Before I Became Careful With Films: On Old Movie Reviews, Fanhood and Film Criticism

After writing about literary festivals, badges and the strange little doors that brought me closer to books, I went back to another old doorway.

My film reviews.

This was a more dangerous archive.

Book reviewing had made me feel serious. Even when I was young and too emotional about stories, books gave me the illusion of control. You could sit with them, revisit a sentence, argue with a chapter, or pretend your thoughts had arrived in an orderly fashion because you had written them down in paragraphs.

Films were different.

Films did not give me that much time. At least not then.

They hit first. Thought came later. Sometimes much later or sometimes never properly. I would leave a theatre with a song still playing in my head, one actor’s face taking over the entire film, a dialogue repeating itself for no sensible reason, and I would think, yes, this needs to be written about.

Not always because the film deserved it.

Sometimes, because my body was still reacting.

That is what I found when I reread my older movie reviews. A version of myself who had not yet learned how to be careful with films. She used too many exclamation marks, she trusted goosebumps as evidence, she believed a strong performance could rescue almost anything, she confused being moved with being convinced, and she wrote about actors as if they had personally entered her bloodstream and refused to leave.

I wanted to edit her then and there.

Then, annoyingly, I realised that I missed her.

There is a strange cruelty in reading your old writing. You meet all the versions of yourself you have outgrown, but not fully escaped. The sentences are too eager, the feelings are too large, and the opinions arrive before the thought has settled, but beneath all that mess, there is also something clean. A kind of surrender I do not allow myself as easily anymore.

Back then, I did not watch films with caution. I watched them like anything could still happen.

A first-day-first-show could rearrange my mood, a song could follow me home, a close-up could become the whole film, a performance could make me forgive the screenplay. Sometimes, I did not review the film as much as I reviewed the state it left me in.

And that, I know now, is not always good criticism.

But it is not dishonest either.

When a film chooses you

I see that most clearly in my old review of Samantaral.

That review began, of course, with a song. I had opened it with “Bésame Mucho,” because apparently I was not interested in entering quietly. I wrote about discovering the trailer, wanting badly to watch the film, struggling to find someone to go with me, almost deciding to go alone, and finally reaching the theatre for a Bengali film show in Kolkata. I mentioned the full house, the terrible seats, and the push-back chairs that made the neck pain slightly less tragic.

The film had not even begun, and I was already writing about the act of reaching it.

That feels important now.

Because younger me understood something instinctively that older me sometimes tries to polish away. A film does not begin only when the lights go off; it begins with the decision to go. With the person you ask to come along, with the ticket you manage to get, with the city outside the hall, with the seat, with the mood, with the private expectation you pretend not to have.

In that Samantaral review, I wrote something I still cannot fully shake off.

You, as a viewer, don’t choose the film. The film chooses you.

When I wrote that, I meant it sincerely. Completely. Almost romantically.

I believed some films found you before you knew why. You did not arrive at them logically. You did not go because of ratings or marketing or because everyone was talking about them. You went because something in the trailer, a song, a face, a mood, a half-understood sadness, pulled you in. And by the time you sat in the theatre, the film had already done something to you.

Now, I still believe that. But with suspicion.

Because being chosen by a film is beautiful, yes. It is also dangerous. 

Once a film gets under your skin, you stop judging only the craft. You start protecting the feeling it gave you; you defend a weak screenplay because one scene broke you; you forgive loose subplots because one character felt real; you ignore indulgence because the music knew exactly where to hit; you let the film win because you liked who you were while watching it.

Maybe that is the real difference between how I wrote then and how I write now.

Earlier, if a film chose me, I let it.

Now, if a film chooses me, I ask why.

This does not mean I have become colder. At least, I hope not. I still want films to move me. I still want a performance to haunt me. I still want to walk out of a theatre feeling slightly ridiculous because a fictional person has ruined my evening in the best way.

But I no longer trust the first feeling completely.

I wait. I prod it. I ask what survived after the music stopped.

• Was it the film?
• Was it one actor?
• Was it the theatre experience?
• Was it my mood that day?
• Was I moved, or was I manipulated very efficiently?

These are not romantic questions. They are useful ones.

My older reviews did not always care for that separation.

Actor worship with paragraph breaks

In my Padmavat review, for example, I was not really reviewing Padmavat. I was writing a fever note to Ranveer Singh’s Khilji.

The film had a title, yes, but I had clearly chosen my own subject.

