“I have been emphasising on augmenting the infrastructure for very long. I have a proposal to address this issue in a time-bound manner. A comprehensive proposal for the creation of the National Judicial Infrastructure Corporation is under preparation, he said, adding a proposal in this regard will reach the Law Minister very soon.

I expect full cooperation from the government, he said.

The CJI said though access to justice has been strongly provided, still lakhs of people are unable to approach the courts to seek remedy and high expenditure and long delays, which are a part of our legal process, are the biggest challenge.

Justice Ramana said another area that needs to be highlighted is that majority of women lawyers struggle within the profession and very few of them have found representation at the top.

After 75 years of independence, one would expect at least 50 percent representation for women at all levels but I must admit, with great difficulty we have now achieved a mere 11 percent of women representation on the bench of the Supreme Court, he said.

The CJI said some states, because of reservation policy, may reveal higher representation but the reality remains that the legal profession still has to welcome women into its fold.

He said bar council and bar associations are his weakness and he has enjoyed his life as a member of the bar more than as a judge.

Today, I feel that more than being felicitated, I am being reminded of my responsibilities as the Chief Justice of India, he said.

The CJI highlighted a new trend in the profession similar to what has happened in foreign countries.

I am referring to corporatisation of the profession, he said, adding, Common people cannot afford quality legal advice at corporate prices which is an area of concern.

Of course, the RSS makes no bones about the fact that it has more than 35 frontal organisations which are registered and have their own bank accounts; but it still does not explain how it got away for so long by not adhering with the laws of the land, including flying a flag other than the Indian tiranga from its headquarters until as late as 2002.

It has inveigled its way into every section of urban and rural life in India over the past half-century, though it is also true that until almost a decade or two ago it was struggling to convert the disbelievers to its way of thinking. The first BJP-led government at the Centre between 1998-2004 turned a blind eye to RSS volunteers invading homes of Muslims and other non-RSS members of the Hindu community, preaching Hindutva to them, sticking garish pictures of Arjun and Krishna on chariots and that of other gods and goddesses on doors, bullying them to send their young children to their early morning shakhas.

But there were also people who did not appreciate the invasion of their privacy. One recalls an upper caste Maharashtrian home they barged into believing these would be friends. The man of the house was at work and the lady was polite in welcoming them to her drawing room.

The husband arrived just as they were pasting a garish sticker on his door. Red-faced, he barged straight into his bathroom, came out with a bucket of soapy water and a dishcloth and proceeded to scrub the sticker off.

“Call the painter tomorrow and have this door painted again!” he told his wife loudly in front of the now embarrassed pracharaks, “I do not want my door sporting any nonsense. And I want to see my kids in the school playground not any vyayaam at any early morning shaakhas!”

There was another instance of the well-educated daughter-in-law of the sister of a pracharak who had donated his home to the RSS, who sent them packing with fleas in their ears. “You dare to ask us to use your carbolic soap that takes the skin off our faces when you yourselves don’t practise what you preach!” she said pointing to the man’s high-end watch.

“You want us to send our children to your ashram schools, where you do nothing but indoctrinate them in some backward notions of past glory and render all the children from your schools unemployable in India or elsewhere. You pick up adivasi children from backward areas and turn them communal when they have no concept of religion except as animists. And what’s more, you are still wearing those ugly shorts so many years after India earned its spurs in the modern world!”

They were speechless.

There are still people in much greater numbers, in a majority if votes polled by the BJP is any indication, who do not believe in the RSS. It is a battle for their minds and souls and Janardan Moon expects them to join him in redirecting the agenda towards a constitutional democracy and restore the nation to its original liberal, secular moorings.

Former Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram said the explanation was unacceptable and minced no words in doing so. “ICHR Member-Secretary’s explanation for the omission of Jawaharlal Nehru from the first digital poster to celebrate 75 years of independence is ludicrous…After bowing down to prejudice and hate, it is best the Member-Secretary shuts his mouth,” said Chidambaram.

