Criticism may have ended with Daney according to Godard, but some zombies still roam in the wasteland of cinephilia.

IFFR

February 14, 2025

IFFR 2025 Dispatch for In Review

(I wrote three reviews for InReview’s IFFR dispatch on Rhythm of a Flower, Bad Girl and Kajolrekha. Here are some excerpts for each of these pieces. No spoilers this time.) The films of Amit Dutta have always been concerned with exploring and re-imagining art forms through cinema, deepening the possibilities of both the art and… Continue reading

Films, Movie Review

Amit Dutta, Bad Girl, ballads, direction, Drama, experimental, Fiction, Films, Foreign Films, Hindustani music, IFFR, Indian cinema, Kumar Gandharva, Review, Rotterdam Film Festival, Tamil cinema
April 4, 2023

Closed Doors Policy: Family (2023)

(I guess the spoiler question arises again, but really, do we really need to fixate on spoilers and trivialize the real-life horrors the film speaks about?) In one of the few expository sequences in Don Palathara’s chilling Family, a nun chastises a pregnant woman, Rani (Divya Prabha), for even voicing suspicion about the acts of a… Continue reading

criticism, Films

church, direction, Drama, IFFR, Indian cinema, Malayalam, movies, Review, Rotterdam Film Festival

About Me

I am Anand Sudha, a PhD in Applied Physics who dabbles in film criticism. I am a blank slate (mostly) who patches pieces of personality from everyone and everything I admire. Just consider me as an insecure William Blake from Dead Man. Somehow, I have tricked some magazines like InReview, Film Companion and Ultra Dogme into publishing my work, which you can access by clicking on the “Published Writing” page to look at my work for other sites and magazines.

My older blog contains some embarrassing pieces written during the heady arrogance of youth , but you can click on the link below if you want to see some of my older writing. I have imported some links from the blog to this site as they contain my more recent work. This blog will be updated whenever I have the time and mainly contains pieces published only here.

In case you were wondering about the tagline, the end of cinema and criticism in the Godardian sense points to an end for a certain tradition or mode of the art form, paving the way for newer modes. Of course, that critic is me. Sometimes, candour is mistaken for arrogance, but more importantly, silly jokes using French words have to be made.

For those who want to contact me regarding articles, you can send an email to anand.narayanan.n@gmail.com.

IFFR

IFFR 2025 Dispatch for In Review

Closed Doors Policy: Family (2023)