I wrote about the first glimpse of his eyes, the goosebumps, the madness, the hair, the hunger, the scars, and the beard. I wrote about the seductive brutality of a villain who should not have been seductive and yet had been built, shot and performed exactly that way. I wrote as if Khilji had taken over the film, the theatre and the review itself.

Maybe he had.

There is no point pretending otherwise now. That review is actor worship with paragraph breaks. It begins with the film and then abandons it almost immediately for the performance that swallowed it whole. Deepika is there, Shahid is there, Aditi Rao Hydari is there, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali is obviously there. But the review belongs to Ranveer. More specifically, it belongs to the version of Ranveer who made me feel that no sane person could have performed Khilji that way without being possessed by something.

Very dramatic, I know. Also, not entirely wrong.

That is what makes old writing complicated. The language may embarrass you, but the instinct is not always false.

That performance did dominate the film. It did tilt the balance. It did make the rest of Padmavat feel smaller in memory. Younger me noticed that, even if she did not have the most disciplined language for it. She understood that sometimes cinema works by imbalance. Sometimes one performance becomes so magnetic that the rest of the film turns into furniture.

Current me would ask more.

• What did the film gain by giving Khilji that much charge? 
• What did it flatten? 
• What did it turn into spectacle? 
• What did my own fascination allow me to overlook? 
• Was I responding to the performance, the writing, the styling, the danger, or the forbidden thrill of finding the villain more alive than everyone else?

Younger me had no interest in those questions. She saw fire and walked towards it, and there is something embarrassing about that.

There is also something alive.

Pleasure as an argument

The Befikre review is even more revealing, but in a different way.

It does not begin with Ranveer. It begins with the National Anthem.

A 9 AM show, a packed theatre, young people, couples, cinegoers who had come for a fun YRF film, all standing in silence. I had written about having a lump in my throat. I had gone to watch a glossy romance in Paris, and the first thing I wanted to capture was a shared theatre moment in Kolkata.

Then the trance broke, Labon Ka Karobar began, Paris appeared, Ranveer arrived, and all critical distance quietly left the premises.

I called myself biased. I admitted it openly. I kinda sorta still do.

I wrote about the dancing, the clothes, the songs, the chemistry, the paisa-vasool feeling. I knew the story was predictable and said so, but I also said that if a predictable story was presented well enough, it worked for me.

That line is important too.

Because younger me was not completely blind. She recognised cliché, she saw predictability, she saw Vaani’s weaker emotional portions, but she did not treat those as deal-breakers because the experience had already won her over. The film gave her movement, beauty, songs, Paris, Ranveer in carefree mode after serious roles, and enough emotion to make her leave satisfied.

So she let it pass.

I don’t think current me would be that generous.

Or maybe I would, but I would make the generosity answerable.

• I would ask why the lightness worked. 
• I would ask if the film understood freedom or merely styled it. 
• I would ask if the romance had texture beyond dares, bodies and location beauty. 

I would probably be more annoying about the whole thing.

But I also know this: younger me knew how to enjoy a film without immediately apologising for it.

That is not nothing.

There is a type of viewer who becomes so careful, so trained in suspicion, that pleasure itself starts needing a defence. I do not want to become that viewer. I do not want every film to enter my head like a case file. Sometimes a song is allowed to work. Sometimes an actor is allowed to charm you. Sometimes a predictable thing, done with energy, still has value.

The problem begins when pleasure becomes the only argument.

That is where I have changed.

Then there was Zulfiqar.

That review belongs to another version of me altogether. The literature girl. The Shakespeare girl. The girl whose whole career, according to her own dramatic but not entirely inaccurate claim, had been shaped by Shakespeare.

I had gone on a rainy Shoshti morning, sad about not being able to wear the saree I had planned, and still determined to watch the film. Very Kolkata. Very me. Very festival-season chaos.

The review is full of love. For the cast, for the idea, for Srijit Mukherjee, for Shakespeare being translated into a Bengali cinematic world. I wrote that the mix of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra was seamless. I said there were no cons. None. Capital certainty. I ended by calling Srijit Mukherjee “Kolkata’s Shakespeare.”

Today, I would never write that sentence without immediately wanting to cross-examine myself.

But I understand why I wrote it.

