India, Feb. 27 -- As spectacle and AI-driven visuals take centre stage, is storytelling being sidelined in films? Ranjita Biswas reflects on the growing dominance of technology over emotion in contemporary cinema as the magic of celluloid is yielding to visual excess

I have a lot of respect for James Cameron, first introduced to me by Titanic in 1997. Like many, I found the film spellbinding - the range, the microscopic attention to detail to authenticate the period, and a love story written around the tragic sinking of the ship on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic in 1912.

His Avatar came in 2009 with the blue-tinted Na'vi inhabiting the extrasolar moon Pandora, carrying a strong message about environmental depletion through human ...