Featurettes/Behind-The-Scenes/Documentaries

Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh is a rescue pilot with the Indian Air Force, who risks his own life to save the lives of others. One day, on duty, he comes across a stranded girl from Pakistan, Zaara. Zaara, a carefree, sprightly girl has come to India to fulfill her surrogate grandmother's dying wish. She meets with a bus accident leaving her stranded in a foreign land. Veer saves her life... and his life is never the same again... Twenty-two years later, Saamiya Siddiqui, a Pakistani lawyer on her first case, finds herself face-to-face with an aging Veer Pratap Singh.

Dil Bole Hadippa! (My Heart Shouts Hooray!) makes a good intro to Bollywood/Indian musicals. It has all the splash of full-out Bollywood but with terrific modern updates and a little something for everyone. For the ladies there's the predictable but crackling good rom/com tension between Shahid Kapoor and Rani Mukherjee. With all this wrapped up in a cricket championship with a little gender-bending to keep it off-balance, guys should find it just as entertaining.

New York is an extremely taut and highly emotive piece of political drama which begins with a bang. Indian immigrant Omar (Neil Nitin Mukesh) is arrested by the FBI and grilled for his terrorist links by officer Irrfan Khan. Pleading his innocence, he is forced to flashback to his college days and his friendship with Sameer (John Abraham), the campus hero and Maya (Katrina Kaif), the campus hottie who stole his heart but loved Sameer. The breezy campus days give way to a more turbulent present when Omar is sent back into Sameer and Maya's life as an undercover agent for the FBI.

Love Aaj Kal is a romantic comedy that segues into a drama, taking a more sophisticated approach and allowing for real emotional development, something we don't get too much of from the generic Bollywood product, what with Indian cinema so hooked on sweeping over-the-top romances.

Vivah unabashedly hearkens back to India's more traditional conventions, and specifically that of the arranged marriage. Released in 2006, Vivah tells the story of two young people, Prem and Poonam, strangers to one another yet destined to be wedded. So it'd be nice if they like each other. Poonam (Amrita Rao) is an orphaned girl from the small town of Madhupur, who was raised in her uncle's household. She is beautiful and demure and brought up to be obedient and traditional.

It has been a while since I sat through a film that made me smile, and at times even break into a hearty laughter. Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na did both. The film, by Aamir Khan Productions and directed by Abbas Tyrewala, is about love. Jaane Tu, in fact, is a very bare bones film that you know the story of: young people growing up, growing apart and growing in love. So we have Jai (Imran Khan) and Aditi (Genelia D Souza), who love each other, but lack the insight and maturity to accept it.

Helen Mirren reigns supreme in The Queen, a witty and ingenious look at a moment that rocked the house of Windsor: the week that followed the sudden death of Princess Diana in 1997. Diana's death came at just the same time that Prime Minister Tony Blair (played by the bright Michael Sheen) was settling into his new government--and trying to figure out the delicate relationship between 10 Downing Street and Queen Elizabeth II (Mirren).

An exercise in moral complexity, 21 is based on Ben Mezrich's book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) plays brilliant, blue-collar scholar Ben Campbell, whose doubts that he'll win a scholarship to Harvard Medical School compel him to join a secret, M.I.T. gang of math whiz kids. Under the silky but chilling command of a math professor (Kevin Spacey), Jim and the others master card counting, i.e., the statistical analysis of cards dealt in blackjack games.

Zohan's star and SNL alumnus Adam Sandler is joined by several fellow cast members (in uncredited cameo roles) from his years on the NBC show. But Sandler also co-wrote the film's absurdist script with SNL veteran writer and sometime-performer Robert Smigel. Echoes of a few of their classic skits on the show--built around high-strung Israeli characters obsessed with disco and selling junk electronics out of a New York shop--are in revisited in Zohan and are a lot of fun to see again.

The delirious sight of Meryl Streep leading a river of multigenerational women singing "Dancing Queen" is one of the high points of Mamma Mia!, the musical built around the songs of the hugely popular pop group ABBA. The plot sets in motion when Sophie (Amanda Seyfried, Mean Girls), daughter of Donna (Streep), sends a letter to three men, inviting them to her wedding--because after reading her mother's diary, she suspects that one of them is her father.