Recipe for a box office winner Who could have believed that three average love stories would assume bigger proportions and become a lot more novel by the simple technique of connecting them all with a concept — in this case, past life regression and rebirth? The answer: K. V. Anand. A concept, not unlike the…

A thin line stops it from being terrific The kernel of a Gautham V. Menon (GVM) film is its love story. That’s his tour de force. While his romances — Minnale , Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya , Neethaane En Ponvasantham — are obvious examples of this, the best parts in even his cop films — Kaakha Kaakha…

A bucketful of clichés The recipe of Killadi could have been palatable, had the makers managed to get hold of a crucial ingredient they unfortunately seem to have overlooked — a time machine. If it were available, they would simply have had to input a random year in the 90s and hurl it back to…

A familiar ghost serves as humour fodder, again Remember when Subramaniapuram ’s success spawned a whole host of Madurai-based gangster films? It’s as if Tamil filmmakers sat up suddenly and concluded that the reason for the film’s success was its setting and genre. A few years later came Raghava Lawrence’s horror film Kanchana: Muni 2,…

This Kappal doesn’t sink The premise of Kappal — three friends willing to go to any lengths to stop the fourth from breaking their childhood promise of celibacy — isn’t altogether rooted in reality. But to be annoyed by it is to miss the point. There’s no message here, just like how the main characters…