Today starting at 5 p.m., the Dryden will screen Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap, India 2012, 320 min., DCP, Hindi w/subtitles).

The longest film ever screened at the Dryden Theatre in a single day (with intermission for dinner break), this explosive blend of Reservoir Dogs, Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Bertolucci's 1900 and Scorsese's Goodfellas is not your ordinary Bollywood song and dance movie. It's a sprawling, adrenaline-filled gangster epic with enough material for an entire year's worth of Hollywood action blockbusters, and visually more inventive than all of them combined. It charts no less than seven decades in the lives—and spectacular deaths—of two mafia-like families struggling for control in the slums of an eastern Indian city, resorting to extremes worthy of Shakespeare's most gruesome tragedies in order to achieve their criminal goals. Its characters have the greed, ambition, and grandeur of Sergio Leone's thugs in Once Upon A Time in America, with an added dose of cynicism and unbridled contempt for the rules of civil society. Anurag Kashyap's eighth feature film has changed forever the public image of Hindi cinema with the hallucinated color scheme of its urban exteriors, the electrifying editing of its chase sequences, and an exhilarating soundtrack in which rap and techno music are mixed with the instruments and voices of traditional India. There was no exaggeration in The Hollywood Reporter's claim that "Gangs of Wasseypur puts Quentin Tarantino in a corner with its cool command of cinematically inspired and referenced violence, ironic characters and breathless pace." Fasten your seat belts, and note the earlier starting time. Presented by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Senior Curator, Moving Image Department.

[source: Dryden website, 2015-May-4]