FEATURE: Laurie Woolever, long-time assistant of globe-trotting chef, writer and maker of excellent television on travel, culture and food, is out with a long-planned travel guide of Anthony Bourdain’s insights into what he loved most

FEATURE: It’s been a year like no other for Kathak exponent-choreographer Kumudini Lakhia, who beat COVID at 91 and made peace with virtual drawing-room dance lessons. Aching to return to her dance school, she says large empty spaces offer a dancer energy that’s irreplaceable.

FEATURE: A fad, a bubble or something with the potential of revolutionising how art is made, sold, valued and collected? Medium-agnostic Indian collectors backing Non-Fungible Tokens are challenging traditional art and its practices

CONVERSATION: Chaitanya Tamhane's The Disciple opens up the world of Indian classical music with all its rich complexities to cinema audiences. But what does one of its own think of this representation? Carnatic vocalist, writer and activist TM Krishna puts compelling questions to the young, celebrated filmmaker

FEATURE: Satyajit Ray garnered immense acclaim as a filmmaker, but he was also a multi-hyphenate artiste. On his birth centenary today, we visit his simultaneous careers as illustrator, science fiction writer and magazine editor, with those he worked with and inspired

REVIEW: The sounds that make up the title of Prateek Vats’s Eeb Allay Ooo! resonate through its length. Their most direct expression is in the deep, full-bodied croaks and high-pitched whoops of its monkey-repelling squad, assigned in New Delhi’s Raisina Hill to scare the animals away from the country’s highest government offices. We hear these sounds even before we see their source as newly-arrived migrant Anjani (Shardul Bharadwaj) gets hurriedly trained in the film’s opening moments.

INTERVIEW: Sonia Filinto’s documentary Bread and Belonging explores the connections between bread in Goa, known locally as pão, and the people who make it.

REVIEW: The home, closed off from prying, judgemental eyes, is also, if momentarily, an empathetic space, allowing conversations and the forging of a connection that could not have developed or existed outside of it; a fact that Ratna, who declines Ashwin’s invitation to step outside together, is only too aware of.

ESSAY: Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), the titular “Beanpole” of Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov’s second film, has post-concussion syndrome. Periodically, she’s sent through phases of catatonic stupor. Soft, choking sounds coupled with a persistent ringing accompany these temporary paralyses and signal our entry into Beanpole, appearing even before she is shown on-screen mid-freeze.

ESSAY: These films open up a Bombay of ageing colonial-era homes, clubs and self-contained residential colonies, of wider, less-crowded roads—a world distant from the more customary images of the busier northern suburbs, of concerns around assimilation, exclusivity and social responsibility, of off-limits religious spaces and practices ironically rendered somewhat accessible by cinema.

ESSAY: In an interview, actor Waheeda Rehman described an episode that had occurred during the filming of Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959). An extra who had been trying to pacify her crying infant was being cruelly berated for missing work by a senior on the set when director Guru Dutt had chanced upon the scene.

ESSAY: The works of both artists—Munro and Almodóvar—draw in small and big ways from their personal narratives. And so, while the film puts an end to the terrible silence in the mother’s life, offering at long last the possibility of a reunion, these stories from the collection turn on their marvellously evocative title exploring what it is to be a runaway from one’s own mother. “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time,” Munro writes towards the end of “Dear Life”. We never find out if Antía truly does the same. But one suspects that it is not her forgiveness that the director is after.

REVIEW: The first time we see him in Madhu C. Narayanan’s Kumbalangi Nights, Shammy (Fahadh Faasil) is trimming his abundant moustache, looking admiringly at his own reflection in the mirror and calling himself ‘the complete man’. In this film about men and the contending representations of masculinity, facial hair understandably plays an important role.

ESSAY: Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s gangster story of violence and retribution has all the usual ingredients: icy hitmen, decisive tests of loyalty, grand showdowns, moody cityscapes…and food. Our aging hero, Francis Costello (French singer Johnny Hallyday), is a chef who owns a restaurant at the Champs-Élysées. And in an early scene, without wasting too much time—a quality that he shares with his director—Costello sets about displaying his culinary skills.

ESSAY: Australian writer-director Shirley Barrett’s latest venture, a screenplay-turned-novel titled Rush Oh!, is about the fascinating and true story of an inter-species bond that grew in the early 1900s between a whaling community in the coastal town of Eden and a pod of killer whales. Every year, the whales returned to help the whalers trap their prey and share in the common loot. In an interview, Barrett describes how she came upon the story one particular rainy day during a beach trip to Eden.

INTERVIEW: “When you paint burning chinar leaves and the smoke, it gives a very beautiful effect. Especially in water colours,” says painter and teacher Masood Hussain in Raqs-e-Inquilab (Art in a Time of Conflict). It is a striking and yet wistful moment that powerfully encapsulates the film’s central theme—the coming together of art and strife, of the beautiful and the bleak, of the created with the real, of life with death.

INTERVIEW: Elizabeth Sankey’s Romantic Comedy, which recently premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), is a documentary analysing the pitfalls and charms of the genre of the romantic comedy. A delightful and engaging work, the film also happens to mark the coming together of the realms of the serious with what is widely regarded as the non-serious.

INTERVIEW: Loneliness and loss, the ways in which people perceive absence, and the choices that emanate from them are some of the themes filmmaker Sudipto Roy explores in his new film Kia and Cosmos. Truth and its potentially harmful and liberating qualities as well as the struggles of modern single parenting, the changing notions of family, the emergence of unlikely friendships, and the affirming nature of unusual and unusually-conducted social interactions are all deeply considered in this gentle and confident debut feature.

REVIEW: In an interview late last year, the first-time director spoke of early attempts at discovering his calling, his persistent interests in photography and writing and how films ultimately proved the perfect amalgam for them. There were talks of the need to move with the times and village homes all around his own near Darbhanga in Bihar were starting to be modernised.

ESSAY: In a podcast almost as heady and packed as their latest film Uncut Gems (2019) and cheekily titled “Seduce and Destroy,” after the particular brand of sleazy pickup artistry promoted by dating coach Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), Josh and Benny Safdie talked to Anderson about, among other things, how their respective films could serve as metaphors for filmmaking with their protagonists appearing as stand-ins for themselves.