The India Story

Sep 22, 2025 — The director of the documentary Celluloid Underground discusses his life as a curator, Iranian film culture, and the inherent ephemerality of cinema.

Apr 22, 2025 — Adaptations, Hollywood histories, and Satyajit Ray’s cover designs feature in this month’s roundup.

Mar 17, 2025 — Headlining this month’s roundup are Joan Didion, Merle Oberon, and Charlie Chaplin.

Oct 23, 2024 — This month brings new books on Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, unhappy writers, and classic documentaries.

May 28, 2024 — With just a few exceptions, critics are generally pleased with this year’s awards.

Jan 24, 2023 — Filled with evocative images and guided by the unique aesthetic sensibility of the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s film is an exploration of the power of grief that is paradoxically uplifting.

Sep 28, 2022 — Uday Shankar’s fantastical dance epic embodies a progressive, postcolonial Indian aesthetic that is decades ahead of its time.

May 24, 2021 — We’re reading more about Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock and about Sofia Coppola and Stanley Kubrick.

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...

Mar 5, 2021 — When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark died in 2015 at age seventy-five from myelodysplastic syndrome, she left behind a vast and varied five-decade trail of portraits and documentary pictures, collected in twenty books and dozens of exhibitions, radical in their...