Though ludicrous, the very fact that ICHR’s had to come out with an explanation is the existential crisis BJP and more particularly Modi suffers from. They cannot afford to remove Nehru’s legacy from India’s history even if they have the power and inclination to do so. On the one hand Modi wants to fulfil Golwalkar’s dreams by turning the idea of India we got from Nehru-Gandhi on its head and take India on a 180 degree reverse direction, unwilling to go down in history books as someone who simply carried forward the previous government’s work. On the other hand, in the attempt to establish RSS’s Hindutva project, he runs the risk of destroying democracy and turn India into a fascist nation ruled by a tinpot dictator, too big a risk in geopolitics.

Yet another manifestation of this existential crisis was when the Union government announced that India will help Hindus and Sikh refugees from Afghanistan (owing to the ongoing crisis after Taliban takeover). It was soon assumed that Muslim refugees would not be helped owing to the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) which excludes Muslims. Minister Hardeep Singh Puri even went ahead and claimed that CAA was necessary for such situations. But in reality, CAA is not helping anybody. It is a defunct law since its Rules have not been framed yet. Moreover, it only applies to those who entered India before 31 December 2014. India’s existing laws which does not have any religious conditions are being used to give shelter to Afghan refugees of all religions.

Modi’s existential crisis is that he made CAA to establish himself as the Virat Hindu Hriday Samrat who changed the secular nature of India’s citizenship laws and established Hindu Rashtra. But in the larger scheme of things, he cannot afford to do blatant religious discrimination in accepting refugees.

Caught in this dilemma Modi’s breakthrough solution is to dismantle everything only to rebuild them in his own image. So, the Planning Commission is replaced by Niti Ayog, Prime Minister’s Relief Fund is replaced by PMCARES, the old parliament building will be replaced by a new one, previous government’s policies and programs are renamed, Nehru Memorial would have to make space for other Prime Ministers, all the assets Nehru built would be sold to cronies…the list goes on.

We said something very similar when we reviewed Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror at SXSW earlier this year, but don’t be put off by its running time, particularly if you have any interest in the folk horror genre. Yes, 192 minutes is a lot of minutes, but the movie is so comprehensive it needs all of that time to contextualize its subject matter with interviews and clips galore. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is coming off its well-received festival run and will soon be available to wider audiences. io9 is thrilled to be debuting its new trailer today.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched arrives on VOD on October 26; it will also roll out for limited theatrical bookings and even more festival play dates throughout the fall (check the film’s official website for updates). It comes to home video on December 7, and Severin Films is already anticipating anyone who comes away from a viewing determined to watch as many of the films highlighted in the documentary as possible by offering up a massive Blu-ray box set. “All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror” contains “19 of the best-known, least-known, rarely-seen and thought-lost classics of folk horror from around the world, all restored from the best available vault elements,” according to a press release, plus special features galore for each individual film, a copy of Jim Williams’ wonderful Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched soundtrack, and more.

You can learn more about that here, but since we know you’re curious, the 19 films included in the box set (along with Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, of course, which comes with its own raft of extras) are: 1983’s Eyes of Fire, 1973’s Leptirica, 1970’s Witchhammer, 1967’s Viy, 1958’s Lake of the Dead, 1987’s Tilbury, 1988’s The Dreaming, 1988’s Kadaicha, 1989’s Celia, 1981’s Alison’s Birthday, 1983’s Wilczyca, 1970’s Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach, 1991’s Clearcut, 1963’s Il Demonio, 1993’s Dark Waters, 2012’s A Field in England, 1993’s Anchoress, 1974’s Penda’s Fen, and 1970’s Robin’s Redbreast.

The Blu-ray set costs $170 and is available for pre-order now ahead of its December 7 release; if you really wanted to go folk-horror wild, there was also a limited-edition “Witches’ Bundle” that included the box set plus a bunch of other spooky goodies, but unfortunately that sold out super-fast. The box set is still available though, and it’s so huge it has its own trailer, which you can see here:

Update: This post was updated to note that the “Witches’ Bundle” has sold out.

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Great Addition for Streamers.
Brilliant pixels for every raid.

Google has either turned off RSS support in Google Groups without telling anyone, or has failed to notice that RSS in Groups no longer functions.

