• 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…

    Read more →

  • Wonder Women

    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…

    Read more →

  • Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu

    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…

    Read more →

  • Card tricks

    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…

    Read more →

  • 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.

    Read more →

  • Let me talk about this ad that’s been popping up every so often while I’m on YouTube, or the Sun Nxt app. Now, I like chocolate as much as the next person, okay? Hershey’s Kisses, too. But a few things bother me about this ad. First, why is this food item feeling so happy about…

    Read more →

  • Sphere of Influence

    I was witness to one of the stranger variants of Tu jaanta nahin main kaun hoon recently. I was traveling in an auto from Nandidurga Road to my place. My auto driver was a rather portly, elderly gentleman, the kind who could moonlight as Santa Claus in the mall if business was tough. The traffic…

    Read more →

  • On the choices made in telling stories about characters with baggage, in Vada Chennai and Chekka Chivantha Vaanam

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • Manmarziyan

    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…

    Read more →