Recent Reviews by Suparna Sharma
Independent Film Critic
Suparna Sharma is a senior Independent Film Critic. She currently writes for The Week and Al Jazeera. Previously she was writing on films for Rolling Stone magazine and was the Resident Editor of The Asian Age, New Delhi.
Films reviewed on this Page
Angry Young Men
An entertaining home video that mollycoddles Salim-Javed duo
Salim Khan, 88, and Javed Akhtar, 79, are the stars of this multi-starrer
Angry Young Men, a three-part series directed by Namrata Rao, is crafted like the many Bollywood blockbusters that its protagonists — Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar — wrote together. Starring their wives, children, colleagues, friends and fans, the series is devoted to not just telling the story of a very successful and almost epochal collaboration, but also to cast them as the best writers Indian cinema has ever had.
IC 814 the Kandahar Hijack
This Anubhav Sinha directorial is one of the best ‘based on real life’ series to date
'IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack', streaming on Netflix, honours the captain, his crew, and the passengers
Since the arrival of OTT platforms and binge-watching, Indian series have shown a marked improvement in craft and skill at telling fictional stories. But when it comes to mounting real-life stories for OTT, most have floundered, sometimes because they follow Netflix’s formulaic template, and sometimes because of who is telling the story. Delhi Crime, for example, the riveting show on the Nirbhaya rape case, was made with the help of Delhi’s former commissioner of police, Neeraj Kumar, and it naturally made heroes out of cops when it should have interrogated them.