Gopinath Rajendran

Two clips from recent promotional interviews went viral for the most ironic reasons. A Telugu producer asserted that there’s no nepotism in their film industry, and closer home, Sundar C, while promoting his movie Gangers, said his films never have double-meaning dialogues or suggestive sequences. Of course, netizens called it out and had a field day on social media. In fact, that is one of a few more concerns that plague Gangers, a rudimentary heist comedy almost rescued by the back-in-form legendary comedian Vadivelu. Veteran filmmaker Sundar C’s films are known for their simple plots, and Gangers is no different. The film is a mishmash of several ideas and templates we have gotten accustomed to — some from the director’s yesteryear hits. When a schoolgirl goes missing, her teacher, Sujitha (Catherine Tresa), takes it up and gets an undercover cop to serve as a teacher. Meanwhile, Saravanan (Sundar C) lands up in town as the new PET teacher for a school where Singaram (Vadivelu) holds the same position and has an eye for Sujitha. Is Saravanan the appointed cop? What’s the correlation between the teachers and the local gangsters masquerading as bigwigs? What are the films these plot points remind you of?…

Cwtch, which means embracing someone to offer a sense of warmth, is a famous Welsh word some of us might be familiar with. An inter-title before Naangal commences introduces us to another one word — Hiraeth — which means homesickness for a home one cannot return to or one that never existed. Very rarely can an entire film’s plot, conflict and resolution be summed up in a word, and director Avinash Prakash establishes precisely that in the first frame of his film, which also doubles as his biographical. With Naangal, Avinash puts us in the middle of three brothers’ traumatic yet transformative upbringing in a dysfunctional family. Rajkumar (Abdul Rafe) is a man whose once-affluent family is now bankrupt. After parting ways with his wife and some financial setbacks, he has become the chairman of a run-down school. With no place to assert dominance, he takes it out on his three children — Karthik (Mithun V), Dhruv (Rithik Mohan) and Gautam (Nithin D) — who stay with him and are forced to endure his physical and emotional torture. What happens when their resilience gets tested forms the rest of Naangal.

Who knew that a character sending a specific someone’s photo on a WhatsApp group would make for one of the ‘massiest’ sequences we have seen in recent times? Director Adhik Ravichandran, who, over the last ten years, has gotten us used to his use of bright colours, dutch-angle shots and quirky humour, takes it up a notch with his fifth film Good Bad Ugly (GBU), and with his idol Ajith Kumar headlining it, the young filmmaker pulls off what netizens would term as a “fanboy sambavam.” In GBU, AK (Ajith Kumar) is a retired gangster who has spent his due share of time behind bars and wants to lead a happy life with his wife, Ramya (Trisha), and son, Vihaan (Karthikeya Dev). But trouble comes knocking his way when his son is wrongly arrested and put behind bars. For the sake of the very son for whom he put down arms, AK now has to enter a world he vowed never to return to.

A bit of googling tells how terminal erection or death erection is an actual condition that’s very much as shocking as it sounds. It is also the core idea behind director Ilango Ram’s Perusu, the remake of the director’s Sinhala-language comedy-drama Tentigo, which bagged multiple accolades. In Perusu, Halasyam, a much-revered elderly person, dies unexpectedly. But his sons Samikannu (Sunil) and Duraikannu (Vaibhav) barely have the time or space to mourn as their father’s corpse, instead of developing rigor mortis where the muscles stiffen, gets a rigor erectus, causing the dead person to have an erection — or priapism as it’s technically called in which a penis remains erect for hours. As the family — which includes the heirs’ wives Shanthi (Niharika) and Nila (Chandini Tamilarasan), Halasyam’s wife (Nakkalites Dhanam) and her sister (Deepa Shankar) — believes this to be a travesty that the villagers and relatives cannot get a whiff of, they try everything in their power to um… bring things under control.

