Vishal Menon

The Boy, directed by Chidambaram, calling it a painful ode to lost innocence and a boyhood that never was—a heartrending drama about a son’s search for his mother, even when the film wanders a little too far from its core. Vishal admires how unengineered the storytelling feels; rather than a constructed plot, it plays like someone recalling the most vivid memories that defined his childhood. He traces Indhu (Farzana), who gave birth to the titular Balan in prison, as she and her son move from city to city, terrain to terrain, even religion to religion, assuming fresh identities and back stories while she reminds herself to trust no one. Vishal lingers on the duo’s outlaw spirit, the recurring sense of the past catching up with them, and the moments—a shopkeeper’s request, a marriage proposal, a heart-shaped earring—that each become Indhu’s cue to flee.

Subhash K Raj’s Blast is a movie that’s written for and around its high moments. It’s almost like Subhash knows how these moments will be received in the theatre, and he also understands the careful plotting and planning that’s required for them to land, once he allows them to. For this, he has figured out his own method to create a reasonably engaging action comedy around an idea that may have been too small, even for a short film.

First-time director Paul George’s Kattalan is what one may call a graphic novel movie. Almost all of its dialogues can be fit into two sides of an A4-sized page, and the effort that’s gone into it is only to re-create a storyboard that was made as a part of the film’s “writing”. As a film that follows the hyper-violent Marco in the same cinematic universe, Kattalan is a film that feels like it was forced to be made into a pan-Indian title. Apart from a handful of leads, almost the entire supporting cast is imported from all the other film industries of the country. Dialogues switch between Malayalam, broken Malayalam, Tamil, and English, and none of them delivers the impact it is meant to. And when they are not conveying plot points or exposition, Kattalan becomes home to some of the most pompous punchlines in all of our cinema.

Something about Karuppu tells me that something changed within RJ Balaji when he watched the first 20 minutes of Atlee’s Jawan. It’s the larger-than-life portion of the film in which a bandaged, mummified SRK emerges out of flames to reveal himself as God, nonetheless to a village that’s in desperate need of a saviour. GV Vishnu, who shot Jawan and Karuppu, has worked overtime to see if he can extend this vision through a full-length feature movie. Along with RJ Balaji and his team of writers, they’ve cracked open an idea that must have begun with this question: what if we transplant the mythical powers of a folk deity onto a modern-day superhero and see where it goes?

Like its protagonist Sathya (Vidhu), 29, the film too seems to be suffering from an identity crisis. For 29-year-old Sathya, he’s exactly at that age where he’s starting to realise that he’s made nothing of himself. At times, we see him dressed to play the part of an accountant in a Chennai startup. A scene or two later, we see him working as a server for a catering company. Then we see him dressed as a shopping centre mascot, and through all these costumes, we hear Sathya’s voiceovers asking out loud who he really is.

It’s not by accident that the one lasting memory from Por Thozhil (2023), remains the tense interrogation scene in which Sarathkumar’s character questions Sarath Babu as they wait for a train to pass at a railway crossing. After the film sets up its characters, director Vignesh Raja slows down time to a nerve-wracking degree to give us a sequence in which every pause is pregnant with layers and undercurrents, as an officer interrogates the man he suspects could be a serial killer…all of this to the menacing visuals of a red traffic light flashing right at you.