Sudhir Srinivasan

Jananayagan Movie Review: When a Farewell Becomes a Manifesto

I suppose the question always was: what’s so special about Bhagavanth Kesari that it needed to be repurposed as Vijay’s last film? Balakrishna’s film rides on moments, on his entertainingly over-the-top presence, on a kind of, shall-we-say, self-aware absurdity? When he yells, “Bro! I don’t care!”, you’re laughing even as you’re cheering. With Vijay, we…

The Odyssey Movie Review: Christopher Nolan’s Homecoming

The control Christopher Nolan exercises over his cinema deserves to be studied. That he has mastered hero elevation should be evident to anyone who’s watched just Batman Begins. In The Odyssey, he reminds us once again that there can be no true elevation without… restraint. Here, the protagonist, Odysseus, must first suffer—and how he suffers. In the…

Idhayam Murali Movie Review: The Confusion of Modern Love

Idhayam Murali begins with some generic nostalgia bait: patchy cable TV connections, teacher crushes, Fanta bottles, desktop computers and CD-ROMs that I gazed at with half-misty eyes… There may be all this nostalgia in the beginning (perhaps because it is a reinterpretation of Idhayam, a film from a different time), but make no mistake, the…

Balan: The Boy Movie Review: When You Run from Love

In Balan: The Boy, you spend an entire first half following a mother and her son, watching them drift from place to place, drop identities like clothes, until that heartbreaking interval when they get separated. When the second half begins, of course, you’d expect to remain with one of them. Instead, like society that has abandoned…

Nooru Sami Movie Review: The Woman in the Mirror

You know how we’ve made important films that examine who people are allowed to marry in our complex, problematic world. One of them, the unforgettable Kadhal, is even referenced in Sasi’s new film, Nooru Sami (which, fascinatingly enough, features Kadhal’s director Balaji Sakthivel as an antagonist). And yet, in our cinema, sometimes we fail entirely…