Dario Argento’s films are always lurid nightmares gleefully exploiting artificiality in a canvas of eye-catching colours. His stained-glass cinema is a visual feast and a sensory delight as well, his entire filmography a self-aware mixture of gratuitous gore, intricate storytelling and sly satire. With Suspiria, all the most appealing traits of Argento’s filmmaking are stitched together and put on display for all dedicated horror fans to devour. Were it designed by anyone other than the Italian auteur, it simply wouldn’t work.

I fell in love with Kozintsev’s King Lear some 30 years ago and I continue to be enraptured by the black-and-white film shot in cinemascope each time I see it. Each time you view the film, one realizes that a creative genius can embellish another masterpiece from another medium by providing food for thought—much beyond what Shakespeare offered his audiences centuries ago. Purists like Lord Laurence Olivier and Peter Brook offered cinematic versions of the play that remained true to what the Bard originally intended, only refining performances within the accepted matrices.

It is very rare for a film to tend to your dessert yearnings. No, sugar cravings have not hit my senses, but Jean Pierre Jeunet’s delightful film Amelie sure has. The film is not only a mix of genres - romance, comedy, drama - but is also a mix of the sweet gooeyness of marzipan, rich strawberry cream cake, pure sugar… Yes, the only way to describe Amelie is as a cloyingly sweet fairytale of a film. As a girl who lives to eat (dessert strictly) and watch films, I can’t help the fact that Amelie is one of my all-time favourite films.

There were no dead bodies in my childhood but there were those days in which friendships were defined, the comraderie felt between myself and my friends essentially a mighty bond unbroken by the bullies and the parents that came along in disruption of it. There were also those eternally sunny summers that never seem to exist in the years that follow, in which cornfields existed to play games in to the chagrin of a farmer or two, the neighbouring woodlands housed animals scarcely seen in the town that stood only a couple hundred yards from it (border to border) and we’d find adventure in what to adults are mundane and maybe pointless.

An “Author’s Pick” is always a very bright idea and a very bad idea. Bright, since first of all it enables the reader to have some of the reviews which that author might not have published otherwise. And bad, since such a pick is more about the author than the films themselves. I might only talk about Gogol and Dostoyevsky, and not about Tolstoy and Chekhov at all!

Nothing quite beats the ennui out of a droning afternoon, like a great film. And few films manage to do that over and over again. For me, Chungking Express is that magical film. Its visual energy and celebration of the Coca Cola-sipping, Mc Donald hamburger-eating and California Dreamin’-crooning lifestyle, bounces you out of your boredom and kicks you back into action.

Giant rabbits, jet engines from nowhere and time travel in “Donnie Darko,” Richard Kelly’s victorious, quixotic and thoroughly captivating debut. An extraordinary, visionary work of cinema that’s altogether impossible to break down and analyse without misstep, the film is almost impossible to totally understand yet so compelling in it’s every singular second that the impact of it is remarkably profound.

Not often is a theme so compelling that film after film is made on the same. Devdas if I am not mistaken has seven remakes of which I have seen three. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s, Bimal Roy’s and P.C Barua’s. This is the order in which I saw the films and I liked only Bimal Roy’s version.