Monsoon Wedding

This big marquee movie - it portrays the preparations for an arranged-marriage wedding among an upper caste clan - is mostly a free-wheeling celebration of Delhi bustle, middle-class mobility and an enlivening tension between tradition and modernity. A masala of Indian screen veterans, celebs and debutants mingle in the film's mise-en-scène, teeming with love torn characters. Among the most notable, Shah is a totem of vexed loyalty as the buffeted father of the bride; Shetty is defiant when her moment comes as the repressed writer-cousin with a secret; Raaz is the 'event manager' PK Dubey, who comes down with a precipitous crush on the family's servant girl Alice. So, like The Philadelphia Story, it justifies its focus on this enchanted class with an open-door social optimism, but finally shows its backbone when it comes to testing the limits of inclusiveness. A vibrant patchwork of people, colours and moods, the film's fluid, crowded and opaque in places, for a while leaving you wondering where it might be going. Then you find the pulse. The impression of cosmopolitan modern India, of diaspora lives thrown into collision and collusion, is engaging in itself, but the emotional optimism here is the most heartening aspect of this vivacious film.