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…

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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…

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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…

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Backrooms Movie Review: The Rooms Inside Us

Backrooms. What a strange film. What a uniquely unsettling experience. You’ll probably ask if I was satisfied? But conventional satisfaction requires a film that falls within a familiar framework. Backrooms is trying to be something else entirely. It asks whether you can surrender yourself to its distortions: in storytelling, in visuals, in sound. It aims…

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Obsession Movie Review: Love Loses Limits

Before we sink into the many layers of Obsession, let me get my superlatives out of the way first: WHAT A FILM! What an ingenious premise. What a climax. What incredible performances from the lead actors. Inde Navarrette is tremendous as Nikki, of course, but how good is Michael Johnston as Bear? Also, did I…

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