RSS, which stands for either RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is an open content syndication protocol. It allows people to subscribe to feeds from websites and receive syndicated content from them through an app capable of reading XML-based data.

Debuting in 1999, RSS evolved into different versions and variants, like Atom, and for a time about 15 years ago was quite popular as a way to receive updates about newly published content. When Google in 2013 decided to discontinue its RSS app Google Reader, it was a controversial decision. Mozilla distanced itself from RSS in 2018.

Lately, RSS has been a low priority for tech companies focused on content distribution schemes that are easier to control and monetize, though it’s still appreciated by those who need to follow updates across a wide range of websites.

Google never made Groups RSS feeds obvious. RSS links were previously tucked away on the About page of any public Google Group. But now they’ve vanished entirely.

Earlier this year, questions about the disappearance of RSS support in Google Groups began to appear on the Google Groups support website. The response provided by one of the non-Google moderators is that RSS feed support went away with the Google Groups desktop client redesign that debuted in May 2020 and rolled out thereafter. A mobile client design refresh followed in August 2020.

While the Groups redesign may have removed references to RSS links on Groups’ About pages, the RSS backend remained in place – Groups users could still subscribe to feeds if they knew how to form the URL and those feeds were still accessible until late last month.

That was when netizens began to notice that their Google Groups RSS subscriptions no longer functioned. Mozilla’s dev-security-policy mailing list, for example, relied on Google Groups RSS to distribute updates, and earlier this month switched to an alternative RSS service.

Work around the problem

Those affected by the disappearance of RSS have suggested several workarounds, like using RSS.app to generate a feed from a specific Google Group. That approach however isn’t ideal because generated feeds are not formatted the same way, so details like message timestamps don’t carry over.

In an email to The Register, Feross Aboukhadijeh, an open-source developer who runs Socket, expressed dismay that RSS has stopped working in Groups.

“I’m disappointed that the RSS feeds feature was removed,” said Aboukhadijeh. “It was working perfectly fine and probably only a minimal maintenance burden to the Groups team.”

While many internet users today may not interact with RSS, the technology is nonetheless critical infrastructure for journalists, technologists, and researchers, he contends.

“RSS is an open protocol for websites to share their information with other websites, apps, and services,” he said. “It’s used everywhere – it powers every podcast feed, and shares articles from almost every major news website.”

• Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android
• Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it’s old and unloved
• First Forth, C and Python, now comp.lang.tcl latest Usenet programming forum nuked by Google Groups
• Yahoo! Groups! to! shut! down! completely! on! December! 15!… Tens! mourn!

Aboukhadijeh also observed that many programming communities, like Node.js, use Google Groups to announce critical security issues. “Anyone relying on the Google Group RSS feed to consume these security notices will stop getting critical security notices until they directly subscribe by email to the group,” he said.

“Another casualty of this change is the @IntentToShip Twitter account which posts when browser makers announce their intent to ship, change, or remove features in their web engines,” Aboukhadijeh added.

Another casualty of this change is the Twitter account … which posts when browser makers announce their intent to ship, change, or remove features in their web engines

“The account is popular in the web standards community since it consolidates posts from many disparate Google Groups into a single feed. The removal of RSS in Google Groups broke their integration.”

With the redesign announcement last year, Google said it would be deprecating – phasing out – 16 features, including Canned responses, Pinning topics, and Topic types, among others.

RSS support, however, is not among the doomed features. If Google mentioned its plan to drop RSS from Groups at the time, it did so very quietly.

The disappearance of RSS in Groups is all the more perplexing for Google’s recent affirmation of RSS, or something like it, in Chrome for Android and its attempt to address its reputation for abruptly discontinuing services through the adoption of an enterprise API policy.

