Review
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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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Advait Chandan’s Secret Superstar begins on a train. A bunch of school kids are singing and dancing. The songs range from the raucous to the raunchy. Watching them is a girl who smiles at their antics but doesn’t participate. And when she does sing, it is with her own composition. You suspect that, all this time,…
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Okay, let me get this out of the way: I went to see Mersal because I had heard that Vadivelu was in it. Thirty seconds into the film, I felt like I had received my money’s worth. He doesn’t get a full fledged comic role or a parallel track, just a regular supporting role with…
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On the WTFiness of my experience of watching Spyder
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War for the Planet of the Apes isn’t a bad film, but I left the theater feeling a tad underwhelmed. The trouble with the franchise is, the buried themes it seems to want to explore have been done already in other sci-fi blockbuster franchises, most notably the X-Men. Which makes it a problem because, once you…
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While I was watching Vikram Vedha, the author whose work kept coming to mind was Ed McBain. The film is structurally interesting — the cop and the gangster are cast as Vikramadityan and the Vedalam, and the latter narrates his story to the former as a series of moral conundrums. Each story peels off a…
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Nominally, Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum is about a pretty thief who tries to steal a gold chain on a bus and what happens next. But to boil it down to such a prosaic description would be a crime in itself. This is one of the most entertaining films of the year.
