Cinemascope

 The most fascinating thing about Z is how Costa-Gavras effortlessly counterpoised heft with panache. Being based on the 1963 assassination...

 Coming on the back of a string of highly reckoned films, The Marathon Man unsurprisingly gets somewhat lost in John Schlesinger’s filmogra...

 1970s weren’t just a fertile period for arresting and topical political paranoia/conspiracy thrillers, but also those that centred on polit...

 The journey from being decidedly sceptical about watching The Crown to being left mesmerized by it was an exhilarating one. Though not an ...

 In All or Nothing , Mike Leigh constructed a multilayered, kaleidoscopic and Dickensian slice-of-life on working-class Brits residing in a ...

 Similar to how the scorching Naked was a radical volte face for Mike Leigh after the bittersweet Life Is Sweet , and the cathartic Secrets...

 Mike Leigh has regularly interspersed seriocomic films – the tonal palette that he perhaps was most comfortable with – with those that were...

 Chabrol’s renowned ‘ Hélène Cycle ’ of films – murky, morally complex and spellbinding investigations into bourgeois social structures and ...

 The most striking quality of Les Bonnes Femmes – Chabrol’s fourth feature and one of his personal favourites – is the way it so fluidly se...

  Comedy of Power opens with a virtuoso tracking shot. Over the course of 2 ½ minutes, a deliciously fluid camera follows Michel Humeau (Fr...

 While Mahanagar wasn’t Satyajit Ray’s first film set in Calcutta, it was the first where the metropolis formed an essential character, rig...

  The Swindle , despite being a seemingly lighter work in Chabrol’s filmography – relatively speaking, that is –, grabs one’s attention with...

 Liszt’s rapturous classical composition ‘ Funerailles ’ attained edgy and sinister undertones in Chabrol’s Merci pour le Chocolat . Music, ...

 The ingeniously named The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (the direct translation of its Italian title, interestingly, was simply “Ladies...

  Seduced and Abandoned , the uproarious middle chapter in Pietro Germi’s subversive ‘ Honour Trilogy ’ – sandwiched between his rollicking ...

 Cost-Gavras’ Section Spéciale bore the attributes that powerfully resonated in his stunning trilogy that preceded it and had made him amon...

 Rosi’s melancholic film Three Brothers is a tale of grief, familial convergence and attempted reconciliations, as well as one of anger, di...

  Christ Stopped at Eboli , Francesco Rosi’s sublime adaptation of Carlo Levi’s celebrated memoir, was composed as much as elegiac memories ...

 Loach’s deeply underrated gem Land and Freedom remains a singular work in his oeuvre, for his rare foray into historical epic – thus presa...

  The Wind that Shakes the Barley was equal parts poetic and political, as evidenced by its deeply elegiac title that referenced a revoluti...