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It’s hard to move away from the territory of trauma that Mahesh Bhatt perennially creates for his characters. His protagonists suffer because they allow themselves the luxury of feeling and hurting in an utterly self-centred way.In a marked departure from the sacrificial mother figures of our movies, the film’s central character Nisha (played with gut-wrenching brutal honesty by Shahana Goswami) is shown to be a rich man’s mistress not because of her kid brother but because, as she roars in one of the narrative’s soul-piercing highest-pitched sequences, she has gotten so used to luxuries she can’t stand in queue for buses any more.

Jashnn, like Mahesh Bhatt’s Jannat before it, wallows in the transparent hunger of today’s lifestyle and how far individuals are ready to go in pursuit of the next thrill. At its heart, Jashnn is a simple story about four...

Confession time: I love Shahana Goswami’s work. For my time and attention, she is one of the most undervalued actors around, her spectrum of performances from Rock On to this new series is worth a slow clap.

Four Years Later, written by Mithila Gupta, Nicole Reddy and S. Shakthidharan demonstrates impressive writing glimpses enough to keep me watching till the final eight episode, but not enough to not question some of the marital and moral decision taken by the couple.

Why for example, does the selfwilled anti-doormat protagonist Sridevi (Goswami) choose to silently suffer her father-in-law’s bullying when her husband leaves for Sydney for further medical studies soon after their marriage?

We are told from the start she is no walkover and she knows she is getting into a marriage of mismatches.

Early in the storytelling she orders herself two scoops of different flavours of icecream while her...

Once again, in his terrific This Day That Year series, Subhash K Jha revisits a unique film. This time, he is looking back at Applause Entertainment-Nandita Das’s 2023 Zwigato, and we hear from Das about this excellent film starring Kapil Sharma.

Applause Entertainment and Nandita Das’s seriously underrated film about a food-delivery boy during Covid had Shahana Goswami delivering a knockout performance as the supportive, resourceful wife of her suddenly jobless husband. Is there anything Shahana can’t do?

In Zwigato, Kapil Sharma as a Covid-crushed delivery boy delivers a performance that is keenly observant of reality: the languorous paunchy body language , the endless rounds on two-wheelers, handling difficult insulting customers at work, an invalid mother and two children at home… Kapil brings the entire force of destiny down on his character’s shoulder without making him a crybaby.

There is a beautiful moment where Manas put...

During a recent Zoom conversation about “Santosh,” the Oscar-shortlisted international feature, director Sandhya Suri was seated comfortably in a large, nest-like wicker chair that was bolted into the ceiling in her London apartment.

“Oh, I love this seat,” she said. “I only have this one chair in this room, and when I invite friends over, we all want to be in this spot. My daughter reads in here, as well. It’s my happy place.”

The serenity of Suri’s calmly floating chair stands in contrast to “Santosh,” her phenomenal, noir-soaked feature directorial debut that follows a female police officer (Shahana Goswami) investigating the murder of a lower-caste girl in Northern India. The film uses its procedural format to mine deeper as a cultural character study.

“Santosh” is the Oscar submission from the United Kingdom, the country which won the Best International Film award with “The Zone of Interest” 11 months ago.