The Gods of Cinema must have smiled on Mumbai. How else can one explain the Ingmar Bergman retrospective getting a re-run, that too on public demand? In an age when tripe like Singh is King make it to the Toronto Fest, it’s a relief knowing that the Swedish Master still retains his share of ardent fans.

It was a night show on a weekday, yet the hall in central Mumbai was jam-packed. Playing on screen was the first film in Bergman’s celebrated “absence of God” trilogy Through a Glass Darkly…

Christopher Zalla, the debutant director who won the grand jury prize at Sundance last year for this film packs the film with immaculate drama of relationship. The city that he portrays is scary, it is a place where people don’t trust each other, nobody helps anybody yet nobody wants to go back to where they belong.

This has to be the best film of the year 2007. That it wasn’t nominated at the Academy Awards is their loss. Just a reflection of the fact that award shows are at best, only indicators of good cinema; they cannot sit in judgment over what is or what is not the best.

This time too, the dilemma is how to narrow down a list of great films made on the Nazi-infused Jewish Holocaust. While the last piece explored the greatest Holocaust classics, this one explores the best of contemporary films on the Holocaust. However the dilemma persists - are the films great by themselves or is it the magnitude of the subject itself that makes them great cinema? You tell me.

Crossed Tracks, (or Roman de Gare in French) the latest offering by the prolific filmmaker Claude Lelouch, comes across as a sophisticated and witty take on the spicy ‘train station’ thrillers one flips through hurriedly between lonesome journeys. Lelouch being one of the lesser revered contemporaries of the French New Wave auteurs and frequently bashed by the Cahier’s critics for his melodramatic sentiments, is in fact in this film very close to the themes of the masters like Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard …

If you haven’t seen a Won Kar-Wai film before this is not one that you ought to begin with. In fact I would not recommend it anyways. This is not a movie; it is a collection of images. Images that are so artificial, it’s preposterous trying to stick them together using a feature-length film. I am certain it has been made on a whim; Wong must have had an idea, and he has started shooting before something concrete could have come out of it.

Goodbye Bafana is another one of those movies which completely lose the plot what cinema is all about. And instead start dosing you with hard to bear values like sexism and a child asking “Is it fair?” and thus shaking the soul of her otherwise ruthless father. It’s a little difficult to comprehend how much popcorn does the average American viewer need to consume before finally getting onto something else?

Boil water, toss in some sugar, blend in a dash of lime juice and voila you get Sukkar Banat (Caramel) - the irresistibly sweet and sticky concoction used for waxing purposes in what actor-director Nadine Labaki calls “our part of the world.” And that’s the first thing about her delightful debut drama/romantic comedy Caramel. Its warm lighting, colourful ambience, playful mood and inviting exotica do not seem as Lebanese as Mediterranean in general. The setting might as well have been Spain or even old world France; you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. But then, Labaki’s focus is not as much on Lebanon’s socio-political turbulence or religious mayhem as it is on personal turmoil.