Amazon.com
The quietly devastating Maya begins with the statement, “Based on true practices.” Not until the very end will those practices, which still take place in certain remote parts of India, be revealed. Until that time, Digvijay Singh’s deceptively bucolic debut takes a quasi-documentary approach to the rural summer of 12-year-old Maya (wide-eyed Nitya Shetty) as she and cousin Sanjay (Nikhil Yadav) play in the sun, sneak candy, and drink warm milk. But then Maya “becomes a woman” and her family starts making preparations for her “prayer ceremony.” Things seems normal enough, although Maya is never told what this ceremony entails and why it is so important. Although the disturbing centerpiece of her initiation into adulthood is more suggested than shown, the point is as clear as it is heartbreaking. It represents, quite simply, the brutal and irrevocable destruction of one girl’s innocence. For this reason, the film is recommended for adult viewers, despite the young (more…)

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Both stylish and stylized, Santosh Sivan’s Hindi epic Asoka tells the heavily fictionalized but nonetheless compelling story of India’s greatest emperor. In the third century B.C., the Mauryan king Asoka built a vast empire by means of ruthless conquest; but after the great Kalinga war he became sickened by the terrible slaughter he had caused, converted to Buddhism and dedicated the rest of his life to spreading peace and prosperity. The film, though, concerns itself only with Asoka’s rise to power, his love for the princess Kaurwaki, and his subsequent descent into brutality. Shah Rukh Khan is a brooding and temperamental prince who woos the lovely princess Kaurwaki (Kareena Kapoor) incognito and with the aid of the obligatory song-and-dance numbers. After a promising start involving mythic swords, heroic combat, and King Lear-like sibling rivalry, the film falls into a familiar Bollywood groove for a while until events overtake the unlucky lovers and Asoka (more…)