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W inter Sleep is one of the outstanding cinematic works of 2014. Winter Sleep is a daunting 196 minutes long movie and could put off an uninitiated, immature viewer craving for action, sex and thrills. The Turkish director Ceylan, speaking to a packed audience that had earlier stood in long, winding queues on a humid December morning in Trivandrum city in India to view the award winning cinematic work and glimpse the accomplished director, during the International Film Festival of Kerala, India, stated with a note of apprehension “ I hope all of you slept well last night as my film is more than 3 hours long .” Interior lighting that embellishes the film Winter Sleep , as in the case of the director’s previous two films— Three Monkeys and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia —proved one fact, it was a work of a contemporary master of cinema, while requiring a viewer’s undivided concentration to savour all the multifaceted morsels of delectable cinematic treats the film offers in the form of am...

T he Dardenne brothers’ work Two Days, One Night is typical of a movie that makes you think beyond its apparent light-hearted positive ending that closes a tense and bleak scenario of sudden impending unemployment. It is a film that makes the viewer ponder if a positive ending is indeed so beyond what the film’s official ending suggests for the viewer’s benefit. More importantly, the film presents a grim situation that could be universal in democratic environs. The facts are stacked against the film’s protagonist Sandra (Marion Cotillard) in Two Days, One Night . Sandra, a factory worker, has been hospitalized for depression and has now been discharged to resume work. While she is on leave getting treated, her employer who runs a solar panel manufacturing plant, realizes that his company needs to tweak its workforce to stay profitable and a sick employee like Sandra is not helping matters. One way out for the employer would be lay-off Sandra and ask the other employers to work more ho...

“ I saw a drive in him” — Terence Fletcher in Whiplash, referring to his former student Sean Casey  “ The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged ” —Terence Fletcher in Whiplash A quick assessment of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash would be that the film is about a music student carving out a drumming career in a jazz band. Another would be classifying the film as a tale of a musician’s long and winding journey to acquire recognition by the critics who matter.  Others would only remember the film as one that forces the viewer to hate and cringe at the actions of an inhuman mentor, a perfectionist, who wrecks the lives of young creative diligent minds by physical and verbal abuse, all for his own goal in life. While all these are justifiable perceptions of the film, young Damien Chazelle’s script and film offers more than the obvious. The film’s opening sequence is of the camera (the viewer’s point of view) entering a darkened corridor at the end of which the student Andrew ...

The "wild" characters from the six segments W ild Tales is a gem of an entertainer made up of six stand-alone, dark, comic tales. It is a portmanteau film with a difference; all the six tales are written and directed by one man--Damián Szifrón.  He is also the co-editor of this impressive work. Surprisingly, this Argentine director is only in his late thirties and he has made a film that belies his age. Most audiences will love it because there are elements in the six tales they will easily identify with, irrespective of where they live on this planet.  Interestingly, the film was co-produced by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who must be delighted that he has invested his money well. It is “wild” because it depicts extreme reactions of ordinary individuals, who are frustrated by present urban societal pressures and the outcomes are quite plausible if the frustrated individuals are left with little or no choice to correct their predicaments, created often not by themse...

“ During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man .” Thomas Hobbes, in his political book on statecraft called Leviathan, published in 1651 “Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it  speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house? Will traders barter for it? Will they divide it up among the merchants? Can you fill its hide with harpoons or its head with fishing spears? If you lay a hand on it, you will remember the struggle and never do it again! Any hope of subduing it is false;...

        “ My films are not fiction films but about fiction ”---Raúl Ruiz      “In today’s cinema there is too much light, it is time to return to the shadows” --- Raúl Ruiz in his book ‘ Poetics of Cinema’       “I chose to take refuge in the dramaturgy of dreams” ---Raúl Ruiz T hese three quotations of Raúl Ruiz are important starting points for analyzing the penultimate cinematic work of the talented Raúl Ruiz-- Mysteries of Lisbon . Ruiz had already made over a hundred movies and he made Mysteries of Lisbon knowing well that his days were numbered after being diagnosed with a life threatening liver tumour.  He completed the film while recovering from a successful liver transplant, only to die soon after, ironically from a lung infection.  While one can sense the brilliance of this cinematic work, it is difficult to distinguish what credit ought to be attributed  to the Portuguese novelist Camilo Castillo Branco, w...