Delhi 6 (DVD)

Delhi-born writer-director Rakesh Omprakash Mehra offers a cinematic love letter to his fascinating, complex home town with DELHI-6. The film finds a group of Indians--and one Westerner--trying to establish a balance between respect for tradition and a desire for modernity. Here, the outsider is a New Yorker, Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan), whose parents, a Hindu and a Muslim, left India before his birth.

Roshan agrees to take his sick grandmother (Waheeda Rehman) back to her gracious haveli amid the chaotic lanes of Old Delhi. In the old city, Roshan is alternately skeptical, bemused, smitten, and aghast as he watches the goings-on around him. Accepted as one of the family by his grandmother's friends, he enjoys the slow rhythm of their mostly traditional lives.

He attends performances of the Ram Leela play, a centuries-old drama of good and evil, with characters swooping past on suspension wires and the stage rustling with red crepe-paper flames.

But Mehra's script also focuses on the uglier side of tradition: the casual mistreatment of slow-witted or low-caste residents, the local cop's corruption, the threat of violence between Hindu and Muslim communities, and the unhappiness of a young woman whose father fears that her independence will destroy his reputation. Mehra deftly shows the tension between the beauty of the old ways and the horrors they sometimes inflict. Tempted to give up on India altogether, Roshan has a vision of autorickshaws putt-putting through Times Square as the monkey god Hanuman flies past neon signs overhead.

Of course, it's only a dream, but it inspires Roshan to keep seeking a real-world way to combine the best of the old and the new.