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The 2010s is coming to a close and we are in the process of compiling the Best of what cinema had to offer for us from 2010 – 2019. We have already done a few articles on Hindi Films, listing the best films, best performances and the best musical albums of the period. You can find all articles related to the Best of the Decade Here. Today we start the journey for Bengali films, and will recall the Best Bengali Films of the Decade.
Continue reading “Best Bengali Films of the Decade – Ranked”
This is our continuing retrospective series to look at the Best of the Decade, and today we will revisit the Best Hindi Films of the Decade. We have already looked at the Best Performances in Hindi Films by Female Actors and Male Actors respectively, and we also revisited what were the Best Hindi Film Music Albums during this period, all the listings triggering good discussions and healthy debates. As we sit down to list the Best Hindi Films of the decade, the task begins to go tougher.
In our series for looking at the best of the decade, the current focus is on Performances in Hindi Films. We have already looked at The Best Performances by Female Actors for the Period 2010-2019 and it ended up being an extremely rich list of great performances. The task for arriving at the Best Performances by Male Actors was even tougher. As much as there is an increased focus on writing more and more strong female characters, it remains a fact that most of our stories in Indian cinema are still primarily centered around men and their complex worlds. Most of the storytellers are men, the demand of the box office is also skewed, and hence the art and commerce both ensure that the space and scope that the leading men have is enormous. The good news is that the potential and the depth of the craft of our fine actors even surpasses the opportunity size, and hence we have seen some tremendous performances delivered by the leading men over the last decade.
Continue reading “Best Performances of the Decade by Male Actors in Hindi Films”
As the passing decade from 2010 – 2019 evolved in pushing the boundaries for storytelling and the kind of subjects that could be handled, it widened the scope for actors across the board. The roles and the performances got more fearless, their character arcs had the scope to be more grey in nature, and there was a space for stronger and more powerful women to exist in those stories. And we got some wonderful performances from our leading ladies to shine through and through these characters.
Continue reading “Best Performances of the Decade by Female Actors in Hindi Films”
It is that time of the year when we start looking back at the Best of films, performances and music of the year. This year is special as we are also winding up a decade, and hence we will also retrospect across the entire decade over the next couple of months and come up with the Best of films, digital content and more over various languages. We will keep appending the links of all such blogs in this index post, so keep watching this space for more:
Best of the Decade (2010 – 2019)
Best of the Year 2019
The passing decade of 2010 – 2019 has been special in terms of how cinema molded itself to be more experimental, more fearless and breaking more boundaries. The phenomenon was true irrespective of film industries and languages and naturally we see the impact in Hindi films as well. As stories evolved, so did the music; and hence as we look at some of the Best Hindi Film Music Albums of the Decade, we see a very interesting mix of traditional, contemporary and experimental music.
Continue reading “Best Hindi Film Albums Of The Decade – Ranked”
Continuing with the mid-year checkpoint discussion, here is taking a pause to look at the Bangla films of 2019. Personally, I think it has been a pretty good year for Bangla Films in 2019 so far and has been a big turnaround since last couple of years. There have been quite a few good films that made their mark, and the good thing was that we got to see a lot of promising new talent coming up with the best of the year. There were also films in relevant and refreshing themes, modern in treatment with a lot of soul. We still had some biggies that were disappointing, but then which year won’t have that in the mix.
As the first half of 2019 is over now, it is a good time to take a pause and retrospect at what Hindi cinema had to offer so far for us this year. Overall, it has been a mixed bag year of a few brilliant films and a huge bunch of average and poor films so far.
2018 will go down as a year where variety was the name of the game. The year will be particularly remembered for a few standout trends in particular: One – it was a reboot for the horror genre towards the better, Two – A-list directors pushed the bar on not catering to the typical comfort zone of the Indian cine-goer irrespective of the genre, Three – the budgets of the mega star movies did not decide their box-office success, Four – Real life incidents & people dictated stories on screen though each one of them wasn’t necessarily honest, and Five – the year marked the beginning of serious movie content being developed exclusively for digital, something that is bound to see explosive growth in the years to come. Clearly, there were a lot of movies that contributed to these trends, and some of them appeared as top class, finding their very deserving place in the Best Hindi Films of 2018.
2018 in Hindi Films was an year of tectonic shifts of sorts for its leading men. It was the year when the audience rose above the massive stardom of all the three major Khans, and only the classiest of the Khans delivered in a highly experimental world. It was the year when two of the biggest names in the current generation of actors delivered the weakest performances of their careers in two blockbusters films. But it was also the year when the new breed of actors broke new ground and continued to rise and rise in very interesting characters, and age became just a number on either side of the curve for the best performers of the year. With all this and more, it was a difficult task to pick up Best of Leading Performances by Male Actors for 2018, a category that will possibly have the widest range of personal perspectives and rightfully so.
Continue reading “Roundup 2018 : The Top 10 Leading Performances (Male) in Hindi Films”
