Big Screen 2014

Interstellar, Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan is a name synonymous with super-realism or sci-fi surrealism. The Nolanisation of cinema was inaugurated by his Inception,a film about dreams and a dystopian condition in which dreams could be manipulated. The gloomy streets of Gotham-a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace-are now grounds of countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With Interstellar, arguably his first ‘true’ science-fiction project, Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the mundaneness of math homework but spliced with the fantastic. With Earth dying and resources dwindling, former astronaut Cooper (McConaughey), along with scientists Brand (Hathaway), Doyle (Bentley) and Romilly (Gyasi), take humanity’s last spaceship through a wormhole in search of a new beginning for the human race.

Running Time:- 169 min

The President, Mohsen Makhmalbaf

This year Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf returns with his first English-language feature,The President, an allegorical lesson about dictatorships and the cycle of violence they breed. The movie offers a didactic morality tale about a fallen autocrat and his innocent grandson fleeing murderous revolutionaries bent on vengeance.

Running Time:-105 min

Boyhood, Richard Linklater

Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is a groundbreaking story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a child named Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who literally grows up on screen before our eyes. Starring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as Mason’s parents and newcomer Lorelei Linklater as his sister Samantha, Boyhood charts the rocky terrain of childhood like no other film has done before and is both a nostalgic time capsule of the recent past and an ode to growing up and parenting.

Running Time:-166 min

Haider, Vishal Bharadwaj

Vishal Bhardwaj proved that Shakespeare is a stuff of big screen as adaptations in the Indian political milieu. In Omkara and Maqbool, Vishal merged Othello and Macbeth seamlessly with the conditions of Indians who are reeling under the hubris and yokes of power. The knack is to sift the timeless values and emotions Shakespeare instilled in his plays and render them into the Indian context. The latest work is Haider, adaptation of Hamlet, in which Vishal had collaboration with actors Shahid Kapoor, Kay Kay Menon, Irfan Khan etc. Haider goes where Bollywood rarely treats: the movie besides being an adaptation of Hamlet is based on a non-fictional work titled curfewed night, a memoir on the conflict in Kashmir by the Indian journalist Basharat Peer. Haider reveals the militarized mid-90s of Kashmir.

Running Time:-154 min

Leviathan, Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev has proved with his Return in 2003 that the sheer class exhibited by the masters like Tarkovsky, Bergman, Keislowski, Kurasowa, Kairostami and Godard has not yet been extinct. Though he appeared to be deeply influenced by Turkovsky, he had the deft of hand to keep his craft perfectly original. His concern was about the condition of man surrounded by unforeseen forces, especially political machinations. In Leviathan Zvyagintsev tells us how the private life of a fisherman gets so embroiled in the larger political landscape as to force him to take a creative political decision.

Running time: 140 min