Articles by Prahlad Srihari
Page to screen: On Queer, desire and disembodiment
There is no tenderness in ‘Queer’ by William S Burroughs. Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation, however, is injected with sentiment and sensuality
Published on May 02, 2025 06:11 AM IST
A Complete Unknown: When Bob Dylan plugged in
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown doesn’t look to decode Dylan’s genius but echoes what it must have felt like to populate his orbit
Updated on Apr 18, 2025 06:47 AM IST
Aspiring to greatness
On ‘The Brutalist’, personal vision and appropriation, and the American Dream as a bait and switch scheme
Published on Apr 10, 2025 03:05 PM IST
BIFFes 2025: On the Wim Wenders and Krzysztof Kieslowski retrospectives
Between Wenders and Kieślowski, the viewer is provided two revelatory lenses through which to view a changing world and the nature of humanity itself
Published on Mar 28, 2025 11:12 AM IST
Handmaid’s Tales
As a new era of political conservatism dawns, calls for restrictions on abortion have grown louder in some societies.
Updated on Feb 27, 2025 02:48 PM IST
A wrap-up of Sundance Film Festival 2025
The line-up this year was heavy with stories of stifled desire, of anger against subjugation, and of resilience in the face of illness, grief and loneliness.
Published on Feb 10, 2025 05:50 PM IST
On Anora and invisible labour
While addressing the invisibility to which sex workers are subjected, films like ’Anora’ also examine how the capitalist framework shapes sex work, how the transactional nature of sex work shapes relationships, and how money shapes power dynamics
Published on Feb 08, 2025 05:58 AM IST
Ugly business; About ‘The Substance’
A dissection of Coralie Fargeat’s horror sensation about the emotional violence of beauty standards and of body dysmorphia rendered nightmarishly concrete
Published on Jan 14, 2025 03:12 PM IST
2024: A snapshot of the year in cinema
From Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’ to Pascal Plante’s ‘Red Rooms’, 2024 served up a generous haul of cinematic riches, provided you knew where to find them
Published on Dec 27, 2024 03:12 PM IST
HT reviewer Prahlad Srihari picks his favourite read of 2024
A challenging marvel of a novel that works inquiries into the nature of charisma and the gap between ideology and reality into a high-stakes espionage plot
Updated on Dec 20, 2024 12:32 PM IST
Page to screen: The highs and lows of 2024
This year witnessed stories, old and new, saunter routinely from the republic of letters to the republic of moving images. An overview of the best literary adaptations of 2024
Updated on Dec 18, 2024 06:18 PM IST
Looking back at MAMI 2024
Though the festival was shorter and the venues and screenings fewer, this year’s edition underlined how events like these give oxygen to smaller and braver films
Published on Nov 29, 2024 09:16 PM IST
No medicine for melancholy
For women suffering from crippling depression in 17th and 18th century Europe, suicide by proxy emerged as a radical expression of freedom
Published on Oct 25, 2024 09:04 PM IST
Alien: Giger counter
With each new Alien instalment, the eldritch mystery that came with the HR Giger-designed xenomorph has all but evaporated
Published on Sep 12, 2024 05:51 PM IST
Book to Screen: Eileen – Of desperation, deviance and deception
Eileen, the film for which author Ottessa Moshfegh co-wrote the screenplay based on her novel, is as uncomfortable in its skin as the title character is in her own
Published on Aug 21, 2024 09:07 PM IST
The high-octane power of mythmaking
Now that the drama has died down somewhat, a closer look at Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The film doesn’t exactly tear up the rulebook on origin stories, but George Miller does give the Fury Road prequel its own voice, its own tempo and its own musicality
Published on Aug 12, 2024 09:31 PM IST
The economics of killing
With recent films like Hit Man and The Killer, the professional killer has emerged as a symbol of disillusionment in the gig economy. His evolution from a psychopath to an antihero has captured the collective imagination precisely because it has coincided with a rise in the existential anxiety that comes with freelancing in a predatory capitalist system
Published on Jul 18, 2024 04:16 PM IST
Maestro: The dualities of Leonard Bernstein
Bernstein composed Broadway musicals, ballets and symphonies. He conducted Beethoven, Mahler and Stravinsky. A look at why a recent celebrated biopic couldn’t do him justice
Published on Jul 04, 2024 08:44 PM IST
Shōgun: Lost and found in translation
Unlike the 1980 TV adaptation and James Clavell’s novel, FX's Shōgun emphasises the Japanese perspective, as it explores the tension between fate and free will
Published on Jun 21, 2024 03:39 PM IST
The Discarnates, All of Us Strangers and the pain of homecoming
Two ghost stories, two worlds and two temporalities inhabit the same representational space in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Discarnates and Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, both of which take off on Taichi Yamada’s novel, Stranger
Published on Jun 06, 2024 08:21 PM IST
Page to Screen: Poor Things – Gray’s anatomy vs Lanthimos’s biopsy
Poor Things feels less like a cinematic translation of Alisdair Gray’s 1992 novel than a cinematic translation of the protagonist Bella Baxter’s perception
Updated on May 17, 2024 05:16 PM IST
The Zone of Interest: The Holocaust film to end all Holocaust films
With this culmination of all the landmark entries in the genre, Glazer rethinks Holocaust films even as he refuses to let the victimisation of Jews be weaponised in the victimisation of Palestine
Published on May 01, 2024 08:47 PM IST
Dune: Blind faith is the mind-killer
While Denis Villeneuve’s Dune flattens some arcs as it streamlines Frank Herbert’s dense tome into a five-hour spectacle, the director does give women characters Chani and Lady Jessica more dimensionality and agency
Published on Apr 23, 2024 09:13 PM IST
Essay: On the spectacle of cancel culture
Depending on whom you ask, cancel culture is a threat to freedom of expression or mere background noise; it is changing social codes or it is changing nothing
Published on Apr 09, 2024 08:54 PM IST
Married to genius
Women have forsaken their own creative pursuits to rally around celebrated husbands. Books like ‘The Chosen’ and ‘Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life’ and films like ‘Maestro’ and ‘Priscilla’ are now recasting spouses as historical actors in the tales of artistic achievements
Published on Mar 27, 2024 08:37 PM IST
Saltburn, Parasite and the class satire industrial complex
Ironically, capitalising on anti-capitalist sentiment has been quite profitable and the eat-the-rich satires now being regularly cranked out show that class warfare as scripted entertainment, strangely, seems to preserve the status quo
Published on Mar 19, 2024 06:43 PM IST
The Beast: All the lives we never lived
In Bertrand Bonello’s feature film, an almost-romance spanning centuries, Gabrielle and Louis, played by Lea Seydoux and George Mackay, are reincarnated as doomed lovers, always living under a shadow of a looming disaster
Published on Mar 08, 2024 08:14 PM IST
Four Daughters: Performance as therapy, cinema as healing
Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters is an audacious film about memory and motherhood that employs re-enactments as family therapy
Published on Feb 13, 2024 06:36 PM IST
Daaaaaali! Serving surreal for dinner
The logic and visual vocabulary of Salvador Dalí’s paintings feed into Daaaaaali!, a tribute to the pioneering Surrealist by Quentin Dupieux
Published on Jan 03, 2024 04:52 PM IST
Page to screen: The highs and lows of 2023
This year, many adaptations went smoothly from bookshelf to the box office, showing that a wealth of source material is available for cinematic translation
Updated on Dec 28, 2023 06:59 PM IST
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