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….

Read More

Vaa Vaathiyaar Review: MGR arrives, the magic doesn’t

There’s a wicked moment in Vaa Vaathiyaar, when a minister is forced to read off a script over the phone, so a group of eavesdropping young activists can be conned by the performance, and walk themselves into trouble. The minister totally aces the performance, and you already know why. The damning assessment of Vaa Vaathiyaar is…

Read More

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…

Read More

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….

Read More

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…

Read More