It is perhaps a testament to the power of storytelling and cinema that no matter how important your message is, if you don’t respect the medium enough, the film doesn’t even work as a competent PSA (Public Service Announcement). Arulvaan follows a young tribal girl and her quest to find education, after she sees how her illiterate tribal community is exploited and oppressed by the ones in power. There is an all-encompassing unidimensionality to the film's making. It is as if the director was hoping you would be moved enough by the very real issue shown that you would give the shoddy making a pass. Which, ironically, translates to an (hopefully) unintentional form of exploitation despite the supposed noble intention.
There are storytelling leaps that are too much to bear, leaps that wink at the audience, and then there are leaps that add to the entire fantasy. The film works because the latter leaps outnumber the other leaps. The terrace on which Idhaya and gang often hang out is noticeably a film set, and the moon is obviously enlarged in VFX ,but there is beauty in such exaggerations, and Idhayam Murali gets it. If Idhayam (1991) was all about showing the pathos of an anxious yearner who crumbles under the weight of his own unsaid love, Idhayam Murali is a rose-tinted fantasy, in which, all the world conspires to give a yearner as many chances as possible until he finally gets it.
Con City is bloated with redundant self-serving scenes, try-hard stylisation, and writing choices that it believes are required for a film about financial fraud.
Kadhal Reset Repeat fails to answer a lot of logical questions, like why doesn’t any of them make Aditi record a video so she remembers the events of the previous day? By the time she does, it is already the climax, and it gets doubly frustrating to know that they did think of this but waited until the end of the movie for convenience's sake. However, since the film already has several other issues, thinking of logical errors on top of that only makes you engage with the film on a level you do not want to be on by then. It might be easy to wish you have Aditi’s amnesia so you forget Kadhal Reset Repeat tomorrow, but engaging in such humour makes you no better than the film’s writing.
What could have been a charming nod to his affection for the actor-politician turns intolerable as you realise that he is trying to imitate Vijay in an unironical manner. Yogi Babu dulls the cringe by making jokes about it. But it is not quite enough. We get second hand embarrassment as Jai gets increasingly bold trying to reaffirm his “affection” for and “association” with Vijay. Someone needs to remind Jai that the Tamil audience likes him enough to not expect such desperate measures. Sattendru Maarudhu Vaanilai is what happens when a typical Tamil murder mystery screenplay gets affected by the ‘brainrot’ virus proliferated by short form content, and mutates into a two-hour-long chain of one bizarre decision after another.
While it almost feels like a threat to her clearly terrified mother, the moment is punctuated with cinematic framing and elevated background music. This doesn’t mean that we are meant to cheer Ramya’s adamant defiance but just that this is probably how it all unfolds through her eyes. While handling a flawed protagonist, a film might feel the desperation to show how their flaws amplified their downfall or invited tragedies. This is where Bad Girl balances its empathy for Ramya while not being too attached to her. Flaws remain flaws and never transform into devices that generate later conflicts. There is no grand redemption or hard-won wisdom, just a subtle acknowledgement of the flaws.
Prashanth Vallavan of Cinema Express wrote "Bottle Radha is a sincere effort to dissect the mechanism and destructive force of addiction, built through several impressive elements brought together by the director.
The most tragic thing about Maareesan is how you can see a much better film right beneath the surface. It is especially apparent during the moments when Velayudham’s internal struggle spills out through philosophical musings. There is a poignant reflection on how our sense of self is just a string of memories. In another scene, Dhayalan remarks how loss of memory could be a blessing, while Velayudham adds how the disease has forced him to let go of the past and future and made him live in the present. Maareesan could have explored such grand and rich philosophical themes through two unlikely travellers bonding over a road trip. But, no, it settles for a simplistic crime thriller that ends with an angst-ridden “solution” for a sensitive real-world issue.
There are subtle mentions of the village’s casteist behaviour, like when the school-going children of the landlord’s house disrespectfully address Nallapaadan the same way they do someone their own age. The landlords trick Nallapaadan into working for free and later serve porridge in a coconut shell they keep outside their house. Albeit in an unsubtle manner, the film gives you historical context for how the underprivileged in the village lost their land and fell to oppression over the course of generations. OMNP is not a vacuous social drama with nothing much to say. Even though we are not being offered any new perspectives, thematic richness is one of the few strengths of the film. The problems with OMNP are more primitive. The filmmaking itself suffers from painful amounts of amateurism.
Maybe this is the future, and maybe we cannot entirely fault the makers for trying to make up for their lack of budget. But, even if you are a wide-eyed devotee of our algorithmic Gods, the AI-generated clips in Retta Thala would still leave you disappointed at the lack of originality in the prompts they typed out to create these clips. Breathtaking indolence aside, the most baffling thing about Retta Thala is not the AI clips but how everything around it, the ‘real’ scenes, feel like they were written by AI. How else would you explain everyone in the film looking like they walked straight out of H&M’s winter collection catalogue (the film happens in Pondicherry and Goa), or Siddhi Idnani’s character revealing her desire to move to France because she has crippling financial issues and is sick of her waitress job?
Instead, all we get is a discordant cacophony of several story elements forcefully made to fit together. Sabdham’s central issue can be described through a pivotal scene that arrives towards the middle. In one of the biggest stretches of exposition, Aadhi’s character explains every single gadget he uses as a paranormal investigator, in painstaking detail. There is one that records thermal signature, one that captures frequencies beyond the human range, and a contraption that beeps whenever a ghost is nearby. He does end up using them at some point, and we do understand how they work but it matters next to nothing when all of the exposition culminates into a scene where all the equipment goes haywire, recording extraordinary levels of paranormal presence, while barely anything registers on an emotional level for the audience.
Even though the film has a number of interesting ideas, they do not rise up in coherence to create a pleasing symphony. Instead, all we get is a discordant cacophony of several story elements forcefully made to fit together. Sabdham’s central issue can be described through a pivotal scene that arrives towards the middle. In one of the biggest stretches of exposition, Aadhi’s character explains every single gadget he uses as a paranormal investigator, in painstaking detail. There is one that records thermal signature, one that captures frequencies beyond the human range, and a contraption that beeps whenever a ghost is nearby.
Prashanth Vallavan of The New Indian Express wrote "The film starts off like a deceptively simple story, almost as if it has nothing to offer except for humour, we realise that Bloody Beggar is rich of heart and storytelling."
Prashanth Vallavan of The New Indian Express wrote, "The premise, the setting, the long list of supporting cast, and even the brand of wacky adventure, feel outdated.
Prashanth Vallavan of Cinema Express wrote "With the botched execution of Jolly O Gymkhana, it is obvious that Sakthi Chidambaram has erroneously believed that an insincere effort was the right attitude to make a lighthearted comedy."
