Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Alappuzha Gymkhana is about a bunch of small-town boys trying to become boxers. But the brilliance of director Khalid Rahman’s writing lies in the fact that the film is not actually about boxing. Jojo Johnson (Naslen), Shifas Ahammed (Sandeep Pradeep), Shifas Ali (Franco Francis), and David John (Habish Rahman) are teens from Alappuzha Gymkhana who have just discovered they haven’t cleared their board exams. This doesn’t come as a surprise to them—they seem to know their limitations. Jojo, the driving force of the group, convinces his friends that becoming boxers might help them gain college admissions, given that academics clearly aren’t their strength. But the real motivator seems to be their bruised egos. What begins as an impulsive decision gradually turns into something life-changing when the group enters a state-level tournament.

The impact of Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects is so enormous and timeless that even after three decades, filmmakers are unable to escape its influence on heist thrillers. Bazooka is another attempt at creating an elusive character like Keyser Soze. The catch is that such an attempt requires several things to fall into place, including clever casting that throws the audience off track and creates red herrings. Director Deeno Dennis misses out on this, leading to a predictable twist that’s visible from the get-go. The genius of The Usual Suspects lies in how the characters become real—everyone involved in the heist has something at stake, making their downfall feel impactful. Bazooka, on the other hand, lacks any real conflict. By the end of the film, when the motive behind the gamer villain is revealed, it feels like we’ve been played by the makers.

Good Bad Ugly once again reiterates that Adhik Ravichandran is perhaps the most campy filmmaker in Tamil cinema today. His eccentric ideas and characters make him one of the most unique voices in the mainstream commercial space, where creative sparks have been dwindling. Sengal Psycho from Trisha Illena Nayanthara, Switch Psycho from Anbanavan Adangadhavan Asaradhavan, and Chiranjeevi from Mark Antony embody the eccentricity that defines Adhik’s sensibilities. For those who can tap into the madness in such writing, the uniqueness of this director, despite its waywardness, becomes thoroughly enjoyable.

The film opens with the quote: “A hero will sacrifice the person they love to save the world, but a villain will sacrifice the world to save the person they love." This neatly encapsulates the film’s core idea. It examines two protagonists pushed to their limits, forcing them to choose between morality and self-interest—one emerging as a hero, the other a villain. At its core, Test has a compelling premise, but producer-turned-director Sashikanth struggles to transform it into an engaging film. The main issue lies in its characters, who feel artificial and distant, making it hard to empathise with them—despite strong performances from the cast.

‘Enter late and exit early’ is a popular screenwriting mantra that demands a writer start off the scene a bit late, narrowing it down to the important processing of the narrative, and exit before the resolution, leaving the audience wanting more. Director SU Arun Kumar has applied a part of this technique to the whole of Veera Dheera Sooran, which seems like a midpiece of a narrative. Hence, it’s numbered ‘Part 2’, despite being the first segment to get released. When we enter the world of Veera Dheera Sooran, it feels like you opened a novel midway. The characters are already established, and so are the origin of the context, and the motive of the characters. The film doesn’t wait for you to catch up, because it attempts to create a reality, where you are just an observer. It is indifferent to your understanding of what’s going on, and that’s the brilliance of Veera Dheera Sooran. It is more like reading a book than watching a film because it demands your investment. Things kick off when a husband complains to the police that Kannan (Suraj Venjarmoodu), an influential gangster, has done something to his missing wife and daughter. SP Arunagiri (SJ Suryah), who harbours vengeance for Kannan and his father Ravi aka Periyavar (Prudhvi Raj), uses the opportunity to end the two. When things get bad to worse, Periyavar seeks the help of an old friend, Kaali (Vikram), who is now running a provision store in a village. We are never explicitly told about all of their dynamics, but we seem to get it. That’s the splendour of the writing. You understand the characters by their actions, and not by what they say. Kaali is tasked with the job of killing the SP, but things take a different route when a hit job goes haywire.

The genius of Lucifer and Empuraan is that, despite spanning more than six hours of runtime (two films put together), the filmmakers continue to maintain the suspense about the origin of Stephen Nedumpalley (Mohanlal). What’s more impressive is the way director Prithviraj has scaled up this character. Stephen is not just a political kingmaker anymore. In Empuraan, he becomes much more, and to be honest, the conflict in Empuraan seems to be too small for him. That’s the downside of the film, as the villains are no match for the powers of Stephen. The first part, Lucifer, ended with a major reveal that Stephen Nedumpalley is a crime lord named Khureshi Abraham, a most wanted leader of an international syndicate. While Lucifer showed us, Stephen, Empuraan unravels his other facet: Khureshi Abraham. The film opens with a flashback to a violent riot in India. Director Prithviraj is clever in not delving into the details of the riot. Yet, the animated sequence of a burning train that kills Hindu pilgrims is enough to deliver the intended message. The aftermath of the riot leads to bloodshed and we find a kid named Zayed Masood, a lone survivor of a small Muslim community, which gets butchered, raped, and killed by Balraj (Abhimanyu Singh) and his bloodthirsty mob.

Sexual crimes have become the go-to place for filmmakers to find easy conflicts. It has become a license for all the on-screen violence of the protagonist and the viewer is expected to get a cathartic release seeing such revenge stories. In the end, the victim or the sexual violence itself is just reduced to nothing more than a conflict or a reason for the story. Trauma is yet another addition to the list of such Tamil films, which are on the rise now. However, director Thambithurai Mariyappan should be lauded as he at least doesn’t capture such violence with an exploitative gaze, which has become the norm. Such maturity is shockingly absent in other aspects of Trauma, which comes across as the work of a novice short-filmmaker. As far as the story goes, Trauma follows three narratives because it wants to be a hyperlink film, which is in vogue now (thanks to Lokesh Kanagaraj). We have two petty thieves who go about stealing cars. They are straight out of Tamil black-and-white comedy dramas because they seem to not even know how much a second-hand car would sell for. They wonder whether an SUV would sell for twenty thousand rupees, and that’s supposed to be funny.

Adolescence opens with a scene of a police officer DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) dealing with his son over the phone. The boy doesn’t want to go to school because of a bad stomach. When his colleague wonders if he will let him get away with the lame excuse, Luke says, “He knows Tracy (his wife) will say no, and I am a soft touch." The scene kicks off as a cute little moment between two officers and escalates into a volatile arrest sequence of a 13-year-old boy named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) as DI Luke and his team burst into his house. It takes a while to realise that the shot hasn’t cut ever since the first frame, and it doesn’t till the end of the episode. Adolescence has four episodes, each one done in a single shot, leaving you wondering how few sequences were even done. However, it is not a series that is all about technical excellence. After a while, you tend to forget the single-shot brilliance as the story is even more engrossing, taking you closer to a devastating state of parenting, the school system, and the rise of toxic masculinity.