Shukla Kumar, wife of Rajendra Kumar and mother of Kumar Gaurav, passes away; prayer meet to be held on January 10

Shukla Kumar, wife of legendary actor Rajendra Kumar and mother of actor Kumar Gaurav, passed away recently. The news has left the Hindi film fraternity and admirers of the Kumar family in mourning. A prayer meet in her remembrance will be held on January 10, as confirmed by close sources. While Shukla Kumar largely stayed away from the public eye, she was a central pillar in one of Bollywood’s most respected film families. Married to Rajendra Kumar, fondly remembered as “Jubilee Kumar” for his unmatched box-office streak, she witnessed the rise and transitions of Hindi cinema from close quarters. Her quiet presence remained constant through the highs of stardom and the inevitable shifts that followed. Her son, Kumar Gaurav, entered the film industry with one of the most sensational debuts Bollywood had seen. His 1981 film Love Story, opposite Vijeta Pandit, turned him into an overnight star and remains one of the most successful debut films in Hindi cinema. The actor was briefly hai...

Presence review – Steven Soderbergh’s intriguing ghost story experiment

Sundance film festival: The director tells a haunted house tale from the perspective of the spirit in a visually interesting yet dramatically underwhelming gambit

For the majority of film-makers, the restrictions insisted by Covid became a stifling force and created a clear dividing line between those who could flourish in extremely prohibitive circumstances and those who could not. Steven Soderbergh, a director who has never allowed anything – from Oscar glory to blockbuster success – to kill his plucky spirit of invention, made one of the only essential pandemic movies with the maddeningly underseen thriller Kimi, a sleek and canny new-tech upgrade of a paranoid 70s thriller. He found a way, along with the screenwriter David Koepp, to maximise limitations and the two have smartly reunited for a project that carries on-paper similarities.

Presence, a project shrouded in trademark mystery, shot over last summer with a waiver and now unveiling at Sundance, is another one-location genre exercise, playfully riffing on age-old tropes and allowing Soderbergh, as both director and cinematographer, the opportunity to experiment. This time he’s playing with the conventions of haunted house horror, his film told from the perspective of the ghost situated in a recently renovated house, new inhabitants moving in – a family, led by Lucy Liu and the This is Us actor Chris Sullivan with the newcomers Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as their teenage children. Like families often do in this genre, they’re arriving with excess baggage, tensions they hope will dissipate in a new home, a fresh start after a period of unease.

Presence is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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