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I remember being absolutely blown away by Halle Berry’s performance in Monster’s Ball. And her victory at the Oscars, while expected, was also a sweet moment because it was part of a trifecta for African American actors – Denzel Washington won Best Actor for an amazing performance in Training Day, and Sidney Poitier won a…
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This is my I-told-you-so post, the one where I get to gloat about how accurate my predictions were. I’m discussing the filmfare awards, about which I had made my predictions at the end of last year. Permit me this moment of self-congratulation: rarely have I been this accurate. Here’s how I fared: Best Picture My…
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Salangai Oli was one of those movies that characterized the best of its era in South Indian cinema: individualistic, dramatic and comprising a clutch of bravura moments. It also happens to feature one of Kamal Hassan’s greatest performances, as a classical dancer whose love for his art, and for one woman, are pretty much the…
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Rocky Balboa is a curious movie. As the latest movie in a series that went steadily downhill after the first installment, the expectations were as low as they could ever get. But, like Rocky himself, it is a surprising triumph. Not a universal one, though – it is about an old boxer coming back to…
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The problem with Pokkiri, the new Vijay starrer, is simply this: it does too much. There’s the story of how a young, ruthless killer named Thamizh rises up the ranks of the Chennai underworld. There’s the love story between him and Asin, which gets interrupted, both literally and metaphorically, by bouts of violence. Then there’s…
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There’s a little verse in this Al Pacino movie called Sea of Love. It goes: I live alone within myself, like a house within the woods.I keep my heart high up upon a shelf, barren of other goods.I need another’s arms to reach for it, and place it where it belongs.I need another’s touch and…
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I spend a lot of time listening to movie music. The reason for this can be condensed to two words: Marathahalli Bridge. This is a little stretch in Bangalore on my way to work where I’ve spent a significant fraction of my adult life staring at the butt of the car before me. My only…
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Roger Ebert’s essay on Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru – it’s so well written, so passionate in its description of the movie, that it ranks among my favourite pieces of writing in general. A lot of what Ebert has written about the movies is brilliant, but his essay on Ikiru is, I think, his best work to…
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Pithamagan has one flaw: Laila is too loud to be credible. There, I’ve got that out of the way. Otherwise, this is pretty much a perfect movie. Heavy, hard-hitting, and comprising some incredible performances. So good that using anything less than superlatives to describe the performances of Vikram and Surya would be an insult. The…
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Nanda was Surya’s breakout movie, the one that transformed him from a generic romantic hero to an actor of substance. A number of movies that came afterwards cemented that position – Kaakka Kaakka (the best cop drama in Tamil cinema bar none, in my opinion), Perazhagan (his most astounding performance to date), Pithamagan (stole nearly…
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