India Song

Feb 5, 2021 — This week we’re reading Nick Pinkerton on Fassbinder’s problems with Chabrol and revisiting films by Marguerite Duras, Lizzie Borden, and Béla Tarr.

Feb 26, 2020 — Before making history last year as the first black woman director to compete at Cannes, Mati Diop had been spending the previous ten years articulating her unique vision in a series of five acclaimed short films. The praise Diop has...

Oct 18, 2018 — An autumnal round of reviews, excerpts, interviews, and news.

Feb 3, 2015 — Jean-Luc Godard returned to the character-driven intensity of his earlier films with this satirical but serious-minded take on men, women, and money.

Aug 17, 2009 — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to...

Oct 19, 2009 — Though known primarily for her wildly varied, continent-hopping features (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, The Namesake), Indian director Mira Nair has for the past three decades also been forging a parallel career of short filmmaking. Both fiction (Migration, How...

Dec 10, 2020 — Twenty-four features from around the world offer a remedy for cabin fever.

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...

Apr 16, 2021 — Few motifs in Indian cinema are as potent, as laden with history and meaning, as the train. In 1955’s Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray immortalized the railways as the symbol of an alienating modernity in a newly independent India; in a...

Sep 10, 2019 — In this landmark melodrama, director Ritwik Ghatak channeled his grief over the destruction of his beloved homeland, Bengal, in the wake of the Partition of India.