All posts tagged: Opinionentertainment

‘A worshipper of nudity’: Raj Kapoor chose hypersexualisation for last heroine Mandakini | Opinion-entertainment News

‘A worshipper of nudity’: Raj Kapoor chose hypersexualisation for last heroine Mandakini | Opinion-entertainment News

6 min readJul 30, 2026 08:06 AM IST “I was a worshipper of nudity. I think it all started because of my intimacy with my mother, who was young, beautiful, and had the sharp features of a Pathaan woman. We often bathed together, and seeing her in the nude must have left a deep erotic impression on my mind. There is an excellent Urdu phrase, mugaddas uriyan (sacred nudity), which describes this perfectly. In my films, bathing scenes recur often.” This is how Raj Kapoor described his fascination with the female body in his daughter Ritu Nanda’s book Raj Kapoor: The One and Only Showman. And if you have seen Raj’s last feature film, Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), you can see this thought in action. Many films from Raj’s later career, like the one mentioned above, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Prem Rog, have not aged well, and with the younger generation that is now discovering the works of the director, it is nearly impossible to defend these films because honestly, even the generation that was …

The women of Omkara make it the crown jewel of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy | Opinion-entertainment News

The women of Omkara make it the crown jewel of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy | Opinion-entertainment News

6 min readMumbaiJul 29, 2026 08:19 AM IST Maqbool, it is. For millions, it will always be Vishal Bhardwaj’s feverish reimagining of Macbeth, with career-cementing performances by Irrfan and Tabu. And, arguably, rightly so. Maqbool was perhaps the trilogy’s boldest act of reinvention, while Haider remains its most searingly political work. But for me, it will always be Bhardwaj’s Moor of Meerut, Omkara. It is the one that has never loosened its grip on me. There is something inexhaustible about it, something that never stops becoming. It is the most cerebral, the most dramatically volatile, and, undoubtedly, the sexiest. Needless to say, it is Bhardwaj’s earthy re-imagining of Othello, where Venice gives way to the dust and violence of Uttar Pradesh, and perhaps the first mainstream Hindi film to plunge audiences into the Hindi heartland in all its grime and glory. Its language was not ornamental, but simply organic. Its characters did not live in the world; the world had already lived in them. That is why Omkara walked, so that the likes of Gangs …

Omkara: We celebrated Langda Tyagi for 20 years; it’s time we talked about Dolly | Opinion-entertainment News

Omkara: We celebrated Langda Tyagi for 20 years; it’s time we talked about Dolly | Opinion-entertainment News

For the longest time, I avoided Omkara. Tragedies have never been my thing. I don’t enjoy stories where heartbreak is inevitable. They stay with me long after the credits roll. So despite hearing for years that Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara was among the finest films Hindi cinema had ever produced, I never found the courage to press play. Until now. Looking back, I am glad I waited. Had I watched Omkara a decade ago, I would probably have admired Vishal Bhardwaj’s brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare, applauded Saif Ali Khan’s unforgettable Langda Tyagi and moved on. Watching it in 2026, however, I found myself thinking about someone else entirely. Dolly. For years, conversations around Omkara (with Ajay Devgn playing the titular role) have rightly celebrated Saif Ali Khan’s performance, arguably the finest of his career. But 20 years later, I think Kareena Kapoor quietly steals the film. Not because Dolly has the loudest dialogues or the most dramatic scenes. Quite the opposite. She spends most of the film simply loving someone. And perhaps that’s precisely why she …

Jana Nayagan: Vijay’s propaganda film makes even Sura and Villu look like masterpieces | Opinion-entertainment News

Jana Nayagan: Vijay’s propaganda film makes even Sura and Villu look like masterpieces | Opinion-entertainment News

After “Vinveli Nayagan” (Thug Life), here is yet another Nayagan who is equally bloviated but a tad less comical. Director H Vinoth’s Jana Nayagan embodies much of what’s wrong with the culture of superstardom. Everything becomes solely about one person, making all else around them insignificant. The makers’ tactics always appear the same: they place the superstar in every frame and get them to do their trademark/signature antics, so fans may overlook the palpable shoddiness throughout, not even realising that the star and the film’s creators have made fools of them by delivering something not worth even half of what they paid for their tickets. Billed as the swan song of actor-turned-politician Vijay, who currently serves as the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, the Jana Nayagan certification controversy, which delayed its release by seven months, is well-documented; so, no recap needed. Don’t Miss | Jana Nayagan movie review: Vijay’s last film unravels under pressure of being Vijay’s last film But a close look at the timeline of the movie’s development — starting from the initial stages when …

You can tear-gas a protest, but not a song: Inside CJP’s music of resistance | Opinion-entertainment News

You can tear-gas a protest, but not a song: Inside CJP’s music of resistance | Opinion-entertainment News

On June 6, 2026, a satirical outfit calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party called for a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, provoked by a leaked NEET paper. Seven weeks in, what started as one stunt around one exam scandal has widened into a general student uprising — the grievances have multiplied well past the original leak, the crowd has swelled past anything the organisers likely expected, and the tear gas has become routine. Street barricades now exist side by side with algorithmically tailored Instagram reels. There’s no voiceover on protest reels, no commentary explaining what you’re watching — just visuals cut to a song. A police baton connects, and the clip is scored to a nazm written in a country most of these protesters have never visited, under a dictatorship that ended before their parents finished school. This is a movement led by people in their late teens and early twenties. Its most viral audio is, on average, older than their parents’ wedding photographs. It is faintly funny to watch a generation accused of eight-second attention …

15 years later, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara still sells a dream India can’t afford | Opinion-entertainment News

