Sudhir Srinivasan

Once smitten, twice try

Last week, a group of friends dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the theatre to watch Premam. Again. My resistance, of course, didn’t have much to do with the film itself; I had fallen in love with it as quickly as Premam’s protagonist, George, does with Mary. But at a time when films come and…

Rajinimurugan

Sivakarthikeyan lifts an average film There’s pretty much nothing in Rajini Murugan that will even startle you, let alone blow your mind. It’s everything you’ve seen already, but you know the thing that differentiates stars from actors? They’re able to take your mind off the silly story; they’re able to make you forget that the…

Gethu

Well shot, but no thrills Some movies are so pleasing visually, their every shot composed so painstakingly, that you are happy to cut them way more slack than you’d others. Gethu is one such. The whole movie takes place in an unknown hill station, and so, yes, the exotic locations must have naturally played their…

A bland life? Try it with a smattering of movies

When your main pastime is watching films — and if you’re the kind that sheds more tears in the confines of a theatre than outside — the lines between cinema and real life invariably begin to blur. As Jake Sully says in Avatar , “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world,…

Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam

Many Selvaraghavan touches in a mixed bag It has always remained a mystery why Selvaraghavan’s scripts treat sex as some nasty, depraved business. The characters are most awkward discussing it—yes, even by Indian standards—and when they just have to, they spit it out like a piece of food that’s been wedged in their teeth for…