When a family matriarch, vexed about not having a grandson after her first two sons produce girl children, is on the verge of giving up, her third son’s wife births a baby girl while the son’s friend becomes a father of a male child. In a minor confusion, the matriarch mistakes the male child of her son’s friend as her grandson and it’s up to the son and his friend to maintain the narrative while external forces decide to kidnap the child. If you, like the reviewer, are a fan of actor Thyagu’s “Adhaan Varghese’u” line from the 1996 Tamil film Enakkoru Magan Pirappan, you would most likely know the above plot is from the same Ramki-Vivek starrer, which itself was a remake of the Malayalam film Aadyathe Kanmani. A tweaked version of this also happens to be the plot of Jai’s Baby and Baby, an uninspiring, insipid ‘comedy’ film.

In a scene in director Magizh Thirumeni’s Vidaamuyarchi, Ajith Kumar’s character Arjun, trying to move a stalled car from the road to the shoulder, wraps the car’s seat belt around him to push the vehicle safely. That, in a scene, encapsulates the film and the contribution of its lead actor to make it work. Walking out of the film, the biggest takeaway is how Ajith, the star who takes the road less taken when compared to his contemporaries off-screen, also pulls off the same with his choice of scripts. Irrespective of whether the payoff is worth the trade, it’s fun to see the star shed the vanity of stardom and surrender completely to the script in hand and that’s what makes Vidaamuyarchi work… almost. Heavily “inspired” by the 1997 Kurt Russell-starrer Breakdown, Vidaamuyarchi is the story of a couple whose road trip is interfered with by some uninvited guests and it’s up to the husband to save his kidnapped wife. More than a decade after Arjun (Ajith) and Kayal (Trisha) fell in love with each other and decided to tie the knot, the romance seems to have faded. When Kayal breaks the truth of having an affair and wants to file for divorce, Arjun decides to hit the road to drop Kayal at her parent’s place. Magizh layers the narrative by intercutting the journey of two strangers who fell in love 12 years ago, with the one last journey they take through the open roads of Azerbaijan.

By now, big stars teaming up for a streaming original film — mostly comedy, and made on a budget that makes you wonder about the recovery without a theatrical run — has become a mainstay. What’s been difficult is to shake off the tag that these films offer little entertainment compares to their big-screen counterparts. Films like Prime Video’sYou’re Cordially Invited tell you why this trend is, unfortunately, not a fad. Director Nicholas Stoller, the maker behind comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek, The Five-Year Engagement and Bros, is back for another comedy headlined by powerhouses Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon. In You’re Cordially Invited, a single father, Jim (Will Ferrell), to get his daughter Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan) married off, books a small inn on Palmetto Island where he got married years ago. Concurrently, television producer Margot (Reese Witherspoon) finds out that her sister Neve (Meredith Hagner) is planning on marrying and she volunteers to plan the wedding. She books the same Palmetto Island, where she and Neve visited their grandmother as children. Thanks to what can be only called a clerical error, both parties reach the island on the same day to learn about the double booking. While Jim and Margot initially decide to work it out by sharing the premises, their egos, insecurities, miscommunication, and many other mistakes play havoc.

After the astounding success ofThe Invisible Man, director Leigh Whannell is back to reboot another of Universal Pictures’ most iconic horror titles. While The Invisible Man turned out to be the outing that could have revived the Dark Universe which was shot down after the failure of The Mummy, the filmmaker’s latest film Wolf Man shows why the chances of getting that universe are darker than the films it could have. In the latest iteration of Wolf Man, after getting a “closure” on his father’s sudden disappearance along with the keys to his childhood home, Blake (Christopher Abbott) decides to make a trip out of it to save his strained marriage with Charlotte (Julia Garner). Along with their child Ginger (Matilda Firth), the couple drives to the middle of nowhere when they get attacked by a mysterious creature similar to what Blake had seen 30 years ago. When one of them gets infected while escaping from the monster, the barricaded safehouse turns into a trap.