Watched this movie nearly a year after its release with no great expectations. Watched it mainly because I think Manoj Bajpai is a great actor and the movie was written by Piyush Mishra. The movie started slow and was no great shakes till the interval point. The post-interval scenes just blew me away.

Manoj Bajpai needs no introduction and he was great as usual. The Bhojpuri superstar (cant remember his name) is pretty good in a short role. Kumud Mishra, Deepak Dobriyal and the other actor who plays Deepak's friend were absolutely outstanding. The post-interval scenes were very well-directed . The best part of the treatment was that there is no jingoism like the usual JP DUtta war movies and there were no love interests for our heroes, so no distractions.

I would say this is the best war movie made in Bollywood and my favourite patriotic movie since The Legend of Bhagat Singh.

This 1970 classic by Hrishikesh Mukherjee is in my humble opinion the best movie ever made in India. Lots of filmmakers claim their movies entertain and have a message but "Anand" is an example of how a movie can be funny, emotional, uplifting, message-oriented and tragic at the same time.

It is a simple tale of a young man from Delhi, Anand (Rajesh Khanna) who is suffering from a fatal disease called "lymphocercoma of the intestine" and how his jovial, optimistic, talkative and do-good nature affects the people he interacts with the last few weeks of his life in Bombay where he comes to, for his treatment. The most important thread of the movie is the deep friendship Anand forms with his doctor, Dr Banarjee (Amitabh Bachchan), whom Anand addresses as Babu Moshai.. Dr Banarjee is a cynical young doctor is deeply affected by the poverty and sufferings around him and he turns bitter and pessimistic because of the apathy all around him and doesnt believe there is any hope of things improving in the society. The transformation in him once he starts interacting with Anand is brought out beautifully in the movie. So much so that at the end of the movie when Anand is close to dying he is the only one that doesnt give up hope and is desperately trying to save him. The movie does well to just concentrate on the going ons and not delve into Anand's dark past (his broken relationship which is never explained fully)

Rajesh Khanna shines and delivers a performance of a lifetime. It is so easily his best movie and performance. Amitabh Bachchan as usual is great and this was his first big hit film and he graduated to starring roles after this although it took him 3 more years to get his next hit with Zanjeer. Ramesh Deo is excellent as a common friend. Three brilliant cameos stand out - Lalita Pawar who plays the nurse, Johny Walker who plays the theatre personality and Durga Khote who plays Babu Moshai's prospective mom-in-law. Salil Choudhary's music is excellent with great songs. The dialogues are legendary.

This is definetly a must-see and still very relevant in today's times. What stands out in the movie is the simplicity in every department - the clothes, the sets, the music. But that is typical of every Hrishikesh Mukherjee film. He is in my opinion one of the top 3 directors India has produced. This film was based on the friendship he shared with Raj Kapoor. Anand's character was based on Raj Kapoor's and Babu Moshai's character was based on his own. I would urge anyone who hasnt watched this movie to watch it atleast once. As for me, I will probably watch it for the 450th time tonight.

This 1975 all-time classic is what you get when legends in their absolute prime work together. The movie is an amalgmation of Salim-Javed's best script, Yash Chopra's best directorial effort, Shashi Kapoor's and Nirupa Roy's best acting efforts and one of Big B's best performances.

It was an absolute travesty that Amitabh Bachchan wasnt awarded the Filmfare Best Actor award for this movie because of Big B's war against the media those days. The screenplay is picture-perfect and there's not a single scene or a dialogue that seems out of place. Some of the new-age film-makers could learn a thing or two from this movie as to how not to spoil a serious movie by having a few silly comedy scenes just for the heck of it. RD Burman's music for this movie is very underrated. The romantic song between Shashi Kapoor and Neetu Singh stands out.

