Gurinder Chadha’s “Bride and Prejudice”, supposedly a modern retelling (Bollywood style) of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, allows me to break out my favorite line when reviewing movies such as these: It is what it is, and if you went into this film knowing what...

Despite having taken a course in Indian History in college, my biggest interest coming into the Indian epic “Asoka”, about the life of India’s greatest king/patron of Buddhism, wasn’t a matter of historical accuracy. It was this: Are the sing and dance numbers in Bollywood movies...

Deepa Mehta’s “Bollywood/Hollywood” is so obviously a parody of Hollywood romantic comedies and Bollywood melodrama that once you realize this, everything else is irrelevant. Like the South Korean movie “Resurrection of the Little Match Girl”, “Bollywood/Hollywood”...

Ethnic-minded films like “American Desi” have a built-in advantage — even if the film fails miserably in every other respects, it can still rely on its little-known ethnicity — in this case, Indian — to save the day. This is a good thing, because had “American Desi”...

The inherent problem with reviewing a foreign film that comes from a country that you know very little about is, well, you know very little about the country. As a result, you (the critic or viewer) are forced to accept the premise of this strange “world” that is being shown to you. After...