Shabana Azmi Movies

A young auto mechanic named Albert Pinto (Naseeruddin Shah), enjoys an insulated life of semi-privilege in India where his wealthy customers will sometimes let him use their luxury cars, and his charming girlfriend stays in her desired place. All this changes as Pinto is suddenly face-to-face with the injustices of an imbalanced social system. His father (Arvind Deshpande) is badly beaten as he joins a strike at work, and his brother (Dilip Dhawan) ends up in jail for trying to steal food because he has been out of work so long he has no resources left. Rudely awakened by the suffering of his father and brother, Pinto begins to seriously look around him. His change from passive ignorance to active resistance evolves through to the end of the film. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Capitalism at its most brutal is a familiar story in Central Asia, and in this story, set in the lovely but decaying Indian city of Lucknow, it takes the form of wholesalers paying the women who weave a colorful folk design in fabric less than it costs for them to support themselves. In this story, Anjuman supplements the charity she receives from her relatives with the pay she gets for her weaving work. However, a local woman doctor urges her to organize the weavers for a better deal, and this is exactly what the plucky young woman does. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Rajkaran is an ambitious man with no way of accomplishing his goals. He is in debt to moneylenders in a big way, and his dream of owning his own cab (he's a cabdriver) is as far away as it ever was, despite his penchant for pinching pennies. He lives with a woman who is as ambitious as he is, a woman who has run away from her husband to be with him. He learns of a scheme to put up an illegal factory which dyes textiles, and he borrows even more money from a local bigwig. When the factory is destroyed by authorities, he is forced into choosing sides in some of Bombay's gang wars, and things go from really bad to genuinely harrowing. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Six directors converge to film an ensemble epic detailing the love and companionship of two friends torn apart by the cruel mechanisms of fate. When a writer makes a shocking discovery about the woman he loves most, the grip of madness takes hold of his fragile psyche. Later, when an underworld don and his best friend attempt to navigate their way through a potentially explosive internal conflict, five friends find that the fictional stories they weave seem to have a profound and unexpected effect on reality. Sanjay Dutt, Sunil Shetty, Arbaaz Khan, and Dino Morea star in a film from directors Jasmeet Dhodi, Hansal Mehta, Meghna Gulzar, Rohit Roy, Apoorva Lakhia, and Sanjay Gupta. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

In this India-set Canadian drama, two disparate wives related by marriage and united at first by the oppressiveness of Indian tradition that relegates them to miserable unions, find solace and love in each other's arms. The film opens as an unhappy young couple, Jatin and Sita, fumble through a conversation. Neither wanted to marry each other, but as it was arranged by Jatin's family, they had no choice. Marriage does not stop Jatin, who owns a video store, from continuing his long-time love affair with a Chinese hairdresser. Caring nothing for Sita, he doesn't even try to hide the affair. Jatin's brother Ashok (who forced Jatin's marriage) is married to Radha. Deeply frustrated at her inability to conceive, he has joined a radical cult that forbids all sexual contact. Ashok and Jatin's demanding mother doesn't help matters nor does the family's twisted servant Mundu. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This is a simple, straightforward tale about the rise and fall of human civilization that focuses solely on four characters: a farmer (Naseeruddin Shah), a weaver (Om Puri), a trader (M.K. Raina), and a woman (Shabana Azmi). At the beginning of the story, the workers in a decaying village are offered food and water if they work for the local lords. The farmer and the weaver refuse. The farmer grows food for them both, and the weaver creates textiles that uses to barter with an itinerant trader. One day a frightened, lonely woman arrives on the scene and she is taken in by the two men. She cooks and cleans, and before long becomes a source of contention. Meanwhile, the trader is observing these events from the sidelines. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Religious and personal tensions escalate steadily in this drama, and nearly everyone in it has some sort of extra-sensitive "toes" that get stepped on by others. James Wilby would seem to have a relatively non-controversial job, for a foreigner, since he is a wildlife conservationist, and foreigners are always going on about the environment. Pakistan is, however, a pretty strange place for his Jewish wife Hannah, the daughter of an American senator. The couple are almost deranged with a desire to have a child together, and when they hear about a local shrine which is said to give the blessing of fertility, they think that it sounds harmless enough and go out to see it. In the rest of the world, eunuches are a thing of the past, but in Pakistan and India, they actually have a culture of their own; ironically enough, they run the fertility shrine. When Wilby and Hannah visit the place, they are rendered unconscious with a drugged drink, and a local boy is called in to inseminate Hannah, who does in fact become pregnant. The birth of the child, however, seems to be the trigger for a lot of strange goings-on, beginning with Hannah's conversion to Islam, which strains her marriage nearly to the breaking point. Also, Hannah has discovered that Alistair has been carrying on with a family friend, and in addition, the eunuches seem to be excessively interested in the child she has by now given birth to. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

During one of the many violent uprisings against the English colonial overlords in India, a church filled with people is massacred. The only people to survive are three generations of women in one family, hidden by a friendly Indian. They are then kidnapped by a Muslim (Sashi Kapoor), who wants to keep the youngest woman as his second wife, despite the objections of his first wife who despises the women for their Englishness. Also, the girl he is enamored of finds him frightening. He goes off to join the fighting and eventually comes back to a much-changed situation. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Set against the backdrop of a crumbling, historical villa on an ancient feudal holding now going to seed, director Mrinal Sen develops a portrait of a crumbling, deteriorating woman -- old, blind, and senile -- and her daughter who is wasting away, hopelessly waiting for her lover like Estragon for Godot. Three men arrive in the town for a brief vacation from city stress, and they inevitably stir up conflicts as they meet the two occupants of the villa and interact with their lives. As in Beckett's famous play, nothing happens -- Sen does not have his protagonists come to grips with their personal issues as the events continue to unfold at the villa. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Shirley MacLaine is Madame Sousatzka, an aging piano instructor of Russian extraction. Entrenched in a dilapidated London rooming house, the Madame gives lessons only to the most gifted. She does not stop at mere instruction; Sousatzka insists that her pupils conduct their lives in the same genteel, cultured manner in which she was raised. Her prize student at the moment is an East Indian teenage boy (Navin Chowdhry), who forms a strong and loving bond with the old woman. Director John Schlesinger occasionally cuts away from the Madame and her pupil to allow comic space for the other tenants in Ashcroft's building, including an erstwhile songstress (Twiggy) and a gay osteopath (Geoffrey Baydlon). Navim Chowdhry's mother is played by Shabana Azmi, an important star of Indian films. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide