Aug 5, 2018 — The writer-director of Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay! takes us through an eclectic mix of favorite films, including works by Jane Campion, Lars von Trier, and Satyajit Ray.

Ira Bhaskar is a professor of cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has written widely on melodrama, Indian cinema, and other subjects, and is a coauthor of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009). She is currently editing...

Dec 9, 2025 — In her Cannes-award-winning narrative feature debut, Mira Nair sees the lives of Indian street children with an unconditionally generous gaze, taking in their world in all its contradictions and complexity.

Nov 13, 2025 — The director of Rat Trap and Monologue was an uncompromising artist who helped establish the Indian state of Kerala as a hub of bold political filmmaking.

Jun 8, 2022 — A major figure in contemporary Hindi literature pays tribute to Guru Dutt in this fantasia that reimagines the great filmmaker’s death.

Jun 28, 2021 — Next month brings a twenty-seven-film spotlight on the neonoir thrillers of the post-studio-system era, a survey of art-house animation from around the world, and more.

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...

Dec 1, 2020 — Near the end of the late Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee’s six-decade career in cinema, journalists liked to ask him one question quite frequently: Why did he never enter Bollywood?Depending on your vantage point, this query is either reasonable or ridiculous....

Nov 5, 2020 — Performances Whenever I think of the iconic Bengali actor Supriya Choudhury, the first thing I recall is not her face—with its high cheekbones and large, kohl-rimmed eyes that often drew comparisons to Sophia Loren’s—but her voice, disembodied, tearing through the...

Jul 19, 2018 — Can art change the world? That’s the question that has propelled writer-director Mira Nair down the various paths she’s taken as an artist, from her early explorations of stage acting and photography to her success with such films as Monsoon...