story of the Indian middle class—K...

Frontline • 11th June 2025

How Raj Kapoor Shaped India’s Socialist Hero in Hindi Cinema

Published : Jun 11, 2025 07:53 IST - 11 MINS READ There are several enduring images of Raj Kapoor. One image of the greatest showman of Hindi cinema—as he is called—is his riff on Charlie Chaplin and the Tramp, a spitting reflection that he made his own by injecting a lovable, warm-hearted rabble-rouser in films like Awara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955). Another image is that of the lonesome entertainer of Mera Naam Joker (1970), one who barters his life and soul for the endurance of his art, a...

OTTPlay • 30th May 2025

I Made A Pro-Tribal Film — Not Left, Not Right: Chhatrapal Ninawe On The Politics Around Ghaath

FILMMAKER CHHATRAPAL NINAWE'S journey with his debut film Ghaath is one he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemies. Ghaath was selected in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, in 2021. And then the producing partner retracted the film from the festival without any explanation to Ninawe, even refusing to communicate or provide any clarity regarding the bizarre decision. After an extended stalemate, the other producing studio, Drishyam Films, along with Shiladit...

The Polis Project • 4th April 2025

Feminichi Fathima & Victoria Malayalam Film Review

Two Malayalam films that world premiered at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala in December 2024 share DNA despite employing different milieu and techniques.
Fasil Muhammed’s Feminichi Fathima (also screened at the 14th Indian Film Festival of Bhubaneswar) is about the eponymous Muslim housewife in Ponnani in Malappuram and possesses a day-in-the-life narrative. Sivaranjini’s Victoria designs a single day as a series of single takes in the life of Victoria, a beautician at a parlor in...

mint • 27th December 2024

Pains and gains: The year in south Indian cinema

The films of south India are now on a pedestal. Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and to a lesser extent Kannada cinema have usurped the homogeneity of Hindi cinema in popular culture. There is a crisis of confidence—not stories or storytellers—in Hindi cinema, but it is dictated by box-office numbers and the industry’s set ways.

That crisis exists in Tamil too. It is only Telugu that possesses some secret sauce for pan-Indianness, a concoction so repetitive it stands at the doorstep of satur...

The Polis Project • 7th November 2024

No City For Women And Yugantar Film Collective’s Impact

At the end of Dr. Rangan Chakravarty’s documentary film No City for Women—a piercing look at modern day Gurgaon, its beginnings, and its growth into an unsafe concrete jungle—we see three women around a table. In the middle is the upper-class homeowner and employer living in one of the city’s ubiquitous gated communities. Two domestic workers, both women, are at her side. The interviewer behind the camera asks, “Is there a new mindset in Gurgaon?” 
The woman on the right nods and explains how th...

Senses of Cinema • 19th September 2024

An Interview with Haobam Paban Kumar – Senses of Cinema

In plain terms, AFSPA expands to Armed Forces Special Powers Act, an act of the Indian Parliament that grants special powers to the Indian army to maintain law and order in “disturbed areas”. But there is nothing plain about AFSPA;1 the Indian army is alleged to have committed grave atrocities and human rights violations under its name. AFSPA is in force in parts of India where separatist movements and tension with the mainland have remained high.

Haobam Paban Kumar began his journey in filmmak...

mint • 18th May 2024

The growing pains of south Indian web series

Vilangu , a police procedural set in a village near Trichy with its narrative marred by caste, culture and politics, is one of the better web series to come out of south India. In an interview to YouTube channel Galatta Plus last year, its writer-director, Prasanth Pandiyaraj, elaborated on the challenges facing long-form series creators in the south. He mentioned “Mumbai" at least three times. He spoke about how he must convey his pitch and story to the local team of an OTT platform, then impre

Frontline • 14th February 2024

‘Cinema shouldn’t be limited to one kind of storytelling’: Don Palathara

Even among independent filmmakers, Don Palathara is an outlier. His latest film Family premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2023 and travelled to festivals including the Bengaluru International Film Festival, the International Film Festival of India, and the International Film Festival of Kerala. Starring Vinay Forrt and Divya Prabha among a talented ensemble, Family will have a theatrical release on February 23, 2024, and in the run-up to that, director Anurag Kashyap relea

OTTplay • 7th February 2024

Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust Delivers Spectacular Sci-Fi Animation

WE hear snatches of Hindi, maybe a few other languages and then settle on English. Two characters speak on a balcony overlooking a busy road. The animation suggests it is after dusk in a land where it is perpetually dark. The aesthetics suggest a combination of Blade Runner and Dark City, a futuristic dystopia with sprinkles of noir and it is all animated in 2D and 3D using video game engine. Overhead shots of the city and its roads, and car windshield as frame within a frame. Based on his 2016

The Federal • 6th February 2024

Kiss Wagon review: An animated epic adventure, protean and powerful

Midhun Murali’s Kiss Wagon, which premiered in the Tiger Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) last week, won the Special Jury Award as well as the FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique or International Federation of Film Critics) prize. The Malayalam-English selection from India can be best described as an animated epic adventure film though it is far more than that.


It is not an easy task to elaborate what the film is about; it bends genres

OTTplay • 10th December 2023

Anand Ekarshi On Making His Malayalam Feature Debut With The Acclaimed Aattam

Aattam: The Play is an incisive exploration of the human psyche in the form of a chamber drama. It is part of the programme at the International Film Festival of Kerala.