The Register asked Google to comment and we’ve not heard back. ®

It’s a huge month for movie lovers across SBS World Movies and SBS On Demand, with modern classics, new favourites, and a range of music-themed movies to get your pulse racing and your heart soaring. There’s literally something for everyone. Here is just a taste:  

Rabbit-Proof Fence

PG
Australia, 2002
Genre: History, Adventure
Language: Walmajarri, English
Director: Phillip Noyce
Starring: Everlyn Sampi, Kenneth Branagh, David Gulpilil
What’s it about?
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls, Molly, Gracie and Daisy (Everlyn Sampi, Laura Monaghan, Tianna Sansbury). In 1931 they were forcibly removed from their families at Jigalong WA, and taken to a camp 1500 miles away at Moore River to be trained as domestic servants, all part of official government policy. Molly leads her younger sister and cousin on a daring escape and in a bid to find her way home, following – on foot – the rabbit-proof fence that cuts across the Gibson Desert and towards Jigalong. But WA’s Chief protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) does his best to recapture them, with help from Indigenous tracker David Moodoo (David Gulpilil).  

Rabbit-Proof Fence Review
Rabbit-Proof Fence: Cheat Sheet

Never Look Away

Germany, Italy, 2018
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Romance
Language: German
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Starring: Tom Schilling, Paula Beer, Sebastian Koch, Saskia Rosendahl, Oliver Masucci, Cai Cohrs
What’s it about?
When two German art students fall in love, the girl’s father, who has a devastating secret, vows to end their relationship. A multi-generational story of trauma, art and fate, from the director of The Lives Of Others. 

Frances Ha

MA15+
USA, 2013
Genre: Comedy / drama
Language: English
Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Greta Gerwig, Adam Driver, Michael Zegen
What’s it about?
Frances (Greta Gerwig) is a gangly 20-something who lives in New York, but is perennially broke, unfocused and prone to mildly self-destructive behaviour. An apprentice for a dance company, Frances is also a klutz, but that does not stop her from chasing her dreams.  

Frances Ha: Noah Baumbach interview
Frances Ha review: Greta Gerwig is luminescently ‘undateable’
Frances Ha review: If you don’t feel like you’re a real person yet, this is the film for you

Zero Dark Thirty

M
USA, 2013
Genre: Thriller
Language: English, some Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, French
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jason Clarke, Mark Strong, Jessica Chastain, Chris Pratt
What’s it about?
It’s a decade since the world’s most wanted man, terrorist Osama Bin Laden, was captured and killed. Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winner explores the elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret locations across the globe, who devoted themselves to a single goal: tracking down and eliminating him. 

Zero Dark Thirty review: Fact blurs with fiction into a crackerjack thriller
The CIA and the ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ filmmakers: Who used who?

Roman J. Israel, Esq.

M
United States of America, 2017
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Director: Dan Gilroy
Starring: Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo, Lynda Gravatt, Amanda Warren, Hugo Armstrong
What’s it about?
Hard-nosed lawyer Roman J. Israel has been fighting the good fight forever while others take the credit. When his partner – the firm’s leader – has a heart attack, Israel assumes that role, and discovers some unsettling truths about the firm. The revelations fly in the face of his social justice values, and trigger an existential crisis that leads to extreme actions. Washington rightly earned another Oscar nomination for his charged performance. 

Buoyancy

Australia, Cambodia, Thailand, 2019
Genre: Drama, Crime
Language: Cambodian, Thai
Director: Rodd Rathjen
Starring: Sarm Heng, Thanawut Kasro, Mony Ros, Saichia Wongwirot, Yothin Udomsanti, Chan Visal, Chheung Vakhim
What’s it about?
A Cambodian boy leaves home on the promise of lucrative work across the board in Thailand, only to be sold to a broker and enslaved on a fishing trawler. As fellow slaves are tortured and murdered around him, he starts to wonder if his only hope of freedom is to become as violent as his captors. Australian director Rodd Rathjen captures a devastating real-world human rights issue with empathy and beauty.  

‘If we actually showed what it is really like, it wouldn’t be watchable’: Rodd Rathjen talks ‘Buoyancy’

Four Lions

M
United Kingdom, 2010
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Language: English
Director: Chris Morris
Starring: Riz Ahmed, Adeel Akhtar, Kayvan Novak
What’s it about?
A whip-smart slapstick comedy, Chris Morris’ Four Lions takes aim at Jihadi suicide bombers and illuminates the war on terror through satire and farce. Follow five inept aspiring terrorists on their quest to strike a blow, and how they demonstrate that terrorism may be about ideology, but it can also be about idiots.