That review was not only about Zulfiqar. It was about the joy of seeing something I had studied, loved and carried for years being reimagined in a world that felt closer to home. It was about recognition. Shakespeare was not sitting in an old textbook anymore. He was in Kolkata’s film language. In familiar actors. In songs. In audience hoots. In Puja weather. In the strange thrill of seeing old tragedy wear a new city’s clothes.

Was I too generous? Almost certainly.

Would I now find flaws? Without question. I am older. I have sharper knives and fewer excuses.

But I do not want to mock that excitement. There is something precious about encountering adaptation before you become too aware of adaptation theory. Before you start measuring fidelity, politics, staging, form, ambition, compromise. Before you ask whether the film has done enough to earn its inheritance. Before you realise that being moved by a reference is not the same as being convinced by a retelling.

Young me did not care.

Young me heard Shakespeare echo in Bengali cinema and called it treasure.

And maybe, in that moment, it was.

This is where rereading old reviews becomes less about embarrassment and more about grief.

Not big grief. Not even tragic grief. Just the small, irritating grief of realising that you cannot return to your earlier ways of loving things.

You can revisit the review, remember the theatre, play the song, and even understand why you felt what you felt. But you cannot unknow what you now know.

You cannot unknow lazy writing. You cannot unknow manipulative background music. You cannot unknow when a director is hiding emptiness behind scale. You cannot unknow when an actor is doing more work than the screenplay. You cannot unknow when a film is asking you to feel instead of giving you a reason to.

Once you learn to see the machinery, the magic does not disappear.

But it changes.

In recent years, when I write about films or series, I find myself much less interested in whether something is simply good or bad. That binary bores me now. I am more interested in what the thing reveals about itself. Where it bends, where it compromises, where it accidentally tells the truth, or where it becomes more interesting than it meant to be.

The newer reviews come from that changed place.

When I wrote about Matka King, for instance, I was not writing from the old “I loved this, therefore it matters” place. I was looking at the image, the rot, the performance, the construction of power, the way a white suit can become more than costume if the film knows what it is doing with it.

That is current me.

When I wrote about O’ Romeo, the frustration was different. The most frustrating films are rarely the incompetent ones. They are the films made by people clearly capable of better. That kind of disappointment needs a different language from fan heartbreak. It is not “this did not move me.” It is “this had the tools to move me properly and chose something weaker.”

Older me might have written around that disappointment. She might have held on to one good scene, one performance, one song, one visual flourish, and tried to save the film through it.

Current me is less charitable.

Not because I enjoy being harsh. I don’t. I actually hate when films by people I admire disappoint me. It feels personal in a way it has no right to feel. But admiration cannot be allowed to do all the work. At some point, you have to ask what the film actually made, not what you wanted it to be.

When love is not what makes me write

I have also realised that I do not always write about the films I love.

That sounds strange, because love is supposed to be the easiest thing to write from. But it rarely is. At least not for me anymore.

The films I return to again and again often become too private to review. They become rooms. I know where the light falls, I know which scene will calm me down, which line will arrive before I am ready for it, which song will make me softer than I intended to be that day. I do not always want to take those films apart. Some loves survive better without an essay standing over them with a torch.

So I do not always write about what I love most.

I write about what refuses to settle.

A film that disappoints me in an interesting way. A performance that survives a weak script. A beautiful scene trapped inside an uneven film. A director I admire, making a choice I cannot forgive. A series that gets under my skin for reasons I do not immediately understand. Those are the things that pull me back to the page now.

Maybe that is why I rarely review books anymore.

I still read. Slowly. Less than I would like. Mostly classics, sometimes international writers, sometimes books I do not yet feel equipped to write about. Books have become private again in a way they were not when I was younger, and reviewing them made me feel serious. I do not feel the same need to turn every reading experience into a response.

Films and series still provoke me faster.

Maybe because they arrive with image, sound, performance, music, bodies, pauses, bad choices, brilliant choices, and all the things that make me react before I can organise myself. Maybe because even now, after all this carefulness, cinema still knows how to get past the door.

But love alone does not always make me write.

Restlessness does.

That is the carefulness I mean.

Not cynicism.

Carefulness.

The difference matters.

Cynicism decides early. Carefulness waits and then decides with more evidence. Cynicism stands outside the film, arms folded, proud of not being fooled. Carefulness enters the film, lets it try, and then asks what it did with the trust it was given.

I do not want to be cynical with films.

I still want to be reached.

But I also want to know how I was reached.

