RIFLE RANGE BOY

Cabrini (Italian/English, 2024) Director: Alejandro Gómez Monteverde After their exposè of transborder abduction of minors to satisfy the sexual needs of the deviant in 'Sound of Freedom' and hitting a runaway success at the box office, Angel Studio tries their hand at distributing a film that tries to highlight the bad treatment of early Italian immigrants at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century to the USA. The expansion of white Americans southward and westward opened the door to an influx of economic immigrants from Europe. The potato famine sent the Irish there, and abject poverty brought Italians and Jews to escape persecution. There was plenty of menial work to be done that the locals found too dirty, dangerous and demeaning to do. Immigrants filled the gap willingly. The Americans were not welcoming of them, however. Shoving them to the most unflattering part of New York, infested with rats, crime and disease, they had to live like rats. Healthcare was poor...

Vina - Sebelum 7 Hari. (Indonesian, 2024) Director:  Anggy Umbara Thanks to Saravanan Decodes , my latest indulgence, for highlighting many solved and unsolved mysteries worldwide. He has 700-over YouTube presentations of some of the most puzzling and heinous murders and tries to decode them. Two exciting cases piqued my interest. It was in how these seemingly dead-ended cases saw living daylight through unconventional methods. The first case happened in Cirebon, West Java. A 16-year-old Vina Dewi Arsita, a student, was reported to have died after getting involved in a road traffic accident while travelling with her boyfriend, Edy, in the thick of the night in 2016. The death certificate was released as death due to Motor Vehicle Accident. There were some uncertainties about whether police did not come forward with more information about the ongoing investigations or whether their investigation was shoddy. Her boyfriend, too, perished in the accident. Burial was done. On the sevent...

  Maharaj (Hindi; 2024) Director:  Siddharth P. Malhotra There was no big hoopla to announce the arrival of one of Bollywood star's son, Aamir Khan's Junaid Khan, to the silver screen. The film, however, had to be cleared by the courts for allegedly hurting Hindu sentiments before making a quiet screening on Netflix. From the get-go, people started demonstrating in front of Netflix HQ in the USA, accusing them of defaming Lord Krishna. Many of the demonstrators had not even viewed the show. Still, they demonstrated anyway, seeing the OTT platform, as in previous instances, had repeatedly been releasing movies that tend to ridicule or put Sanatha Dharma in a bad light. In their eyes, Hindus were like dodos, easy prey for target practice. For instance, no one would dare make a movie that even gives a hint of ridicule or as much questions Islamic figures or practices using modern-day yardstick. It is an unwritten rule that Islamic bodies had to give their nod before such a story ...

Origin (2023) Director: Ava Duverney (Based on the book, ' Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents' by Isabel Wilkerson) It is an interesting way of looking at all the problems affecting the world today. It is blamed on caste segregation. Traditionally, we think of caste as a problem only affecting India. And Indians believe it is a system brought in by colonial masters and divided the nation to ease control. The stifling of one layer of society over the other is not just based on the colour of their skin. It is something beyond. The group at the top end of the food chain would want to maintain the status quo and keep the people beneath them forever squashed. The writer, Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, compared situations in three scenarios.  She looked at the black situation in America, where blacks are stereotyped as troublemakers, poor, unemployed, unemployable and criminals. The system reinforces this stereotype upon them to a level that even the blacks buy into t...

Maharaja (2024, Tamil) Director:  Nithilan Swaminathan If you are fed up watching the same old-time-tested formulaic Indian movies, this one is for you. The story starts as a comedy, but as it goes on, the storyline gets twisted.  Just when you think you know how the story will go, it takes a tangent and yet another. And it goes on and on until it ends with a final twister.  Maharaja, a mild-mannered barber, leads a simple life with his wife and a little daughter. Right in front of his eyes, he sees a lorry, with its driver obviously off its rails, crashing into his house, killing his wife instantaneously. His ‘daughter’ is miraculously saved by a metal dustbin.  Maharajah continues life as a widower and a doting father. One day, his house is broken into, and the metal dustbin that saved his ‘daughter’ goes missing. Maharaja makes a police report.  What happened afterwards is a series of flashbacks, parallel storytelling, police brutality, and police power abuse...

The First Omen (2024) Director: Arkasha Robertson Recently, I heard about a mysterious case of a missing teenager in Rome, Italy. She was 16 in 1983 when she was allegedly abducted. Her father was an administrative staff member in Vatican City. 40 years into her disappearance, the Italian Police never found her. Along the way, there were allegations of abduction by international terrorists, murder by serial killers and many more. Pope John Paul II was also heard to have appealed to the perpetrators to no avail. The Holy See was not spared of accusations. Conspiracy Theorists accused a convoluted union of the mob and the Papacy, a collusion between the Italian Police and the Vatican, as well as the possibility of an unmarked grave in the Vatican. It is not the best of times for the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). At a time when many from the developed world had strayed away from Catholicism, stories of deviance and malfeasance spread quickly like wildflowers.  This movie is set at a ti...