Four Lions: Kayvan Novak interview
Four Lions: most definitely an alternate view
Four Lions Review

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

M
France, 2007
Genre: Biography, Drama
Language: French
Director: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Max Von Sydow
What’s it about?
The true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a stroke in 1995 that rendered him mute and almost completely paralysed. This is an adaptation of Bauby’s autobiography, which he dictated by blinking his left eye.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Review
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Review

The Band’s Visit
Kicks off SBS World Movies Music Week: 7.30pm Monday 17 May  

PG, 2007
Genre: Comedy, Race Relations
Language: Arabic, Hebrew
Director: Eran Kolirin
Starring: Ronit Elkabetz
What’s it about?
This warm heartfelt movie about love, loneliness and cultural differences stars the late Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz in one of her most popular roles. It follows the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, led by the repressed Tawfiq, who after taking the wrong bus on their way to a cultural event, wind up on the doorstep of Dina, a free-spirited cafe owner in a remote Israeli village. After informing them they will be stuck there until the next morning, Dina offers to put them up for the night, with help from other villagers. 

‘The Band’s Visit’ review
Dinner and a Movie: The Band’s Visit

Devdas
Screens in SBS World Movies Music Week: 9.30pm Monday 17 May 

PG
India, 2002
Genre: Bollywood
Language: Hindi
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Starring: Aishwarya Rai, Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Jackie Shroff
What’s it about?
One of the most lavish and expensive Bollywood films ever made, this is the sweeping tale of soul mates, childhood sweethearts Devdas and Paro, whose love is thwarted by India’s rigid class structure. Young Devdas is sent to study in London by his wealthy father. On his return, love blossoms again, but the families oppose the romance.

La Vie en Rose
Screens in SBS World Movies Music Week: 9.30pm Tuesday 18 May 

M
France, 2000
Genre: Music, Drama, Biography
Language: French
Director: Olivier Dahan
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Gérard Depardieu, Jean-Paul Rouve, Emmanuelle Seigner, Sylvie Testud
What’s it about?
A biopic about the legendary international singing icon Edith Piaf (Marion Cotillard), whose voice and talent captivated the world. The remarkable artist was born into poverty but survived using the only gift she had – her voice. Piaf’s tragic life was a constant battle to sing and survive, to live and love, with no regrets.  

La Vie En Rose review: You will have no regrets seeing this.

Nia DaCosta’s sequel to the cult 1992 horror classic of the same name, Candyman, had a triumphant weekend at the box office.

The film was not released on-demand or streaming but made $22.37 million after being released in 3,569 theaters in the U.S., with an additional $5 million internationally. Perhaps the film’s greater achievement was becoming the first number one film at the box office from a Black female director ever. In addition to directing and producing, respectively, DaCosta and Jordan Peele wrote the Candyman sequel’s script together with Win Rosenfeld. Both critics and fans have given the film a thumbs up; its Rotten Tomatoes score is currently 85% and 74% for critics and fans, respectively. Candyman’s opening-weekend box office take is enough to recoup its $25 million budget—no small feat for any movie released in 2021, and, as Variety says, Candyman also “appears on track to become one of the rare pandemic-era releases to become profitable during its theatrical run.”

Compare that to the recently released Free Guy, which earned $28 million its opening weekend, but had a budget in excess of $100 million—that film made an additional $13.6 million this weekend, a strong showing for its third week. Disney’s Jungle Cruise, however, earned only $5 million, putting it behind Paw Patrol: The Movie’s $6.6 million. Part of Candyman’s theatrical success surely comes from the fact that it, like Free Guy, wasn’t simultaneously released on some streaming service (e.g., Jungle Cruise). Anyone who wanted to see the new film had to go to movie theaters to do so. However, despite the movie having a better financial debut than expected, it’s worth noting that the overall box office is still less than 50% of what it was at this point in 2019, prior to the pandemic.

Candyman stars Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony McCoy, an artist who becomes inspired by the legend of the Candyman, not knowing his connection to the vengeful entity that arrives every time his name is spoken five times in front of a mirror. Teyonah Parris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, and Coleman Domingo also star, along with a few surprises. DaCosta’s next project will reteam her with Parris for the Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, starring Brie Larsen as Carol Danvers, Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan, and Parris as Monica Rambeau—a.k.a. Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and, uh, Monica Rambeau, respectively. The Marvels is currently scheduled to premiere in November of 2022.