Usually the second lead in all Bachchan's movies of the 70s and 80s just could'nt hold their own against the Bachchan tsunami, but this was one of the few movies that the other hero got noticed as well (only other instance I can think of is Dharmendra in Sholay). This role fetched Shashi Kapoor the best supporting actor award if Im not mistaken. A lesser hero than Bachchan would have been daunted with Shashi Kapoor having so many good lines and all the songs. Nirupa Roy got the best ever hero's mother role in this movie and was great. Neetu Singh had a very small role and so did the sexy Parveen Babi. Parveen Babi's legs though had very long roles. They looked absolutely ravishing.

For those familiar with Yash Chopra's recent work in those cheesy SRK love stories would find his work in Deewar surprising. He also created a bit of a controversy those days by showing Bachchan and Parveen Babi having a physical relationship without being married. He crafted so many memorable scenes in this movie - villagers tatooing "mera baap chor hain" on young Bachchan's hands, when the bad guy tosses a coin at young bachchan, the dock scenes, the "mere paas maa hain" sequence, bachchan losing his 786 badge when being chased and so many more that Ill probably end up listing the entire movie.

All in all an absolute classic that was overshadowed by Sholay that released in the same year. Sholay was more a crowd pleaser with loads of comedy and high-octane action with bigger stars and a larger than life villain, but doesnt take anything away from Deewar. I know this movie was remade in all Indian languages with big stars but none of them could match Bachchan's intensity and I pray SRK doesnt try and remake this movie.

Remake of Ramgopal Varma's 1989 debut film in Telugu of the same name, this 1990 classic had an above average run at the box-office. RGV who did his Civil Engineering degree before turning into a video library owner, asst director and eventually a director used his experiences of his college life to make this film about college politics.

Its the story of a how a middle-class student gets sucked into college politics and eventually turns into a city don. Although the story may seem like a regular run-of-the-mill kind, its the RGV treatment that made it into a path-breaking film. The camerawork with very dull lighting, having no background music during action scenes which added to the drama and suspense and made it realistic, no make-up look for all actors and all the actors underplaying the roles and not overacting (overacting was the norm in the 80s commercial flicks) were some of the trends that were started with this movie. Ilayaraja's background music was great and a shame that there were no awards given to background music those days. Some of the great scenes in the movie that I still remember after 16 years from this movie - the very first fight scene when Nagarjuna pulls his cycle chain to beat the shit out of the college rowdy (Chakri, who went on to play Satya), the attack on the hero's friends, the cycle chase scene, the scene where Nagarjuna and his friends beat the villain's goons and drop them off at the villain's house.

Raghuvaran as the villain was sensational. Paresh Rawal in a very short role of a corrupt politician was great. Nagarjuna, Amala and Raj Zutshi played their respective roles well. This movie absolutely revolutionized the Telugu movie industry and led to many RGV clones. One possible reason this movie may not have done very well in Hindi was because it did not have any major Hindi stars in the movie and the movie may have looked like a dubbed movie. Also the Hindi movie industry was making a lot of love stories with the Khans with great music by Nadeem Shravan those days.

RGV went to make a few more movies (some great and some not so great) before he finally made it big in Hindi with Rangeela. Some of his good movies after Shiva and before Rangeela -

1. Kshana Kshanam (1991) (Telugu) with Venkatesh, Sridevi and Paresh Rawal - (dubbed very poorly into Hindi as Hairaan)

2. A Telugu-Hindi bi-lingual called Drohi (1992) in Hindi and Antham in Telugu with music by RD Burman. Starring Nagarjuna and Urmila  

3. A Telugu-Hindi bi-lingual Raat (1992) A horror film starring Revathi.

4. Produced a low-budget comedy called Money (Telugu 1993) starring Paresh Rawal, Renuka Shahane and Chakri which he remade in Hindi in 2001 as Love Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega. (although the Hindi version was glamorized and was made on a bigger budget).

5. Gaayam (Telugu -1993) Screenplay by Mani Ratnam - This movie was inspired from Godfather and which he again made in Hindi as Sarkar (2005) which was closer to Godfather than Mani Ratnam's script.

Tigumanshu Dhulia made a similar college-politics movie called Haasil with Jimmy Shergill which in my opinion was great but then again like Shiva it got lost in the host of glamorous movies.