High On Films
In the film Dr. Siras says – The new generation just wants to label everything. So, if I call Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh fantastic, fabulous, cool, and awesome it would be a grave mistake on my part. What Mehta’s film did to me was turn my head in shame because that’s exactly what people like you and me do. We like to label things because poetry is just not our thing anymore and reading between the pauses is something we have forgotten.
’45 years’ appears to be a simplistic marital drama but at its core, it is a complex character study. There are two central characters, Kate and Geoff, an old couple, married for 45 years. On one of their regular Monday mornings, a piece of news comes in form of a letter that the folks in Switzerland have found the body of Katya. The Husband’s love interest before marriage.
![When Marnie Was There [2015]: The Ones who Love us never really Leave us.](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/c109743c-4dfa-498f-bc23-6fec69fd5b3e.jpg)
In the end, “When Marnie Was There” comes as a little film with a big heart, which is about the troubles a lonely subdued child can face during adolescence and how she gets through it; but what it really about is Love and how strong Love can be.
![Boy and the World [2015]](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/O-Menino-e-o-Mundo1.jpg)
Boy and the World is tragic & starkly bleak allegory of how miserable the world has become , showcasing perpetual vicious cycle of changing world’s implications on human condition and human relationship that is governed by human needs against their own will. Boy & the World takes a look at the ever changing outside of the world & the dynamic mechanism of socio-political functioning that influence the boy emotionally and physically. It uses boy as lens to see the horror of daily life.
![Spotlight [2015] – The People who took on a Blighted ‘System’](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/63489.jpg)
Tom McCarthy’s stupendous drama “Spotlight” (2015) opens and ends on the confined spaces of two different institutions – police and press. One silenced a crime, while the other stood alone to shine down its ‘spotlight’. Contemporary movies about journalists have often taken a cynical and audacious look at the profession. Tom McCarthy’s film offers a counter-argument for the worthiness of the investigative journalism; about how it could stand up against an entity that deems itself as ‘untouchable’. “Spotlight” reminds of us why effective journalism is a significant part of a healthy democracy. It asks tough questions on the mechanism of a powerful institution that abuses its followers’ faith, but at the same time it’s not the kind of film that takes on an insipid judgemental stand. There’s a torrential flow of humane moments in “Spotlight” that is so sincere and non-sentimental.
![The Revenant [2015]: A Beautiful & Bloodcurdling Visceral Cinema](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/The-Revenant-3.jpg)
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s ravishingly wild, survival movie “The Revenant” (2015) opens with a shot of a steadily flowing stream, whose currents are disturbed by the steps of men carrying guns. A man chooses his target and the gun sound reverberates through the forest, signaling the impending sense of doom that waits for all the frontiersmen. Arrows whiz past in & out of the frames, making contact with the human flesh; faces are bludgeoned; musket fire pulls down archers from the tree tops. Without employing the use of 3-D, these visuals just drop us in, diffusing the nauseating feeling
![Carol [2015]: An Emotional Gamut of Expressions](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/blanchett.jpg)
White man’s America is easily a well explored theme in cinema. Be it in the superhero universe (Captain America), TV space (Madmen and Masters of sex) or even Todd Hayne’s earlier work(far from heaven, it did had a glimpse of black man’s world as well). And why shouldn’t it be? It was the period of immense changes, that eventually set out to define generations to come. One such change was women getting into office jobs- they were becoming economically independent ever to explore the world
![The 400 Blows [1959]: An unsentimental film about Adolescence](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/vlcsnap-2015-12-01-22h42m06s658.png1.jpg)
I did read quite a bit about Francois Truffaut before watching ‘The 400 Blows’ and found the man notoriously interesting. Before Truffaut made his debut as a film director, he was a vehement film critic who infamously stripped movies he didn’t like, in his reviews. His harsh film criticism barred him from attending the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. Only one year later, he won the Best Director Award at the same festival for his debut film The 400 Blows. He was also one of the men who devised “The Auteur Theory”,
Here are the 10 films that made it to the 4th edition of our ‘HOF-Men Recommend’ Series. You can check out the 2nd and 3rd Edition at the end of this post.Firaaq, made by first time director and critically acclaimed actress Nandita Das, examines the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots. There are five parallel stories which explore the life of a set of people one month after the riots ended. We follow a myriad of characters ranging from a Muslim hating Hindu