15 years later, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara still sells a dream India can’t afford | Opinion-entertainment News

On July 15, 2011, three men who had never quite grown up got on a flight to Spain to find themselves. For a generation exhausted by the weight of societal expectations, arranged marriage pressures, and a 9-to-5 grind, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara looked like proof that adulthood could be beautiful and above all, aesthetically immaculate. Bollywood had done coming-of-age before. Dil Chahta Hai was about college ending. Lakshya was about finding a purpose. ZNMD picked three men who already had jobs, money, settled lives, and asked what happens once none of that is enough. Nobody had asked that question before. It’s why the film landed the way it did. But the answer it gave wasn’t real. It swapped adulthood’s compromises for a soul-searching holiday, and sold that as the truth. Fifteen years on, that idea has aged into something more complicated. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara was made on a budget of roughly Rs 55 crore. It sent Arjun (Hrithik Roshan), Kabir (Abhay Deol) and Imraan (Farhan Akhtar) through Spain for three weeks — a villa …

Alpha: YRF Spy Universe turns Alia Bhatt, Sharvari into its most compliant agents | Opinion-entertainment News

Alpha: YRF Spy Universe turns Alia Bhatt, Sharvari into its most compliant agents | Opinion-entertainment News

The YRF spy universe has given us strong, sexy, globetrotting agents who saved the nation while sashaying around in foreign locations and charming the ladies. So, when the studio announced Alpha, the Spy Universe’s first film to be headlined by women and to feature its first Indian female agents, there was naturally a lot of excitement. In six previous films, seasoned agents Tiger (Salman Khan), Pathaan (Shah Rukh Khan) and Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) have performed stunts that defy the laws of physics and logic itself. Perhaps the fact that they were men or A-list movie stars meant that we were expected to suspend our disbelief and watch them dance on a beach, blow up buildings and outrun a high-speed train without ever questioning any of it. Spoilers ahead But in Alpha, the latest film in the franchise, Sita (Alia Bhatt) and Durga (Sharvari) have special Spidey senses and what is portrayed as an abnormal amount of physical strength for a woman, because their father injected their mother with the Alpha serum while she was pregnant. …

Gram Chikitsalay Season 2 is easy to love. It is also afraid of its own story | Opinion-entertainment News

Gram Chikitsalay Season 2 is easy to love. It is also afraid of its own story | Opinion-entertainment News

There is a scene in Gram Chikitsalay Season 2 where a pregnant woman is rushed to Dr Prabhat’s PHC in a bullock cart, the local quack having prescribed a havan for her complications. The medicines needed to treat her aren’t available. A crisis is building. And then, at just the right moment, the medicine supply comes through. Mother and child are fine. The scene earns its warmth. That is precisely the problem. Not the warmth itself, but the convenience of it. In the world of the show, medicine shortages resolve when they absolutely have to. It is a satisfying version of rural India. It is also a version that most people who have actually lived in rural India would not fully recognise. The show is set in Bhatkandi, a fictional village in Jharkhand. Dr Prabhat Sinha, played with considerable sincerity by Amol Parashar, is trying to make the local Primary Health Centre functional and trusted. Season 1 established the premise well, a non-operational PHC, a village that preferred its quack doctor, Chetak Kumar, played by …

Why Agent Vinod remains Sriram Raghavan’s most fascinating failure | Opinion-entertainment News

Why Agent Vinod remains Sriram Raghavan’s most fascinating failure | Opinion-entertainment News

6 min readMumbaiJun 22, 2026 09:49 AM IST Manmohan Desai, Mahendra Sandhu, Godard, Prem Chopra, Iftekhar, Tarantino, Danny, Vijay Anand, Ajit, Hitchcock, Shahbaz Khan, Michael Bay, Sergio Leone, Prem Chopra, and an explosive four-minute-long take over Pritam’s Raabta. What’s not to love? Your mind would make you want to think of James Bond’s Dr. No, but somewhere along the way, you’re convinced that Sriram Raghavan is equally enthralled by Jeetendra’s 1967 spy actioner Farz. Similarly, your mind would make you want to think that Raghavan’s busy plot doesn’t have any time for serious song picturisation, but then, somewhere along the way, you see a mujra-in-the-villain’s-den thrown into the mix. The constant feeling that you get is that Agent Vinod is stranded between two traditions, making you strand yourself between the heart and the mind. But if you watch closely enough, and repeatedly, just like I have, in all these years, you would perhaps realise that Raghavan just wants to have some fun with the genre. Is that too much to ask for? Well, surely for …

The devastatingly affective tragedy of Main Vaapas Aaunga’s climax | Opinion-entertainment News

The devastatingly affective tragedy of Main Vaapas Aaunga’s climax | Opinion-entertainment News

In an otherwise uneven retelling of familiar longing in Love Aaj Kal (2020), there is a moment tucked away at the very end, after the story has exhausted itself, even after the credits have rolled, that stays longer than anything that precedes it. Kartik Aaryan stands beneath the balcony of the woman he loves, looking up with the hope that generations of lovers before him have carried. But the balcony offers no answer. No silhouette appears or hand parts the curtains. There is only and only absence. It is here it strikes you that after returning time and again to the tales of Romeo and Juliet, Heer Ranjha and Laila Majnu, stories that, in many ways, are variations of the same wound (much like most Imtiaz Ali’s films), this time, however, Ali finds a new note to play. Romeo is still standing beneath Juliet’s balcony. But this time, Juliet is gone and Romeo is to blame. He only claimed to love but never dared to truly love. It is this thought, this moment, that returns …