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Embrace your creativity and all this power.

Apple has given a release date for the second of two Tom Hanks films it acquired during the pandemic. Finch, a futuristic tale about a reclusive inventor and his canine and robot road buddies, hits Apple TV+ on November 5th. Like Hanks’ war movie Greyhound before it, the film became a casualty of the pandemic, mired by release date delays until Apple swooped in to acquire it from Universal. The robot (pictured above) is played by Caleb Landry Jones, fresh off a best actor win at Cannes. 

Hanks plays the titular character, an ailing robotics engineer who emerges from his self-imposed underground exile to journey across a desolate American wasteland. Along for the ride are his dog, Goodyear, and an android who names himself Jeff. Together, they make a dysfunctional family, but can they learn to get along? I guess we’ll have to wait till November to find out. 

Finch is also loaded with offscreen talent. The good-natured sci-fi flick is directed by Emmy-winning Game of Thrones lead Miguel Sapochnik, with Alien scribe Ivor Powell and newcomer Craig Luck on screenwriting duties. While director Robert Zemeckis serves as an exec-producer and the film hails from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, which may explain why the plot gives off major Cast Away and AI vibes.

The November release date also signals Apple’s possible confidence in the film’s awards chances. Either that or it’s just looking to add a major movie to its fall line-up, which is already stocked with big hitters like sci-fi series Foundation, the second season of The Morning Show and current affairs show The Problem with Jon Stewart.

Film production drastically slowed during the pandemic, but it didn’t come to a halt. Already, movies made under the constraints of the past year have begun to emerge as a peculiar subgenre. I’ve been unimpressed by the examples I’ve seen so far—the absurdly on-the-nose caper “Locked Down,” the spatially and imaginatively limited romantic drama “Malcolm Marie.” But, with “Joji,” a new Indian film directed by Dileesh Pothan, there’s finally a movie that integrates the pandemic gracefully and intelligently into its story. It was filmed at the end of 2020 and the beginning of this year, in the state of Kerala, and it’s an adaptation of “Macbeth”—a very loose one, so much the better.

The film, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, is set in the present day, in and around the sprawling compound of a wealthy and domineering landowner, Kuttapan Panachel (PN Sunny). Kuttapan is in his early seventies and runs his family with an iron fist. His three grown sons tremble and grovel in his presence, none more than his youngest son, Joji (Fahadh Faasil), who seems to be around thirty and is bitterly frustrated—including with himself. While Joji’s brothers, Jaison (Joji Mundakayam) and Jomon (Baburaj), keep busy with the family business, Joji, a college dropout and something of a ne’er-do-well, has big dreams of (literal) horse trading but needs money to fuel his risky venture. Jaison’s wife, Bincy (Unnimaya Prasad), who is treated like a servant by all the men in the family, endures her servitude in anticipation of a grand inheritance.

The mighty Kuttapan is muscular and violent, physically abusive to Joji and physically active on his estate. One day he enters a pond where workmen are failing to fix a clogged valve. He finishes the heavy labor himself and suffers a massive stroke. He’s taken to the hospital in grave condition and is considered likely to die; for Joji and Bincy, the prospect of inherited wealth is tantalizingly close. Yet Kuttapan survives, and Joji decides—with hints and winks of guidance and encouragement from Bincy—to do something about it. Then Kuttapan’s death becomes a matter of suspicion, and Joji expands his killing spree to cover up his filial betrayal.

