Chicago (1927)

(The unabridged and updated version of a Siren column about the 1927 silent version of Chicago, first published behind a paywall at the now-...

The Canon in the Early Silent Era pt.2

In my previous entry in this series I was looking at how the stories from the Hebrew Bible that the earliest filmmakers adapted into the f...

Nadal as the anti-Hitchcock hero (and other thoughts on tennis and suspense)

[ Did this piece for Mint Lounge’s tennis special ] The final leg of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train has the narrative cr...

What about the good trip? Scattered thoughts on Udta Punjab

Is it a problem that my favourite scene in Udta Punjab isn’t one that depicts the horrific repercussions of drug use (as this film effectiv...

Madam Satan (1930)

(About five years ago the Siren had a column at a doomed little webzine called Nomad Widescreen, and she was in the habit of posting excerpt...

A man of two minds: on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

[Did this review for Scroll ] I am a man of two faces, and also a man of two minds, the narrator-protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer...

La naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ (1906) - Scene Guide

For a long time I've been meaning to sit down and actually watch La naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ ( The Birth, Life and Death...

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

The Siren's essay for the Blu-Ray release of Here Comes Mr. Jordan , the immortal supernatural comedy made at Columbia in 1941 and direc...

In which Gulshan Grover plays a good guy (and can't finish his bath)

[ my latest Mint Lounge column ] Middle age can make you mushy in unexpected contexts. In the 1980s, if someone had told my child-self that ...

On a biography of Shashi Kapoor, householder and movie star

[ Did this essay-cum-review for Open magazine ] My childhood memories of Shashi Kapoor are mainly of ‘Amitabh’s favourite heroine’, as one ...