Gangs of Wasseypur

Ambitious, compelling and accomplished, this Indian crime drama from director Anurag Kashyap owes a considerable debt to The Godfather and can stand confidently alongside Jean-François Richet's Mesrine (2008) and Olivier Assayas's Carlos (2010). This first instalment of a two-part, 317-minute epic chronicles the first five decades of a feud between the Muslim Khan and Qureshi clans that divides the northern mining town of Wasseypur and the city of Dhanbad that eventually subsumes it. The films teems with secondary characters, subplots, digressions and musical interludes, while the action is often frantic and very bloody. Rajeev Ravi's kinetic camerawork and Sneha Khanwalkar's knowing, homage-stuffed score are very impressive, as is the performance of Manoj Bajpayee as the head of the Khan dynasty, whose dealings with wife Richa Chadda and mistress Reema Sen are every bit as fraught as his rivalry with crooked politician Tigmanshu Dhulia. But it's Kashyap's dynamic direction that puts this in the top tier of sprawling gangster epics.