Favorite films

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2009

★★★★★ Watched 18 May 2025

A Lennon-worshipping poet and a mime dressed as an Ardhanarishwar are the jester duo in the home of a far-right extremist. Fratricide determines the fate of a pair of illegitimate siblings. Love turns a pawn caught in this dirty game into the embodiment of vengeance. Shakespearean in its scope, one of Kashyap's finest works depicts Rajasthan as the duality it constantly exists in - a land with vast histories and where the present is constantly burdened by them. Dileep is so many Indian college students; bargaining with the devil initially to survive and being too foolish to ever realise that.

2025

★★★★ Watched 20 May 2025

At nine films now, it is only natural that the romance is wearing off. Instead of uniquely depicting how our ragtag team goes about saving the world, the energies have now shifted to showing how creatively its destruction can be plotted. And for a series that has always teetered the sci-fi genre, it feels like a betrayal that the nemesis here is akin to a supernatural force. But Cruise certainly knows how to add enough heart to make a trip to the theatre worthwhile. That entire Sevastopol sequence, which has no cutaways, is one of the finest in the entire series.

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2022

★★★★ Watched 17 Jan 2023

By focusing so heavily on the faces of his characters, Spielberg captures film's unparalleled ability to momentarily transport its viewer and also how transformative it can be. Sequences like his discovery of his mother's infidelity and the one with his estranged uncle add to the film's eclectic mixture of styles he is utilising here and for good reason. Unabashed in its sentimentality, sometimes to a fault, the ending is possibly his finest.
All that being said, the washed out, refined lighting style that Spielberg has been using as of late in his period films adds an artifice that he needs to do away with.

2024

★★★★★ 1

It is gratifying to watch a Bollywood film which appears to be informed by the news and not gossip columns. Banerjee shows our modern digital existence as the only place of our perpetual presence since the handful of scenes not taking place on screens appear unnaturally distant and detached. He is not interested in glamour beyond the extremity of its artifice and in that, he takes his film from the midst of social media's excess to an AI-generated world that, while feeling absurd, also hits too close home as a cautionary tale. This is an intelligent filmmaker, angry and unchained.

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