That is why Samantaral remains the bridge review for me. Even inside all that emotion, I can see the critic beginning to form. I praised the feeling, the performances, the innocence of certain moments, the songs that stayed. But I also called out the weak screenplay, the loose subplots, the excessive close-ups, and the fact that the film may have had more weight as a book than as a film.

That review was not fully careful yet. But it was trying.

It was the beginning of a split that defines how I write now. One part of me wants to surrender. Another part sits beside her, taking notes.

This can be inconvenient.

It can make watching films less pure, whatever pure means. It can make me pause before praising something that has already moved me. It can make me suspicious of my own tears. It can make me ask whether an actor was brilliant or whether the film simply gave them all the oxygen. It can make me walk out of a film feeling two things at once, which is exhausting and usually more honest.

But maybe that is what I want from writing now.

Not certainty.

Aftertaste.

I want to know what remained after the obvious feeling left. 

• Did the film deepen in memory, or did it shrink? 
• Did one scene keep glowing while the rest vanished? 
• Did the performance survive the film? 
• Did the film survive its own ambition? 
• Did I keep thinking about it because it was rich, or because something about its failure bothered me?

This is also why I no longer write reviews like verdicts.

I do not want to stand at the end of a film with a stamp. Worth watching or not worth watching. Three stars. Four stars. Skip it. Stream it. Theatre experience. These things have their place, I suppose, but they do not interest me as much as the private weather a film creates.

Some films are excellent and leave nothing behind.

Some films are flawed and refuse to leave.

Some films are not good enough, but one image keeps returning like an unpaid debt.

Some films fail in a way that tells you more about the filmmaker than their successful work.

Some films choose you for reasons you only understand years later.

That last one still gets me.

Because I still believe in being chosen by a film. I just no longer think that is the end of the conversation.

A film choosing you is not proof of its greatness. It is proof of contact. Something touched something. That matters. But then the writing begins. Not the immediate post-show gush, though there is a place for that too. I mean the real writing. The kind that asks what happened in that contact. What you brought into the hall. What the film used. What it earned. What it stole. What it left.

Older me wrote before the feeling had cooled.

Current me waits for the burn mark.

That sounds better than it feels.

Because sometimes I miss the immediacy. I miss the girl who could come home from a film, sit down and write like she was still half inside it. I miss her lack of embarrassment. I miss her willingness to say, “This actor has a fan in me,” and mean it with zero irony. I miss the way songs entered her reviews without permission. I miss the way she could quote lyrics at the end because the film had not ended for her yet.

But I do not miss the over-forgiveness.

I do not miss mistaking mood for merit. I do not miss calling everything brave because it had one sincere idea. I do not miss giving a film credit for what I wished it had done. I do not miss writing around a weakness because admitting it would disturb my affection.

The pulse and the question

So here I am, somewhere between the two.

More careful than I was.

Still not careful enough to be safe.

That may be the right place.

Because safe writing about films is usually dead writing. It has no pulse. It knows the correct words. It understands craft. It can identify themes, performances, pacing, music, cinematography, politics, all of it. But it does not let anything happen to it.

I don’t want that either.

I want the pulse and the question.

I want to admit that Ranveer’s Khilji once hijacked my entire Padmavat review and still ask what that hijacking meant. I want to remember that Befikre gave me uncomplicated theatre pleasure and still wonder what I was willing to ignore for charm. I want to keep the sweetness of my Zulfiqar excitement while knowing that no filmmaker becomes “Kolkata’s Shakespeare” just because I had a good Puja morning. I want to honour the Samantaral line about films choosing us while adding the adult clause: yes, but what did the film do after it chose you?

That adult clause is basically my current voice.

Not rejection.

Revision.

I do not want to write like that girl anymore. Not fully. She was too generous. Too dramatic. Too willing to be taken in by eyes, music, madness, charm. She gave actors too much power and screenplays too many second chances. She wrote sentences that now make me want to look away and protect her at the same time.

But I do not want to lose her either.

She knew how to be claimed by cinema. She knew that a film is not only its structure, not only its politics, not only its craft, not only its flaws. It is also the strange private weather it creates inside you. It is the song you play for three days. The scene you keep explaining to people who did not ask. The actor you defend with the moral seriousness of a court proceeding. The line you quote, because it made sense once in the dark.

I am more careful with films now.

But every once in a while, when a film slips past the critic and goes straight for the pulse, I hope that older version of me is still somewhere nearby.

Uncareful. Embarrassing. Open.

Right before she has the language for it.