Pop Culture Archives

Big Little Lies is Back! It Continues to Ask Difficult Questions about Sexual Abuse & Trauma

Big Little Lies came out months before the #MeToo storm, shattering many of our assumptions about what victims and abusers look like. It’s only fitting that with its second season, it helps answer some of the questions left on the shore once the storm receded.

Sonali Kokra March 31, 2016

Pop Culture

Criminal Justice: Behind Closed Doors Review: A Tale about Abuse and Marital Rape that Becomes Predictable

Criminal Justice: Behind Closed Doors feels like a tired attempt at resuscitating characters and a world that frankly needed more than just the injection of precious ideas like domestic abuse, marital rape, and consent. Even Pankaj Tripathi and his mastery of the OTT space cannot elevate the second season.

Manik Sharma March 31, 2016

Pop Culture

Adam Sandler, I Now Pronounce You… A Comic Genius

If you had a Venn diagram with two circles labelled “classy” and “massy”, the overlapping area would be marked “Adam Sandler”.

Dushyant Shekhawat March 31, 2016

Pop Culture

Joker Review: In a World Cluttered by Clown Princes, Joaquin Phoenix Has the Last Laugh

Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, marks the first time we, the audience, get to see The Joker not as the larger-than-life Clown Prince of Crime, but as just another disturbed loner – a novel approach to portraying a character that has been analysed, explained, and dissected both in print and on film for over 50 years.

Dushyant Shekhawat March 31, 2016

Pop Culture

Runway 34 Review: Doesn’t Land as Well as it Could Have

Ajay Devgn stars and directs this latest film about a miraculous plane landing. But what is a good premise to begin with is eventually wasted in this caricaturist portrayal of a near accident and the intrigue surrounding it.

Takshi Mehta March 31, 2016

Pop Culture

Laakhon Mein Ek Review: An Engaging and Politically Relevant Study of India’s Healthcare System

Biswa Kalyan Rath’s Laakhon Mein Ek comes across as a rarity in the Indian landscape of fiction series by refusing to drag season one’s resonant storyline to inspire a second season. Instead, it paints a compelling portrait of the breakdown of India’s healthcare system.

Poulomi Das March 30, 2016

Pop Culture

Why Game of Thrones Did Not Deserve the Emmy for Best Drama

Despite sprawling set-pieces and CGI-fuelled dragon fire, GoT has failed on three fronts that made the show a success: writing, suspense, and logic.

Arré Bench March 30, 2016

Pop Culture

Goodbye Toni Morrision, A Champion of Decency and My Imaginary Friend

To read Toni Morrison was to be intimate with her politics; and to be intimate with her politics is to challenge, sometimes even annihilate patterns of thought. I haven’t always agreed with her, but she’s forced me to think, think, think. To cultivate convictions and be political.

Sonali Kokra March 30, 2016

Pop Culture

Pushpa, KGF and How Massive Beards Came to Replace Hairy Chests as a Sign of Masculinity

There was time a when our heroes carried hair on their chest as a sign of restrained heroism. It’s absurd really, but films like Pushpa and KGF imply the arrival of the most explicit and visible evidence yet of a man’s virility, troublingly told through violence – his overgrown beard.

Manik Sharma March 30, 2016

Pop Culture

Human is Thrilling, and perhaps Universal

Hotstar’s Human asks the all-important question about what it means to be human. That it is set in the world of pharmaceutical opportunism and intrigue is just a coincidence, for this terrific show headlined by Shefali Shah and Kriti Kulhari is a winner.

Lakshmi Govindrajan March 30, 2016