Yashaswini Sri

in The Indian Express

Ashwin Chandrasekar's latest offers genuine moments and strong performances but suffers from familiar plot and jarring tonal shifts.

in The Indian Express

A father protecting his son from a profession that carries social stigma, while quietly continuing it himself; that is the kind of layered conflict that can make for a memorable film if handled well.

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Vijay shines but the film fails to catch up.

in The Indian Express

This is the best Suriya has been in years, and that is not a small thing. He carries the film through its weaker stretches on effort alone, and in the moments where everything clicks, Karuppu is exactly what a Tamil mass entertainer is supposed to feel like inside a theatre. The reunion of Suriya and Trisha, their first film together in roughly two decades, works because they are not playing lovers. They are two lawyers on the same side, and that dynamic brings a warmth to the film that a forced romance never could have. Karuppu is flawed in ways it cannot hide. But it has Suriya at his most committed, a first half that delivers, and enough big moments to make the ticket worth it. Just brace yourself for the second half.

in The Indian Express

As a physical exercise, the dual performance works.

in The Indian Express

It’s a smaller canvas than what he usually works with, and a first real outing in Telugu, but the instinct behind the twist feels exactly like his. Telugu cinema knows how to build a mass entertainer around a male star, and it does that reliably. What it does less often is hand a woman the same scale of action and the same room to carry a film entirely on her own terms. Maa Inti Bangaaram is exactly that kind of attempt, and between Samantha’s conviction in the lead role and the combined vision of B V Nandini Reddy and Raj Nidimoru, it fills a gap that has sat empty in the industry for a while now. It is not a flawless film, but it is a sincere one, and Samantha’s work alone is reason enough to stay till the credits roll.

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Vishal’s directorial debut Magudam is an ambitious, action-heavy revenge saga that boasts committed performances across three timelines, but struggles with a screenplay that cannot always hold its m

in The Indian Express

When the film leaves the water and becomes a land-based drama about power, exploitation and survival, the screenplay loses the specificity that made the sea portions so compelling.

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The director spent five years developing the script, aiming to make what he calls a Telugu story made for the world, moving from his earlier naturalistic approach toward heightened visual layers and intricate detailing.

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For a film that needs its background score to do heavy lifting during long stretches without dialogue, the music is too flat, too safe and too forgettable.

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Sing Geetham does not choose a lane. It is a fantasy, a musical, a mystery, a comedy, a drama, and an environmental fable, all rolled into one. Singeetham has spent a career juggling genres, and here he has attempted something more ambitious. He has tried to weave all of them into a single piece of cloth. What holds all those genres together is not plot or structure, it is compassion. The film’s real subject is what happens to a community when people stop genuinely caring about each other and the world around them, and what it costs them to find empathy again. That theme runs quietly beneath every tonal shift, whether the film is being funny, unsettling, tender, or mythological. This is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds. Sing Geetam largely manages it.

in The Indian Express

Jayakrishna Gummadi’s cinematography gives Tirupati a visual identity that feels specific and grounded.

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At its core, Thaai Kizhavi is a film about how families take strong women for granted until they’re suddenly not there. It makes that point without a lecture. The film makes the point that when a family eventually falls apart, it’s often the woman at the center who had been holding it together all along, and nobody notices until she’s gone. The message lands because it’s embedded in the story, not announced.

in The Indian Express

What arrives on screen instead is a film that worships its hero, lectures its audience, and forgets to tell a story worth caring about.

in The Indian Express

Suriya returns to the family entertainer genre after nearly two decades, delivering a warm, sincere romantic drama that works largely on the strength of its performances, and less on the script.

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