Aaranyakaandam Review: Righteousness is a luxury

Edhu thevayo, adhu dharmam, Aaranyakaandam says at the beginning and at the end. Righteousness is whatever is necessary at any point. It means there can be no objective morality in a world that isn’t an equal playing ground. For some privileged and comfortable enough, a belief in virtue and righteous behaviour may be possible. For some others, survival…

With Love Review: Expressing Love without Expectation

I truly believe that in every good film, there lie delicate moments that lay bare its soul, moments where you know you’re in the presence of beauty. With Love has quite a few of them, and it’s these moments that truly make this film for me. Yes, the premise is clever, and keeps things energetic….

Parasakthi Review: A passionate argument, a distant film

At one point in Parasakthi, someone observes that language isn’t merely a tool to express thought. It is thought itself. Languages aren’t clothes you can change for convenience and still remain the same person inside. Each alters you. To suffocate one language or impose another, then, isn’t simply a superficial shift. It is a demand for transformation. It…

Avatar: Fire and Ash Review: Beautiful, bleak, but barely evolving

For a while, it’s so good to be back in the Avatar world, to surrender to the astonishing visual joys that James Cameron offers. Each moment, each shot feels so textured, so dense with detail, that it’s so easy to forget all of this isn’t real. Skin, flora, water… all of this feels so tangible….

Dhurandhar review: Craft, conviction, and troubling certainty

The soul of Dhurandhar is rooted in quiet deception. Wait, I’m talking about Hamza Ali Mazari’s (Ranveer Singh) mission. He’s a spy operating across borders in this 214-minute film, and given this running time and the number of characters, motivations and political threads it handles, this film could very easily have collapsed into something rambling…