Editor's Choice
Singapore Film Festival Celebrates Aamir Khan With Screen Icon Award, Opens With ‘The Assassin(s)’
Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk
At its 37th edition, the Singapore International Film Festival is bestowing its Screen Icon Award upon Indian actor, director and producer Aamir Khan, according to the announcement. The honor will feature a quarter-century Special Presentation screening of "Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India," accompanied by director Ashutosh Gowariker.
Opening the festival is the South Korean thriller "The Assassin(s)," helmed by director Hur Jin-ho.
"Lagaan," released in 2001, remains one of the defining credits of Khan’s career. The film earned a Best Film Filmfare Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s the project that anchors the Singapore tribute a quarter-century later. Khan’s broader record bears out the case for a career honor: nine Filmfare Awards from 32 nominations, including three for Best Actor, plus four National Film Awards spanning acting, producing and directing credits. His work as producer and director on "Taare Zameen Par" in 2007 brought him a Filmfare Best Director award on top of acting honors earlier in his career for "Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak" and "Raakh."
The pairing of a Screen Icon Award for an actor known for socially engaged mainstream cinema with an opening film built around a political assassination plot gives this year’s SGIFF lineup a specific shape, even if the festival hasn’t framed it that way itself.
Studio CarryOnHarry will be watching whether Khan’s Singapore appearance includes any comment on his upcoming projects, given how rarely he does extended festival press.
Studio CarryOnHarry Perspective
Opening a major festival with a political assassination thriller is a deliberate curatorial choice, one that signals whether organizers see cinema as a space for examining power and dissent. At Studio CarryOnHarry, we notice that pairing this with a Screen Icon honor for an actor whose films have engaged social themes—from agricultural reform in "Lagaan" to dyslexia in "Taare Zameen Par"—suggests SGIFF may be positioning itself toward substantive storytelling rather than spectacle alone.
In practice, this matters because festival programmers shape what gets international distribution, critical attention, and ultimately funding for future films. A festival that opens with a thriller about assassination, not action heroics, signals to producers and investors that there’s appetite for movies wrestling with political consequence. Over the course of a full festival, these early choices ripple outward.
What remains unclear is whether Hur Jin-ho’s film will sustain that thematic weight throughout, or whether the opening-night slot is primarily a commercial draw leveraging South Korean cinema’s current global momentum. The festival itself hasn’t articulated whether the pairing with Khan is intentional commentary or coincidence in programming.
The most useful way to read this may be not as "what does SGIFF believe in?" but as "what does SGIFF want audiences to expect?" A festival’s opening film is its first argument to attendees about what matters this year.
Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.
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Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk
Mushtaq Khan, a veteran Bollywood character actor, passed away at 56 after fighting cancer, as reported by multiple sources. Balle Balle Radio released a tribute following his passing.
According to accounts of his final days, Khan was taken to Nanavati Hospital in Mumbai following stomach pain complaints and died there that evening. Reports have varied slightly on the precise cause, with some describing liver cancer as the underlying illness and others noting a decline in his health over recent weeks; the exact date given for his death has also varied across accounts, with some placing it in mid-September and others on September 24.
Known for roles in Welcome, Hera Pheri, and Gadar, Khan had developed a long career as a comic and character actor in Hindi cinema and television. He was a familiar face in the ensemble comedies that defined a stretch of early-2000s Bollywood, typically cast in supporting parts that traded on sharp timing rather than lead billing.
Tributes have followed from across the industry and from platforms including Balle Balle Radio, reflecting the reach of a filmography built less on marquee roles than on steady, recognizable work over many years.
Studio CarryOnHarry sees this as a reminder of how much of Bollywood’s comic backbone over the past two decades rested on character actors like Khan, whose names moviegoers may not always have known even when his face was instantly familiar.
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A new image of Alia Bhatt has emerged from the forthcoming Bhansali production "Love & War," depicting the performer in an elegant cabaret-inspired persona. It follows the film’s first-look poster, which featured Ranbir Kapoor.
The film marks Bhansali’s reunion with Kapoor nearly two decades after the actor’s 2007 debut in "Saawariya," also a Bhansali production. It is Bhansali’s latest large-scale romantic drama, a genre he has built his career on since films like "Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela," his 2013 adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" that starred Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone. "Love & War" brings together Kapoor, Bhatt and Vicky Kaushal in the lead roles, produced by Bhansali Productions in association with Saregama.
Earlier images from the film showed Kapoor in an intense, battle-worn look, including one depicting a bullet wound, suggesting a war-torn backdrop to the story’s central romance. Bhansali has described the project as an attempt to do something out of the ordinary for him, without elaborating on plot specifics. Trade reports have pointed to reshoots and a rising budget as the film has moved through production, consistent with Bhansali’s reputation for extended, exacting shoots.
The movie will arrive globally on Thursday, January 21, 2027, in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, positioning it to anchor the Republic Day weekend box office in India.
Studio CarryOnHarry will be watching whether the pairing of Kapoor and Bhansali, absent from each other’s work since 2007, can translate into the kind of opening the film’s release-date positioning suggests they’re aiming for.
Studio CarryOnHarry Perspective
Alia Bhatt’s cabaret persona here matters because it signals something viewers have been watching unfold quietly—a deliberate shift in how she presents herself on screen. After years anchoring romantic dramas and intense character studies, this playful, theatrical styling suggests she’s becoming comfortable in roles that ask her to embody a specific aesthetic rather than disappear into vulnerability alone. That’s worth noting because it reveals a performer gaining permission to be ornamental, powerful, and enigmatic all at once.
Consider the difference between this and her work in recent independent films or dramas where emotional interiority dominates the frame. A cabaret look demands physical presence and visual command—it’s about the silhouette, the stance, the moment. In a Bhansali production especially, where costume and production design carry as much narrative weight as dialogue, this suggests Bhatt may be playing a woman defined partly by surface, mystique, or historical context rather than inner conflict. That’s a fundamentally different acting register, one that requires restraint rather than revelation.
What we don’t yet know is whether this styling choice signals a major plot function or primarily serves aesthetic continuity with Bhansali’s visual language. The cabaret framing could mean her character occupies a specific world within the film’s backdrop, or it could simply be how Bhansali is choosing to present her alongside the "war-torn" imagery associated with Kapoor. The actual narrative weight of this look remains unclear.
The real insight may be that Alia Bhatt’s career is moving toward roles where she can anchor a film through presence and visual authority, not just emotional intensity. That’s a maturation worth watching—one that positions her differently within the Bollywood landscape than where she began.
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