Anand Ekarshi’s Malayalam feature debut Aattam: The Play had its world premiere at 21st Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles where it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Film. An incisive exploration of the human psyche in the form of a chamber drama, the film had its Asia premiere at Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023, was the op

The Federal • 1st December 2023

Mithya review: Athish Shetty shines as a trapped soul in an emotional tug of war

In Sumanth Bhat’s Kannada film Mithya, we are always behind eleven-year-old Mithun aka Mithya (Athish S Shetty). We see what he sees in these moments. Bhat, with his cinematographer Udit Khurana, films Mithya from the back of his head almost all the time. In the very first scene, Mithya is standing perilously close to the door of a zipping train, and we are behind him as he remains still and the background whizzes away.


The composition follows a similar pattern — when he arrives at his new ho

Mintlounge • 15th June 2023

Mia Hansen-Løve: ‘I wanted this film to be austere’

Time is one of the pillars of Mia Hansen-Løve’s films. We follow characters through changing weathers, years and decades. “All my films deal with passing of time in some way, the earlier films were more obvious in this regard as there were longer stretches in their stories and some films focus on shorter periods,” she says over Zoom. “But the question of time, growth and how we change and how much we remain the same is at the heart of my films.”

Time is fluid in her films. The earlier films lik

The New Indian Express • 13th January 2023

Biweekly Binge: In the name of the father

In Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun—streaming on MUBI—Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio play Calum and Sophie, a father-daughter duo vacationing in Turkey sometime in the 90s. He is barely into his 30s. She’s all of eleven. It’s a curious dynamic to the extent that fellow vacationers casually assume they are siblings. Mescal possesses a heavy guttural voice of a coach that does not betray his age, so when he says, “I am her father though” in a thick accent, the teenage traveller is quick to apologize and

Mintlounge • 26th November 2022

Pushpak at 35: The silence of the clowns

Vasan Bala’s Monica, O My Darling sent everyone on a spot-the-reference treasure hunt but a rare warm moment in the film is in its bibliographic hat tip—the who’s who of Bala’s likely favourites on an apartment nameboard. It’s warm because one of those names is not like the others. The Indian names make up a certain kind of genre film-makers—Sriram Raghavan, Vishal Bhardwaj, Abbas Mastan. Almost all the names roll off the tongue for even the casual watcher but the very first name might have elud

19th November 2022

The making of an international juggeRRRnaut

Good morning! A big hello to readers who signed up this week. Welcome to The Intersection, The Signal's weekend edition. This week, we talk to the people who made Telugu action epic RRR a runaway box-office hit in the US. Also in today’s edition: we have curated the best weekend reads for you.

If you enjoy reading us, why not give us a follow at @thesignaldotco on Twitter and Instagram.

Ariel Vida is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and production designer. If you look at her social media, you mi

The New Indian Express • 21st September 2022

Biweekly Binge: Mothers and daughters in a chamber

Two of the best films of 2022 premiered at Venice International Film Festival, followed by showings at Toronto International Film Festival. One is Alice Diop’s first narrative feature Saint Omer which came after several revered documentaries by the filmmaker, and the other is Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter. The former also won the Silver Lion at Venice.

These two distinctive films share special similarities in the way they use dialogue and sound in addition to the centrality of the relation

News9live • 16th September 2022

The Fabelmans movie review: Steven Spielberg coming of age

Spielberg titled the film The Fabelmans instead of something singular or personal because the film is about the disintegration of a family and making of pictures — a collaborative and democratic art more than any other.

There have been many tributes from talented filmmakers to pretenders and plagiarizers when it comes to Steven Spielberg. One of the greatest tributes to Spielberg and his cinema is the first 40 minutes of JJ Abrams’s Super 8 (2011).

The children. The 8mm film. The adventure to

News9live • 31st July 2022

Inside labyrinth of Irma Vep: How to make a remake on making of another remake

In 'How The Picture Moves,' Aditya Shrikrishna offers a technical breakdown of recently released movies and shows.

Olivier Assayas flips a pivotal moment in the TV series adaptation of his 1996 film Irma Vep. He flips great many things in the modern version, which is an updated exegesis on the state of art and business of filmmaking but this moment, as it does in the original, stands out.

In the film, Maggie Cheung playing a version of herself, visits René Vidal, the increasingly volatile film

News9live • 3rd July 2022

Suzhal: The Vortex and Vilangu — A tale of two Tamil small-town mysteries

In a span of four months, we got two Tamil web series that could be slotted under the genre of "small-town mystery". Vilangu, written and directed by Prasanth Pandiyaraj, released in February on ZEE5. Suzhal: The Vortex, created and written by Pushkar-Gayathri and directed by Bramma and Anucharan, released a few weeks ago on Amazon Prime Video India.

The former is smaller in scale in terms of both story and budget. The opposite is true for Suzhal, especially with the pedigree of writers and dir

Frontline • 15th May 2022

Understanding the new ‘pan-Indian film’

In M. Rajshekhar’s Despite the State, the author meets a man in Bihar who downloads music and films and sells them for ten bucks. He mentions the popular titles—Akhil: The Power of Jua, Heart Attack, Businessman 2, Shivam, Viraat, and The Return of Raju. They are all titles from South India. Businessman 2 is the Hindi dub of Pandaga Chesko and The Return of Raju’s original is Soggade Chinni Nayana. Rajshekhar goes on to write about the popularity of the dubbed version of Telugu and Tamil films s