The movie borrows no Shakespearean language, no royal or martial context. It is less “Macbeth” than a current-day film noir about the stifled passion and terrifying rage beneath familial decorum. Those tensions burst forth in “Joji” in a wide range of expressive flourishes, including finely nuanced dialogue and hair-trigger violence, tensely poised images and fiercely frozen gazes. Pothan’s eye for symbolic detail starts with an air gun, which Jomon’s teen-age son, Popy (Alex Alister)—having bought the weapon with money stolen from Kuttapan—fires at a tree that oozes sap like blood. There’s sharp dramatic precision in images of Kuttapan nearly choking the dozing Joji with a distinctively brutal gesture; in the extended and bitterly ironic exertion with which family and attendants bear the paralyzed Kuttapan from an ambulance to his bedroom; in the immobile elder’s deadly glower at his greed-driven sons. There’s also the sheer pressure of time in quiet, contemplative sequences—walking, driving, fishing—that seethe with latent violence. Such details infuse the movie with a gloriously eloquent and intricate visual texture that conjures the rhetoric of tragedy in spare language.

The script, by Syam Pushkaran, is both practical and fiercely expressive, as when, at a religious service for the ailing Kuttapan (the family is Christian), the priest, Kevin (Basil Joseph), dismisses with empty homilies Kuttapan’s evident physical discomfort, or the family shares its sotto-voce complaints about the old man’s miserliness. (There’s vast eloquence in the dialogue’s brevity, as when the family doctor, a relative, takes leave of Joji, calling him “you millionaire.”) There are no witches or war on the horizon in “Joji.” Rather, there’s the impinging power of civil and religious authorities, and the menacing gossip of neighbors. Their opinions and evil rumors intermingle potently with the judgment of the police and weigh heavily in the family’s action, as if their private lives endured a sort of supernatural surveillance. Mirrors, slats, drones, and the commanding perches of high ground convey a sense of public menace in private life, a prying both from without and from within, by the inner force of conscience.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus rages, and Pothan finds ways to fuse the practicalities of the pandemic with the film’s dramatic themes. Death is in the air, as at Kuttapan’s funeral, where the presence of mourners with masks and the presence of even more without them evokes both the deadly menace at home and a civic life in dangerous disorder. When Joji tries to avoid the funeral, Bincy urges him, for the sake of appearances, to “put on a mask and come.” In a shot of Joji looking at his masked face in the mirror, the covering bypasses its medical function to embody his amoral and criminal self-concealment.

Ultimately, “Joji” runs up against a Shakespearean paradox: the external forces of public life, though embodied in brilliant cinematic symbols, nonetheless never quite weigh as heavily in the action as the family drama does. Lacking grand-scale politics and matters of the throne, “Joji” spins out, close to the end, into an altogether more conventional crime story—albeit one that Pothan and Pushkaran cap with wild cleverness. But the disappointment of the dénouement matters only slightly. Long before the plot is resolved, “Joji” offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.

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Amazon has struck a multi-year deal for exclusive Prime Video streaming rights for Universal’s live-action theatrical releases. As Deadline reports, it’s the first time Amazon has made such an agreement with a major US studio. The deal kicks in with Universal’s 2022 slate of movies.

Here’s where things might get a little confusing. The deal is for a chunk of the pay-one window, which is the 18-month period after a movie’s theatrical run. Earlier this week, Universal and its NBCUniversal sibling Peacock reached a similar agreement for the first four and last four months of the window.

Within four months of their theatrical release date, Universal’s live-action movies will start streaming on Peacock. Four months after that, they’ll move over to Prime Video for 10 months, then the films will go back to Peacock for at least another four months. Streaming rights can get pretty complicated!

The deal covers Blockbusters such as Jurassic World: Dominion, Get Out director Jordan Peele’s next horror film and Halloween Ends. Movies from Focus Features and Blumhouse are also part of the pact.

Netflix currently streams Universal’s animated movies from Illumination and DreamWorks. According to Deadline, from next year onwards, Netflix might still stream the studio’s animated releases for the 10 months of the pay-one window that they’re not on Peacock. In any case, those films will hit Prime Video at a later date. Phew.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s free streaming service IMDb TV will hold exclusive streaming rights for 2020 and 2021 theatrical movies from Universal. The deal covers The Invisible Man and current box office champ F9, along with some older animated movies like Despicable Me 2, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Shrek 2.

The Prime Video deal follows a major agreement between Netflix and Sony Pictures. Starting in 2022, Netflix will have exclusive rights to Sony’s theatrical releases for the 18-month pay-one window. So, movies like Uncharted, the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel and Morbius are all Netflix-bound.