Shabana Azmi Movies

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

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

With songs and musical numbers that are woven through the storyline, this unevenly-paced drama is about a brothel that has been an institution in a small town for a very long time. The women entertain the local clients with suggestive songs and dances and are not the type of prostitutes that ply their trade in New York City, for example. Unfortunately for the business of the brothel, a developer wants to schedule some new buildings for the town, so the madam is forced to move her women to the outskirts, and things will just never be the same again. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

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

When the blind principal of a school for blind adolescents meets up with a young widow, there is an attraction that leads to an affair. Both this intense relationship, and a secondary relationship between a young blind boy and his seeing friend explore the world of the sightless and its context, the world around them that they can never see. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Based on a story by Munshi Premchand, and much influenced by Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1925 film Chess Fever, this satirical film by noted Indian director Satyajit Ray is set in colonial India in 1856. The British Resident of the East India Company (Richard Attenborough) has observed that the monarch of Lucknow, which is in his trading region, seems to be completely uninterested in government. He tries to arrange things so that he can annex the province. Embroiled in a long-running chess rivalry, two local noblemen (played by Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey) cannot be bothered with such minor issues as who is governing whom. Meanwhile, conditions in the kingdom go from bad to worse. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Released after censorship restrictions were lifted by a more liberal Indian government, Amar Akbar Anthony indulged audiences in a story with loose morals and visual excitement. The Chinese box of a narrative is essentially a comedy of errors concerning three brothers, Amar, Akbar, and Anthony. Abandoned in a park by their father, the three are raised separately and without knowledge of each other. By coincidence they all find themselves giving blood to a woman in a hospital and events stemming from this encounter bring them together. All three meet women who they fall in love with, but when their father, who unbeknownst to them has become a successful smuggler, kidnaps one of the women, all three become implicated in the struggle for her release. At the end of the film, the identities of the three are revealed, the police reveal that the smuggler is their father, and they manage to defeat a variety of criminal elements. The film closes with the brothers reunited, driving off into the sunset with their women.

~ Brian Whitener, All Movie Guide

When a married man seduces his serving girl, it's just for fun. As a spoiled and raw young man of India's upper classes, he is unprepared to face reality when the girl shows up pregnant, and he virtually has a breakdown. The girl, however, is made of tougher stuff, as is her husband; he has long wanted children, and accepts the child as his own. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide