Aditya Shrikrishna

Two months have passed since the events of Nelson Dilipkumar’s Jailer (2023). After dissolving Varman’s (Vinayakan) body in acid, Tiger Muthuvel Pandian (Rajinikanth) is quietly living as a supermarket supervisor somewhere in the hills near Coimbatore. He doesn’t look for trouble, but it tends to follow him, first in the form of a young man picking up a street fight and then by way of a government officer who, in a petty show of might, simply torments the family by supplying dirty water. All this is in keeping with Nelson’s low-key treatment of Rajinikanth’s star wattage, making him a leaner, meaner family man who prefers to delegate action rather than wield it himself. Muthuvel solves the water issue on his own and when push comes to shove, a mild thrashing does the job. Nothing life-threatening. Nelson maintains the same somber beginnings of the first film.

Karthik Subbaraj’s Dorothy is a cinema of red herrings and foreshadowing. In the beginning, it declares itself as a ballad to the friendship of Karthi (Rishikanth) and Subbu (Sananth), their early childhood in school, their companionship that triumphs caste, and their affection that transcends class. It is an inception that’s familiar to the Tamil audience, one that evokes so many films from the past, from Uyarndha Manithan, Paarthal Pasi Theerum and Alayamani to Sattam, Annamalai, Thalapathy and Friends. Subbaraj sets it closer to his stomping grounds—in and around a village in Madurai in the mid-90s. If the last fifteen years are any indication this points to only one genre—the gangster saga known as 3Ms, Madurai Murder and Mayhem—and so goes Subbaraj, populating the film with familiar tropes and beats, making Karthi and Subbu the muscle for a local thug.

The first few scenes of Shahad Nilambur’s Pradhama Drishtiya Kuttakkar remind one of Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, in how undramatically we find out about the death of Aleena Abraham’s (Parvathy Thiruvothu) husband on duty. Aleena, with a child and the hopes of her husband’s family pinned on her, takes the police job on offer. There are no theatrics, no sad ballads or wave of sympathy for her, her baby or her situation. Theatrics is for later, but manufacturing sympathy almost never enters the picture, for Aleena is cut from a different cloth. The film then speedruns—a montage covers her training, a split-second encounter with her husband’s former colleague, her posting to a station in Kottayam and getting comfortable with the new workplace and her sufficiently leisurely colleagues, all of them in the lowest rungs of the police hierarchy. We realize that time has passed and the baby is now a toddler.

It’s quite easy to describe I’m Game, Nahas Hidhayath’s follow up to his wildly entertaining debut, RDX (2023). Imagine if SP Muthuraman’s Enakkul Oruvan (1984) and Madonne Ashwin’s Maaveeran (2023) had a baby. The older film is a kooky reincarnation saga played with melodramatic earnestness while the latter maintains an irony-tipped sharpness through its serious action-oriented storytelling. I’m Game doesn’t always get the ratio of this mix right, but it hedges its bets on the handful of inventive ideas that keeps the proceedings engaging.

Tamil cinema’s current epidemic is directors auditioning themselves as leads, and Lokesh Kanagaraj is its latest carrier. In Arun Matheswaran’s DC, Kanagaraj is Devadas, a wronged hero discarded by society. He beats, shoots, maims and kills, but doesn’t like to be called a rowdy or a gangster. There are no backstories in DC; Das and his gang are a strange mix of delinquents with revolutionary blood running inside them. They have a leader, Arasu (Thalaivasal Vijay), whose aims and ideologies are equally nebulous, but in the first few scenes in the film the gang accosts a police vehicle to steal a weapons consignment. An inadvertent act by a cop leads to the gang exacting revenge by savagely murdering him, which in turn launches a more stringent manhunt. The police officer giving orders to the team entrusted with this task signs off with two words: be brutal.

H Vinoth’s Jana Nayagan, more importantly Vijay’s Jana Nayagan, or even more accurately Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay’s Jana Nayagan, finally sees the light of day. An obvious propaganda vehicle, Vijay’s cinematic swansong was slated to release in January this year. But the film faced release troubles when the censor certificate was withheld without reason, forcing the makers to approach the courts. The court and censor battle stretched long enough that several things came to pass. The film mysteriously leaked online. Tamil Nadu then had its state elections in April, in which Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam emerged as the biggest party, leading to him taking oath as the state’s Chief Minister on 10 May. It was such an eventful, unprecedented couple of months that the film always had an uphill task, a mere underscoring of the occasion.

Raja (Murali), from Kathir’s debut film, Idhayam (1991), may have become iconic over the years, partly due to the grating niceness and tragic innocence of the character (and mostly due to Ilaiyaraaja’s music). But in a contemporary world in which we reevaluate gender, misogyny and the obsessive nature of love, the idea of unrequited romance makes the conversation feel like the colloquial phrase we use to describe it—one-sided. Rathna Kumar’s superior Meyaadha Maan (2017), refracts the idea through a class lens, where the disparity in economic positions chokes the character out of expressing his true love. This year’s Hollywood phenomenon Obsession reimagines extremities of a nice-guy-dream realized to the point of stifling one life for the other’s wishful fantasy.

There is an incredible time jump a little over halfway into Chidambaram’s Balan: The Boy. A police station hide and seek battle between a police constable and a lost little boy (Adiseshan) occurs in parallel with the search for his identity, conducted by the police officer, the one who’s given the constable babysitting duties. We move between the officer’s investigation outside and the game in the station as the nonplussed constable launches a frenetic search only to hit a wall. With a medium size hole in it small enough for the boy to crawl through. A painful realization dawns on her face and a match cut takes us to a bus window with the solitary face of a teenager speaking a language from another part of India. The whole sequence is hardly a few minutes long, but Chidambaram, cinematographer Shyju Khalid and editor Vivek Harshan take us on such a delirious ride that we transcend time.