Review
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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…
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Petta functions wonderfully as a supercut of Rajni’s filmography, set to old தமிழ் film music. The Mullum Malarum references abound, obviously – with a name like Kaali, that’s almost a given. One of them comes right at the end and is an absolute beauty. But there are so many others that much of the pleasure…
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Please, please go watch this film before reading my blog post. What an amazing, amazing film this is! I didn’t get to see it during its theatrical release, and I had the dubious fortune of being laid up with an infection on Deepavali evening, so it was just me and the TV at home. (Not…
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Consider the prefix “Once upon a time in” that is affixed in the English subtitle that appears during the opening credits. Here’s a director who has pretty much announced, right at the start, that he’s attempting to do to the bylanes of a fisherman’s slum in North Chennai, what Sergio Leone did to Manhattan’s Lower East…
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There is a long, unbroken take early in Kaala that serves to introduce the eponymous character’s family. It ends with some playful banter between a few characters, after which you get The Song. (You know, the one that’s a paean to The Hero and has been such a staple of big-budget hero-centric Thamizh cinema that,…
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I felt a strange sort of dissonance while reading Devi Yesodharan’s Empire. The story is told from the point of view of two major characters, and while the inner monologues and the descriptive sentences feel exquisite, the dialogue itself feels stilted. Does the fact that Thamizh is my mother-tongue have a part to play in how…
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Let me begin by talking about the weakest couple of scenes in The Post, the ones that made me so angry I could spit. At the beginning of the final act of the film, Katharine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post, makes the decision to side with her editor Ben Bradlee to publish an…
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There is an early conversation in Newton where one character explains the physicist’s greatest contribution: until he came along, people thought that the laws governing the earth were different from those governing the skies. Newton told the world that the same laws apply throughout the universe. The man providing this explanation expands this into a…
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