Satyajit Ray

Amin Matalqa's teary drama, "Captain Abu Raed," takes its obvious cues from the neorealism of Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir, but Matalqa doesn't know how to balance melodrama with quiet moments the way the masters did. The movie's strongest point is...

4 stars (out of four) Mira Nair's "The Namesake" is a profound and beautiful film about love and conflict within an Indian family, the Gangulis, who move from Calcutta to New York and experience intense culture clash through several decades and...

Three boys head off to see their mother, though only one of them knows where they're going, and why. "We're just trying to experience something," says the one played by Owen Wilson, his head bandaged owing to a recent motorcycle accident. They are...

It's hard to approach a new film by Wes Anderson without feeling like you've walked into an argument. There's something about his dollhouse aesthetic, his storybook formality, his miniaturist's attention to detail and his dogged belief in the power of...

Hipsters have been traveling to India for decades to imbue their ironic, image-conscious lives with meaning. Blame the Beatles for making it the West's one-stop country for spirituality (an image from which India has undoubtedly benefited). So it was...

(C+) An off-screen suicide attempt and an on-screen death betray the slightness of The Darjeeling Limited, an only intermittently amusing movie about three privileged, estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) who embark on a...

Elvis is in the building. The American Cinematheque's Mods & Rockers festival celebrates the life and legacy of the King with a six-day tribute featuring several of Presley's most successful films, plus the 2005 CBS miniseries "Elvis" and two...

3½ stars (out of four) Deepa Mehta's "Water"--the third film in her elemental "Fire"-"Earth"-Water" trilogy--is a gentle yet powerful drama of social protest, an impassioned portrayal of the fruits of prejudice, set in 1938 India, at a time when Gandhi's...

From The Times: March 31, 1992 "The Silence of the Lambs," the suspenseful but gruesome psychological thriller centering on an FBI trainee's battle of nerves with a diabolical psychiatrist-turned-cannibal, swept the Oscars Monday night, winning the...

Like the many arms of Krishna, the subplots of "Bombay Dreams" - the hotly anticipated Broadway import that recently colonized the London stage - are multiple, numerous, independent yet conjoined, straining in eight differ- ent directions at once. In this...

"Bombay Eunuch," a compact but powerful 71-minute documentary about contemporary India, takes us deep into the world of the hijras: transvestite Indian men who willingly become castrated and live their lives as women - or, more precisely, as a sex...

PART I -- A Veterans Reunion After watching Francis Coppola's newly restored, 197-minute Apocalypse Now Redux, it is a shock to show up at a New York hotel room and see the actors who played sailors dressed in civvies. I had been prepared to conduct...