Awakening Dead Souls

Bhakshak | Cast: Bhumi Pednekar, Sanjay Mishra | Director: Pulkit | Hindi | Netflix

At the end of a hard-hitting 135 minutes, Bhumi Pednekar’s character looks straight into the camera, into our souls, and asks the important question: “Have you forgotten to sympathise with someone else who is suffering?” She could be talking about the subject of the movie, a recreation of the real life case of a shelter home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, in which former Bihar MLA Brajesh Thakur, among 11 others, was sentenced to life imprisonment for sexually assaulting several minor girls. Pednekar plays Vaishali Singh, a Patna reporter who refuses to give up on the story despite attacks on her family and threats to her own life. Aided by her cameraman, a weary but still hungry Sanjay Mishra as Bhaskar Sinha, she takes on the powerful goon, Bansi Sahu (Aditya Srivastava) who runs the shelter home. It’s an ugly bunch, chosen to horrify us. It does. The officer in the social welfare department who takes undue advantage of his position, the caretaker who administers sleeping pills to the girls, the support staff who enable various men to exploit the girls. There is a woman police officer, played by Sai Tamhankar, who tells Pednekar’s character the harsh truth: “The court wants proof, not reality.” The movie asks the question: Do you want to be the voice of the crowd, or remain afraid to speak the truth, or indeed report what happens? Not for anything or anyone but to answer to ourselves, to be able to sleep, to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without loathing. Do we?

Why Watch it? Powerful performances, sledgehammer dialogues, and girls who are like ghosts who walk. It is a searing film that speaks to our times

The Ugly Beautiful

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans | Cast: Tom Hollander, Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloe Sevigny | Showrunner: Ryan Murphy | English | Disney+Hotstar

He was their glamorous gay friend, an inveterate gossip, a father confessor, and palate cleanser. They were the Swans, beautiful New York hostesses, married to famous but neglect­ful men, rich and emotionally unavailable. They’d confide in him, he’d live off them. It was a fair exchange. Until it wasn’t. Truman Capote used his access to write a tell-all about their lives, only lightly disguising their identities. They declared war on him, and the feud became the stuff of legend. Naomi Watts, as Babe Paley, the wife of the founder of CBS, is the star of what is essentially a study in vengeance against Capote, played with decrepit elegance by Tom Hollander. As she becomes more poised in her careful shut-out, he becomes more desperate for her attention. As she keeps her nerves together, his disintegrate. Call it the curse of a writer getting too close to his subject or a trans­actional relationship that has run its course, Capote vs. The Swans takes us into the heart of Fifth Avenue and allows us to luxuriate in its perfectly appointed apartments, its swish restaurants and its dinner parties to die for.

Why watch it? To see a delectable bevy of swans engage in mortal combat with an insider turned intruder

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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