…get ready for  a terrific documentary opening here on August 1: America the Beautiful. More about it in a little while, but I’d strongly urge anyone interested in media, magazines, celebrity or fashion to check it out.

My review of Melanie Abrams first novel, Playing, has just run in Mint. There, Abrams talks about what it’s like to write a novel that contains heavy  dollops of S&M and an Indian character who figures prominently in that story line, when you happen to be married to a well known Indian literary figure – […]

  So here’s the thing: normally it takes Eddie Izzard, George Carlin, Damon Wayans or Bill Maher to get me to laugh out loud, and yet, the other evening, arriving at the cinema in not a good frame of mind at all, I actually found myself laughing through most of Mike Myers latest, The Love […]

  I tried to finish reading Monica Ali’s much lauded debut novel Brick Lane before going to a recent screening of Sarah Gavron’s film adaptation, but only got as far as Nazneen’s first pregnancy.   The film opens with the briefest of gloss over Nazneen and her sister’s early days in Bangladesh (the part I […]

  Amazingly enough, those of us in the US got to see Kamal Hassan’s big, big, big release hours before it plays on some 1000 screens in India. The theater in Newark was 3/4 full, many people coming straight from work, laptop bags in tow, and the film started spot on at 8pm.   No […]

  With RGV’s latest movie, there was an interesting addition to the multiplexes usually showing the occasional big Hindi release in New Jersey: the AMC Loews Newport Centre 11, in Jersey City. This cinema is located in a mall this is literally steps away from the PATH train.   Tickets cost $10. At the show […]