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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.
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Baradwaj Rangan’s series of interactions with contemporary Thamizh directors on Film Companion reminds me of nothing so much as Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. When Al Pacino introduced Lumet as he was awarded the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, he said, “The director directs.” But what does that entail, exactly? This is the question that drives
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Much has been written about the fact that this is a film about a female superhero helmed by a woman, and about how this has brought a unique set of sensibilities to the genre. I have nothing further to contribute in this regard. I agree with the assessment in general, and I agree that it
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Back in the last millenium, when I was still figuring out whom I wanted to work under for my doctoral thesis, I asked my friend and mentor Sridev for advice. I was leaning towards working with his advisor, Professor Asim Kumar Pal, so I figured he’d be able to tell me what the experience was
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A black woman in a plaid dress walks into a room full of white men in starched white shirts. She is Katherine Goble, a child prodigy who has been assigned to the Space Task Group at NASA owing to her skills at analytic geometry. In an ideal world, the first of these two sentences would
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There’s a quiet exchange between Mahavir Singh Phogat and his wife where talks about the difficulty of being a coach and a parent. I can’t be a parent when I’m being a coach, he says. That the world expects him to be a parent and not a coach matters little to him. He is clear-eyed
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By far the most refreshing thing about Moana is what it does not have: gender politics. The heroine, a plucky little girl born to the leader of a tribal chief on an island paradise, is expected to succeed her father. There’s no resentment on the part of anyone in the village on this count, nothing
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There is a scene at the beginning of the third act of Kodi when Dhanush’s mother, played by Saranya (she must, by now, consider this role about as routine as brushing her teeth) has a conversation with a major character. She starts off saying that she is not happy with what her son has become,