Review
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There is a preternatural stillness to Kaathal – The Core, Jeo Baby’s latest directorial starring Mammooty and Jyothika. People pray with solemnity, and there’s a lot of praying throughout the film. Courtroom arguments are presented in a normal tone of voice. Even a political campaign where one candidate uses a microphone is interrupted by rain,
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Statutory warning: Here be spoilers. For more or less the entire first half of the film, I was transfixed by Leo. The writing is clean, the screenplay flows like water, the action is well shot, and Vijay finds another gear I didn’t know he had. The opening stretch involves a stunningly shot and edited encounter
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Firstly, why the hell does the title need that extra i? Ah, never mind. Here’s the thing, and watch out, because there are going to be a few spoilers here: A young man finds out that his wheelchair-bound mostly-mentally-absent grandfather once had a dalliance with a woman named Jamini. Turns out they had, at the
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Listen, before you read any further, this post is gonna contain spoilers the size of a Wikipedia article on Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer. So beware. There’s a moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer when the team on the Manhattan Project is setting up for the Trinity test (the first nuclear test explosion) and the titular character
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There is an extended sequence at around the midpoint of Wonder Women where various expecting couples who make up the prenatal class that the film is set in, engage in an exercise involving a baby doll that they have to pretend is their baby. The subsequent conversations, largely centered around the women’s significant others, give
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There is an exchange between Muthu, the protagonist and Paavai, the girl he is interested in sometime early in the second act of the film. She asks him where he is from; he replies with the name of his hamlet, and adds, by way of clarification, the name of a slightly larger place it is
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Assorted musings on Mahaan, a very interesting film that unfortunately doesn’t work as well as one wishes it had. This piece is likely to contain some spoilers, so don’t read it unless you’ve watched the film, or don’t plan to, or don’t care if someone puts out spoilers. Karthik Subbaraj seems to have made a
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Two viewings and a lot of thinking about Super Deluxe later, all I know for sure are two things: a. Thyagarajan Kumararaja has made a great film, and b. He’s definitely messing with us.
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Caution: Spoilers ahead. Read this only if you’ve watched the film. Gully Boy is a rousing tale, but it’s easy to look at the broad outlines of the plot and dismiss it as Dharavi’s 8 Mile or some such thing. That would be doing the film a huge disservice. A genre exercise must not automatically
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Taapsee Pannu occupies the center of Manmarziyan like this was the role she was born to play. And why wouldn’t she? The role’s a peach, and Pannu mines a vein of ferocity that makes her character in Baby and Naam Shabana look mild in comparison. It has been argued that the level of agency she
24 frames per second 