Vishal Menon

Set aside all temptations to speak about small town Angamaly as a character in Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, because even a guitar has a full character arc in Gireesh AD’s effortlessly charming film. The first scene of the film is Ashley (Mamitha Baiju) getting ready to say goodbye to her group of close friends as we hear chatter about her moving to a college in Ernakulam. They click selfies, hug each other all teary eyed and as a farewell gift, her friends gift her a new guitar. It takes an hour more, but it’s when we see the wallpaper on Ashley’s screen that we’re told about a band named Room 17 and of how she was its lead guitarist. When her new neighbour Justin (Nivin Pauly) identifies the band that features on this wallpaper, it immediately brings Ashley closer to Justin, someone she thinks off as the only person around her who’s even heard of that band.

Director Elan’s Pyaar Prema Kalyanam could be termed a spiritual sequel to his first film Pyaar Prema Kadhal, a detail the director will not allow you to forget. At the core of it, they’re both films about the chaos that erupts when the families of a couple, decide to force their opinions onto their children. Both of these films also try to analyse a fairly modern (or seemingly progressive) relationship status from a distance, banking on the comedy that erupts when their orthodox family members try to come to terms with it. Pyaar Prema Kadhal, which released in 2018, did this with a couple that decides to enter into a live-in relationship, that too when one of their families live just one street away from them. In Pyaar Prema Kalyanam, Elan takes it one step ahead; the couple here are sure about getting married, but the groom must leave behind his home to move in with the bride and her family.

What you’re likely to feel about Venky Atluri and Suriya’s Vishwanath & Sons will largely depend on how you feel about Mamitha Baiju’s performance in it. She plays Maddy, a surrogate mother who enters the life of Vishwanath’s titular son when he’s emotionally blackmailed into finding an heir to his $5.4 billion fortune. Atluri could have used several descriptors to explain Maddy’s character to Mamitha Baiju, but there’s no denying the hangover of a thousand loosu ponnus of Tamil cinema who had to walk, just so Mamitha could run.

40 minutes into the three-hour-long Magudam, you feel like there’s almost nothing you’ve been told that matters to the larger plot. You’re introduced to a medical representative named Kripa and his family, and told repeatedly about their middle-class desire to buy a car. It’s info the film could have conveyed with one succinctly written dialogue, but Magudam hammers this point into our heads with sentimental scenes, a cringy family song about this dream and the most gnawingly dated comedy scenes led by Thambi Ramiah. It becomes clear as day that this car is going to be important to the plot, but given the amount of time it takes to keep droning on about it, you begin to expect a twist so original that you imagine M Night Shyamalan shifting base to Saligramam to live closer to Vishal.

In the interviews leading up to the release of Vismaya Mohanlal’s Thudakkam, it’s writer-director Jude Anthany Joseph spoke about how the basic concept of the film had been in discussion, as far back as 2020. There’s been a whole host of similar films that have released since, but there’s no denying the film’s obvious lack of sheen because it has hit screens after all of those films have released. In terms of its messaging alone, Darshana Rajendran’s Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaye Hey comes to mind, with recent releases such as Blast in Tamil and Maa Inti Bangaaram adding to an unignorable feeling of déjà vu. In first viewing, Thudakkam also feels like the most dated of these films, relying on a gratingly obvious amount of self-seriousness, as though it’s the first ever film to say what it’s trying to.

Where does one begin while setting out to describe the control Arun Matheswaran’s exercises over his source material, in what is easily his most complete film? In a series of staging masterclasses, Arun finds crackling new ways to lift what’s on paper to deliver a moment that feels satisfying in so many ways that you forget that you’ve perhaps scene this exact situation plays out in a hundred gangster dramas before. You can point to the half dozen action blocks to make the case for Arun’s superior cinematic eye but it’s in the “smaller”, more tender moments that you see a new side to this filmmaker.

If Shaji Kailas began his career today, he would wrestle with the idea of starting out as a celebrated food vlogger. Even when he’s setting up major action sequences, he seems obsessed with the idea of staging confrontation around food. Speaking strictly of its novelty, this could be something as inane as framing an intro shot while placing a hot, steaming glass of lemon tea at the foreground. But the ideas that cracked me up in his new film were the subtle innuendos he’s packed in to trigger a conflict. Take the instance of five masked assassins walking into a small restaurant with the intention of creating trouble. One of them looks at the waitress and shadily asks if she will give him some “buns and milk”. It’s meant to sound as off as it does, but the dialogue delivery of the actor makes it sound crass. When the film’s hero, Paulson (Joju George trying his best), walks in upon hearing this, he sends the bad guy flying with a kick to his groin. As he flies across the screen, we see two eggs flying with the same velocity, landing at the centre of a frying pan. A second later, Paulson slashes a sword across another bad guy and instead of zooming in on the damage this causes, we cut to a shot of a banana that gets sliced into two.

The best parts of Con City are when it tries, quite successfully, to be a found family film. It has a gentle pace and takes its time to introduce us to its lead characters and the complex manner which they come to meet one another. If Saravanan (Arjun Das) and Mithra (Anna Ben) are pushed into a life of crime as a result of their respective predicaments, the mother-son duo of Janaki (Vadivukarasi) and Jackie (Yogi Babu) are who they are simply because they want to get rich and make a movie. There’s no overt moralism in them and the fact that they all know this about themselves, makes them a family we feel like rooting for. More than their need to stick together to remain free, we feel that it’s this lack of morality that has somehow kept them together.